Santoki's World

Today I’m sitting in front of my computer. I thought back how everything started, back in 1990 when I first participated at the YWCA Summer School and then in 1994 when we founded Dongari Switzerland. There was no internet, everything went by sending letters. Nowadays I can’t even think about how to organize things without the internet. The internet is part of our daily life and plays a very important role when it comes to networking.

When I grew up I had several penpals from all over the world. There was this Japanese businessman collecting empty beercans. He had more than 5000 at that time. There were other ones I met through others or met at the WWF summer camps or through work.

I had so many penpals that kept me busy writing letters. But the cool part for me was always to return from school and to find a letter on my desk. The farther away it was sent the better. The more colorful the stamp the better. I didn’t care much about what the letter itself said. It was just the excitement of receiving a letter… a sign that I was alive.

I kept most of the letters. I’ve already forgotten most of the names and only rereading the letters can update my memory… for a short while.

When I was in New York back in the early 90s I also wrote letters. But when I returned and was working in the IT department of the same company I soon discovered the internet. At that time it was through Compuserve, the first account the company had and I was the only user of it. It was very interesting and exciting to chat with people from all over the world and to browse through all those sites that already existed at that very early time.

Yet when we founded Dongari Switzerland most of the work was still done the old-fashioned way. We still sent letters, called and my phone bill was every month so huge…

I used mostly the company’s computers and copymachine to edit and print the Dongari newsletters. I still have some copies of those early newsletters from 1994. One big part of the whole budget was assigned to postage. Letters, newsletters, announcements… everything was sent via regular mail and it was really expensive at that time.

Soon though more and more internet users showed up. Everybody was keen to learn the new technology and to master the howto of emoticons. The old fashioned mailing list was soon replaced by a new technology. Soon our Dongari homepage was designed and ran originally on the geocities website. Of course there were drawbacks like limited webspace and popupads… just like today on certain blog providers.

But then I was part of a team that built a local area network within the student dormitory we lived in. The budget we had was nothing against what a professional company asked for. We provided all our work for free and the dormitory covered the material and the computer. That’s how I became administrator of the dorm’s server. And soon Dongari Switzerland had its own webspace with almost unlimited (at that time) webspace. I also created two mailing-lists, Dongari for our local Swiss users and Urinara for all the others. By using majordomo, one of the common mailing-list servers on Linux, I had many options I could use. But one of the first thing I had to learn is that running a mailing-list is not as easy at it seems to be. Who sets up the rules? Where are the limits? How long should a flame war last? Who should be kicked? How long may a mail be and are attachments allowed or not? Many more questions popped up during the time I ran those lists.

At the same time the topics were also very interesting and similar to today’s discussions. Where do we belong to? What do you think of international adoption? How did you experience it? How much Korean are you? Many more questions, many more flame wars and sometimes it was also exhausting to just go through all those mails. Learning from all those messages and growing, that was the important part.

Soon other mailing-lists appeared in the cyberspace. The biggest list was Sunny Jo’s “Korean Adoptees Worldwide” list on Yahoo!Groups. I closed down my lists after some time as less and less traffic was on it and more and more went to the mailing-lists with graphical user surface.

I think the internet created so much more options for all the Korean adoptee organizations in the world. It is nowadays much easier to communicate through the help of emails, mailing-lists and websites than it was before. But there are also dangers. I realized that when I spoke to other adoptees in Sweden. When it comes to important topics nothing can replace a personal talk. Only when you can feel, see, hear and touch the person you talk to, then you can really know what the person is saying. Well, apart from cultural and lingual problems, of course.

Recently there has been also a surge of BLOG writers in the internet. There are really old ones but many just recently discovered those BLOGs or mixture of various functions…
Especially in the USA there seem to be more and more communities on the internet who function through the internet. Of course there are also new dangers coming with the new technology but I’m certain that especially the Korean adoptee community profited a lot from it.