This is an update from Young Sun Song, one of the volunteers who went to Texas.

Feb 25, Monday

We arrived at the motel around the midnight in Dalls, TX yesterday. We watched little bit of CNN rerun of Obama/Clinton debate from last Thursday. We set up alarm at 7am, but DJ wouldn’t get up for a while, probably because of jet leg. luckily, DJ asked some people, and we were able to eat hot breakfast. while we were having breakfast, we also called people to confirm the meetings today Young Sun called Senior association, DJ to InChul Shon in Houston, and Chaegu to Korea times.

First meeting in Dallas was with Korea times editor Yong Moo Choi. He used to work in Chicago, and knew DJ, and Chaegu back then, and it’s been 11years working in Dallas. the meeting took more than 90 minutes, and he taught us Korean American in Dalls 101. he concluded his class with the conviction that he doesn’t understand why people would live in Chicago. considering weather, education, living cost etc, Dallas in much better place to live. he compared two cities a lot, and one thing interesting was that Chicago has very strong social service organizations such as Korean American community services which has been around more than 20 years, and helping recent Korean immigrants. However, there isn’t any organization providing social services. He contacted Korean American social work professor from Chicago, and held national KA social worker conference in Dallas to raise awareness of the need in Dallas. Also, he gave us a lot of practical advise about press conference that considering deadline of weekly papers, wed morning would be ideal to have press conference, and inviting them to the restaurant in convinient location in Korea town, and ask community leaders to come. We changed our plan from visiting Haninhwi to having press conference on Wed morning.

We stopped by another weekly newspaper, Korean journal, none of the reporters was there, so we left our material to the ad designer, and she happened to live in Chicago for long time, and have been living in Dallas for last two years. She went to school in Chicago downtown, and compare with it, she said Dalls is a dead boring and ugly city. Later we bumped into the vice president of the paper, and he was about to make another delivery to Super H-mart. a week ago, H-mart did grand opening, and 30,000 customers have visited since then.

We had lunch at Young Dong Jang where we are going to have our press conference on Wed. it was clean and the food was tasty.

After lunch, we stopped by at Haninwhi, and the president was visiting Korea for Myung Bak Lee’s inauguration ceremony. ED was young and very cool. Haninwhi were providing income tax filing and voter registration services. He agreed to come to the press conference on Wed, and we took picture in front of haninwhi.

At 2:30, we met with the vice president of Korea daily. we introduced ourselves and purpose of our trip for 1-2 min, and he was jumping right into the point, and asked what we wanted him to do. He agreed to send reporter to our press conference, and his comments made me think that Korea times and Korea daily are comparative to each other. Korea daily is distributed free and Korea times charges 50 cents per copy.

One of the surprising things in Dallas was there are so many weekly newspapers that we didn’t know, and those papers have heavy volume in terms of pages, and have very large circulations. we identified 6 weekly newspapers, and visited 3 in person, and called and invisted the rest three to the press conference.

Lastly, we visited Radio Korea with the president, and his college age daughter and son sounded pretty excited about Obama, so he was also very motivated to talk about Obama already. He felt very strongly that if you’re Koreans living in the States, engaging in civic life, and caring about issues happening in the States are more important than things happening in Korea. He scold KAs who would exchange golf games in Korea by taking Korean politicians for dinners while those Korean elected officials are staying in the States. He said it’s transitional period in KA community in Dallas, so it’s very encouraing to see younger generation like us who actively participate in American politicians. He offers help us by 1. setting up radio interview on wed afternoon, and 2. contacting kac who can help us while we are stying in tx.

And then we checked in our motel, and worked on press release for Wed, and left to Houston. we went to Tony’s mexican restaurant and called people we are going to meet tomorrow in Houston. we are on our way to Houston.