Annalisa Murphy's mother was not pleased when her daughter announced two years ago that she was going to Central America.

Even as Ms Murphy was boarding the plane in Dublin her mother was eagerly reminding her it was not too late, that she could still change her mind, stay at home in Ireland, decide against living in a country where malaria and such illnesses are not uncommon.

Ms Murphy is one of five staff workers here for Trocaire. Amid a disaster "of "Biblical", Trocaire is delivering assistance in a fashion that is markedly different from many other international agencies.

Despite their brave intentions, it becomes immediately obvious to observers that many of the big international agencies are unfamiliar with Honduras. Many of their people arrived last week and they are still struggling to learn the chaotic terrain. Beyond that, they are dealing with their own massive bureaucracies and communications difficulties. Help is getting to people who have been without water and electricity for two weeks, but it is painfully slow.

Trocaire has huge advantages. People like Sally O'Neill, who first came here in the 1970s, are Central America experts. Others, like Sorcha Fennell, who was formerly based in Sudan, are old hands at the challenges of Third World countries in distress. Ms Murphy had already lived here for years by the time the hurricane struck.

Most importantly, Trocaire is small enough to be fast and nimble. While some American-based agencies were still trying to find trucks to rent and to clear the paperwork to get money to do so, Trocaire's Sally O'Neill had already cleared an emergency budget approval of £200,000 from Dublin. Bags of rice were already on their way in trucks rented from local Honduran contacts by the time the rains subsided.

Slow does not seem to be in Ms Murphy's vocabulary. Dressed in jeans and a sleeveless shirt, she has a complexion that looks perilously fair in this relentless sun. As she moves, the 27-year-old does not walk, she sprints. Today is Thursday afternoon and she has been co-ordinating a distribution of emergency food and medicine to some 30 remote villages in an area outside El Triunfo in southern Honduras. Trocaire has a total of three trucks heading this way.

"I love it here," she says, as we travel the 3 1/2 hours from Tegucigalpa to El Triunfo in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The poverty here, and the conditions of poor hygiene in a country that is among the poorest in Central America, do not seem to depress her.

"This has been such a real opportunity to get into rural development," says Ms Murphy, who got her master's degree in rural development from UCC. "All of the 160 projects we have in the region are about training people to help themselves." She rejects the kind of assistance that creates dependency on foreign aid. Trocaire's goal, she says, is to enable people to organise themselves.

In El Triunfo, we travel over dirt roads, past wandering, emaciated cows, and loose pigs and chickens, to Oscar's house. Some 4,000 bags of rice and maize and beans are piled in his living room. The plan is to load the trucks and drive as far as the road will allow towards the village of Santa Maria. After that, the river has washed out the road, so the men from the remote villages will gather and load the 100lb bags on to their backs to ford the river and carry the food up the mountain.

A dusty, cobblestoned road leads down to the river. The banks are lined with women washing clothes, standing in the water up to their knees, beating laundry against rocks. Others carry buckets of fresh water on their heads. Oscar's volunteers must get food to both Santa Maria, which has 400 houses, and El Cedrito, seven km away, which has 108 homes. The people there are running desperately short of food. They have been cut off for two weeks. There is no water, electricity or roads. No one is saying when the road will be restored.

Some food gets there today, but the distribution must continue tomorrow. And there are medicines arriving in the morning. The light is fading. After a brief discussion in Spanish with Oscar and his volunteers, Ms Murphy announces to her travelling companions: "You head back. I'm going to stay the night. I really need to be here in the morning." It is a startling pronouncement. We are standing before a house that has no front door and a dirt floor. Chickens and pigs wander in and out. There are children everywhere, 26 of them; some are naked and all are barefoot.

Someone manages to ask Ms Murphy if she has, so to speak, a place to stay.

"Oh sure. I'll be fine. I have a place to stay," she says, smiling. A crowd of villagers are surrounding the bespectacled young woman with her backpack, and they smile, too.