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EK: Can you talk a little bit more about the help line and what you did with that?

AG: We received phone calls that ranged from people just asking initial questions. In the beginning I think that the populations we were trying to reach were still a little skittish and hesitant. Like, "Yeah, you say this, but what's it really about?" Or the questions would be, "I don't have that documentation. Are there other ways that I can prove I am who I say I am? I was where I said I was?" And so those were the questions. It was really sort of fact-based. They were doing their fact-based research to figure out, "How can I apply?" And it could be hard, because you think you're ready to talk about a difficult time in your life, and then you get the person on the phone, and they're asking questions. And I guess in today's language people would say it was triggering, so you would have to work with people. Sometimes you did have a language challenge, other times their child would be on speaking for them, and then it's the, well, I don't know if you really like your mother, you know. So it's the managing of that relationship to help people understand what the requirements are. It was always hard if someone said, "Oh, but my husband" -- you had to be alive on August 10, 1988, to be considered initially eligible. I had several calls where the husband died on the 8th, the husband died on the 9th, "Is there anything you can do?" And I'm like, "Ma'am, the law wasn't signed until..." so those were sometimes hard calls on the help line when I was working with that. Or people that... really with the distrust, that was a hard one. "I'm going to give you the information because I want you to have it, but I don't want the money." And so my question is, "But if you don't want the money, why are you giving me the information?" "I want to be on the record." And then as we went through and we found other groups of people to be considered, and just the different information they had to provide, or even at the time when we started, so if I joined in January of '91, we hadn't even gotten to the children being born in camp. Which made sense, you're going to have kids that come about, try to figure out how, because they were six, or they were babies, and they don't know, so it's working with them to get with the parent. "Okay, well, my mother has died, she didn't make '88. Who can I get to help me? Can I get my sister to help me? We were with my dad." And even when you got to meet some of the people in the office, we had one person whose parents and sister were in camp, and just the emotion. One of the things that I'd say about working for the Office of Redress Administration was, you know, you hear about government, and it's like oh, you know, it's this big bureaucracy. But when you got to put an actual face to what you were doing, that's what made it good to go home. It really helped in saying what you're doing has a value, and you see the end of it. I had a call from someone -- this is sort of jumping ahead -- I had a call... this is May, in December from a young lady whose parent had received payment but lost their documentation. And I guess they're getting to move into an assisted living situation, and so she was born in camp, so she was a baby. So parents probably in their seventies now, but played telephone tag with the daughter to get her to... so I'm not with ORA anymore because of course we've sunset, but my number is still out there in the community. So I get the calls pretty, you know, two or three calls a year, somebody looking to get the documentation. And so then I know who to kick it over to that's still in the Civil Rights Division to help, but it's always nice to hear, and to hear the stories of, "Oh, yeah, my mom told me about her experience." I've never had anybody call me looking for documentation that did not have a fond memory of their experience with us, so that's good. I don't think the IRS says that.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.