2015-09-05 My Working Birthday

Know how you know you love what you are doing? One sign: You don’t stop doing it simply because it is your birthday!
I celebrated my birthday by holding three different orientation sessions. So many wonderful things from today:

Refugees:

* A refugee calling me a “superman for North Korean refugees.”
* Celebrating my birthday with the refugees entering our project.
* Three of the refugees who were Grace’s students the last few weeks joining the program clearly more confident than they were a few weeks ago.

* The refugees were curious about me, they wanted to know why I do what I do. The same with the last group of tutors at the last orientation.
* One refugee mentioned that it is amazing what we do without real infrastructure. We have held our orientations and matching sessions at TOZ, Mulmangcho, Freedom Factory, the Bitcoin Center.

Tutors
* Tutors coming from around the country to join TNKR, including one teacher who wants to fly in from Jeju twice a month to tutor. We definitely need a gofundme account for her…
* We had only two orientations scheduled, but three of the tutors coming from far away, and unfamiliar with Seoul, arrived really late. So Eunkoo Lee and I met them from 7 pm for a third unexpected orientation.

* Special thanks to Christian Kim and Sareena Tanlines for talking us up to TaLK teachers. We have so many outstanding young people signing up to join TNKR.

Website:
* Orlandy Godines and Worth Stokes teaming up to completely revamp the TNKR website.

Fundraising

* An unexpected $100 donation from one of the refugees in the project.
* An unexpected donation from a Bitcoin user.

Birthday messages
* And I checked, I have 195 birthday messages on my Facebook timelines. I have more than 2,900 Facebook friends, so I guess I need to delete the other 2,700 who did not post a message. 🙂* Years ago, I had to work on my birthday. I remember grumbling all day. But this September 5. I loved it.

2020-04-26 "May I choose more teachers?" TNKR Matching session #102

2020-04-26, TNKR Matching session #102 The Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center (TNKR) humbly began in March 2013 with 5 tutors and 5 NK refugees being matched together. We held that first session at a TOZ business center in Gangnam. Seven years later, TNKR has now matched 455 North Korean refugees with 1,027 tutors, coaches, and mentors. Today we held our 102nd Language Matching session at our slightly expanded office near the Sangsu Subway Station. Instead of just being something that Casey and Eunkoo did short-term, TNKR is now an official organization in both South Korea and the USA, we have been featured in media and by other organizations (just yesterday, we were featured by KOTESOL), and we have fans and donors from around the world.

2020-11-26 My basketball story

This photo was uploaded today by my aunt Annette. This was back in the day, when 1) I had a head full of hair and 2) played basketball a lot. That first year of playing organized basketball, I focused on playing defense. It seemed that everyone wanted to shoot the ball, so I passed the ball and played defense. I probably led the league in steals, rebounds and blocked shots. I enjoyed taking on the best player from the other team, I felt like I would get better, quickly. The second year, I was a different player. I will never forget the first game that second year--we lost 29 to 26, I scored 18 points. I probably led the universe in scoring that second year, although we didn't win much. One thing I learned from that experience is that one great player 9 (at least in his own mind) can't beat a team. An eye injury ended my pro career before it began, to this day I still have floaters in my eyes because of the injury. I started wearing glasses, but the problem never went away. On t...

Park Jin welcoming remarks to FSI (and Casey Lartigue)

National Assembly member Park Jin makes the welcoming remarks at FSI's conference featuring North Korean diplomats. Park Jin | Greeting message to FSI and Casey Lartigue mention - YouTube

Mentoring while Black (Korea Times 2/16/2023)

Mentoring while Black by Casey Lartigue Jr. February 16, 2023 www.patreon.com/caseylartigue

Chang Ha-Joon's foolish consistency (Korea Times, January 1, 2013)

By Casey Lartigue, Jr. Is the sky blue? Is the ocean water? If you suspect those are trick questions, you are right. The sky isn’t always blue ― it is reddish at sunset, dark at midnight, gray on an overcast day. The ocean isn’t water ― there’s also fish, plant life, submarines, dissolved minerals, surfboards, sunken ships, even people swimming in it sometimes. As Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1996 book ``The Vision of the Anointed,” people who use “all-or-nothing” reasoning can deny a statement because it is not 100 percent true in every circumstance. Such word games might be fun for college students or debaters, but there are some distinguished people who are respected for making such childish arguments about serious issues. In his book ``23 Things They Don’t Tell you About Capitalism,” Cambridge University economist Chang Ha-Joon argues that 1) “[T]here is really no such thing as a free market” and 2) “The free market doesn’t exis...

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