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2016-09-13 "Hello, this is TNKR!"


2016-09-13: Since last night we have had more than 100 phone calls to the TNKR office. That would be like a mom-and-pop shop having 3 buses of hungry football players suddenly parked outside their small restaurant.

Steve Chai and Youngmin Kwon were bumping into each other handling so many calls! They had to remember to keep a safe distance from each other.

They started off with written notes, but I told them to move this to a spreadsheet so we could follow up with everyone who called. We were all volunteers at that time, suddenly dealing with many phone calls and requests from people who wanted to join us immediately.


Most of the calls were from South Koreans, including a 12-year-old girl, who had seen last night's TVN special about TNKR. A professional female South Korean golfer also called, more than once. But there were also a few calls from North Korean refugees.

https://www.facebook.com/CaseyLartigue/videos/1135977703212890/

We also had a lot of "Hey! I called 10 times already" and "I left five messages" calls.


2021 Update: Before anyone passes judgment. We fielded more than 200 calls, in addition to many missed calls and voice mails. Probably 90% of the calls were from South Koreans. Some people were grumbling when I told this story. 

The way TVN told the story, there was this fantastic place teaching English for free with volunteers giving their time. Halfway through the 49-minute special, TVN finally announced that we were tutoring North Korean refugees. That didn't stop the phone calls, many South Koreans were still trying to see if they could squeeze in.

Another big argument that Eunkoo Lee and I had in our early days was requiring North Korean refugees to provide documentation from the government showing they had gone through the government's certification process. At this moment, when we had many South Koreans trying to join us, she didn't say "you were right." It was so obvious, especially at that moment, that I was right again!

Over the years, we have had some South Koreans try to claim they were North Korean refugees, until the moment Eunkoo would ask them for their paperwork. When that happens, it is always a teachable "I told you so" moment!

* Yes, we tried to harness that energy of so many South Koreans learning about us by having Open House sessions for South Koreans. We did them in Korean so no one would have an excuse about not joining us as volunteers and donors. If we had 200 South Koreans--or 200 anybodies--consistently donating, fundraising for and supporting us our activities then we wouldn't need to consistently engage in fundraising online and could just focus on our work.

* Over the years, we have had many strategists suggest that we should have paid classes with South Koreans to help finance our activities. That sounds good in theory, but in reality:

1) We would probably quickly be the subject of investigations by the government because of language institutes accusing us of acting like a language institute without going through their requirements. I already get threats from people to report me to the government because they don't like something I said or did.

2) The amount of work it would take us to operate like a language institute would mean that we wouldn't be engaged in our main mission then--tutoring North Korean refugees in English (people continue to over-estimate our capacity and budget). To do that, we should shut down our current operations and open a language institute (in an incredibly competitive field).

3) In conversations with our volunteers over the years, probably 98% join us exclusively to tutor and mentor North Korean refugees, not to teach South Koreans. Many tutors would tell me, whenever we would have even one or two South Koreans at our sessions that they wanted to tutor North Koreans. They could find South Koreans to tutor for free on their own.

4) I already had some communist attack dogs and sympathizers of North Korea accuse me of exploiting volunteers. Imagine what they would have been alleging if we had found a way for volunteers to give their time to a mini-language institute that was "exploiting" them to teach South Koreans so we could keep TNKR tuition-free for North Korean refugees. But that wouldn't have happened anyway, because the volunteers were coming to us to tutor North Korean refugees, not South Koreans.

5) Our 1:1 approach sounds great, but it is labor-intensive to the point that it would be difficult to bring to scale

6) South Koreans have very high standards when it comes to English, in terms of curriculum, professional expertise, and experience. It wouldn't be long before they would be denouncing TVN and us because we weren't as organized as some of the big language institutes in town.

I have listened to people say we should try to make money through South Koreans paying for tutoring, but so far no one has presented a real proposal and none followed through on their suggestions.

https://give.lovetnkr.com/Tutor-NK-refugees


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