 More than 26,000 North Korean refugees currently reside in South Korea, and many of them struggle to adjust to their new lives. To help them, a student organisation here at UC Berkeley, Liberty and North Korea Berkeley chapter, also known as LINK, has launched a new project whereby Cal students teach English to North Korean refugees on a weekly basis via Skype. They call it CalChat with North Korean refugees. How did you come up with this innovative idea? I wanted to introduce a new programme where members could have a chance to directly interact with actual refugees residing in South Korea. So I got in contact with a North Korean refugee who lives in South Korea, and I asked her, you know, what can we do? What can we do to help? So she asked around, she asked her friends, and she said, it would be nice for us to learn English, and hence CalChat was born. Just like that? Yep, just like that. And of course you said that these North Korean refugees are currently in South Korea, and I suppose you must have faced some practical difficulties when you were setting up this programme. Yes, I think the most, you know, biggest challenge was the logistics in coordinating the schedule for both tutors and tutees because, you know, the tutees are all the way in South Korea, tutors are all the way in Berkeley, California. So we have to, you know, consider time zone, we have to consider that South Korea is a day ahead, which me and the other co-founder of this programme kind of forgot that Korea was a day ahead when coordinating the schedule, so we actually had to rematch everyone all over again, so that was the biggest challenge, I think, so far. We also spoke to some tutors about the experience. Even though I can speak Korean, even though I speak it at home and even though I'm learning it here, I feel that this opportunity really challenged it because usually I didn't realise how much I depended on certain English words that I would just throw in, but when I was tutoring her who had absolutely no background in English, I realised that I actually, those few critical words really mean a lot and that I really need, like, there is a lot for me to work on in terms of my Korean, so I think it humbled me a lot. I just hope that she is able to comfortably converse with her, just comfortably converse in English with other people who can speak English and she's able to build confidence in talking to other people. I want to be that kind of open door for her to know a little bit more about the American culture that she wants to know more about by telling her about my day. Every day I would ask her what her day was like and then she'd ask me what my day was like and just to teach her about what it is like to be a university as a student in America. Do you know that this new programme will be a model for other chapters of Liberty North Korea in the United States and around the globe to copy in the near or distant future? I think it would be a fantastic way for more and more people to just help the refugees who are in South Korea who want to learn English, because there are so many who want to but who don't have the resources or the opportunity to do so. So I think it would be great if we could serve as that first model for people to kind of see and emulate and begin to do their own style, whatever works for each organisation.