The Casey Lartigue Show!

TNKR students Eunhee Park and Sung-cheol Kim were on TBS eFM this morning! At the 22 minute mark, you can hear host Jasmine Lee mention TNKR! https://audioclip.naver.com/channels/106/clips/12382 There are many native and fluent speakers of English who have never done a live radio interview. For Eunhee, it was her second time to do a live radio interview in English, for Sung-cheol, it was his first time.. And you can hear my interview on the same show three weeks ago. https://audioclip.naver.com/channels/106/clips/12008

The Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center held its 96th Language Matching session on Sunday, September 29, 2019. It was one of our biggest sessions, with almost 40 people squeezed into our small room, with some of our volunteer tutors sitting on the floor during the session. We are accepting donations so we can get a bigger office one day ( TNKR fundraising page ) . STUDENTS We had 11 North Korean refugees join yesterday's session. * Six returnees * Five newcomers It means we have now had 429 North Korean refugees join TNKR since we first began operations in 2013. Two key features of TNKR are that refugees choose the language helpers they will work with and can choose as many as they want. On average, refugees chose 3.6 tutors. Three refugees chose 5 tutors each. Three refugees chose 4 tutors each. Three refugees chose 3 tutors each. One refugee those 2 tutors. One refugee chose 1 tutor. Arrival dates of students into South Korea: 20

The Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center (TNKR) will be holding its 95th or 96th Language Matching session this weekend. I've lost track of how many, there was a time that I could name all of the dates and every volunteer at every session, now I am lucky enough to round up to the correct number of the session.  To get prepared, we hold 1:1 meetings and orientation sessions with North Korean refugees and orientation sessions with volunteers. The weekend started Saturday morning with TNKR co-founder Eunkoo Lee holding an orientation with four North Korean refugees. Thanks to Laura Yoo and Tony Hwang for donating books to TNKR, refugees were able to pick through a number of books. We don't really have enough space to accept too many book donations but can accept a limited number of books, especially shortly before orientation and Matching sessions when refugees are visiting. Then over the weekend, I led two different orientation session

One of the delightful things about being the International Director of the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center is meeting with North Korean refugees when they come in for their initial consultations with us. We want to learn what it is they want to study, make sure they understand that we have a specific process that we expect them to follow, make it clear that this is not a social club to come find foreign friends, and that this is a self-study program so they should not expect tutors to do everything/we have expectations for them. After we go through the initial interview, the most common question refugees ask: "When can I start?" Some seem to be looking around our office, wondering if there are any teachers available at that moment to start studying. We have had refugees show up unannounced, even though we don't publicize our address. Others have called us as soon as they learned about us, asking if they could come visit right then. When we tell the

TNKR had an absolutely fantastic forum with students visiting from the USA. These forums are great for several reasons: * It gives refugees studying in TNKR practical opportunities to practice public speaking. Over the years, I have noticed that many North Korean refugees who gave public speakers weren't really prepared. When we decided to create our own public speaking program, we wanted to be sure that we weren't like a speaker's bureau with speakers who were expected to already have become polished speakers. It was going to be a work in progress. That meant, despite people asking for us to post speeches online or to even do Facebook Live, our focus was going to be on having the speakers develop at their own speed and that their speeches wouldn't be presented publicly until they were ready. * Audiences get to hear directly from North Korean refugees. Watching a documentary or reading an article can move people, but meeting directly with NK refugees can have ev