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DT: And what... jumping ahead a few years to, you know, getting your redress apology and the check, what was your feeling and response when you received that?

YK: Okay. By that time I was married, and my husband and I had just wanted to put the camp experience behind us. And he had received his PhD and he was working at IBM and we were doing well. And then when we got the money, even in social groups we were in, people would say, "Well, you know, we're paying for that." So we felt like, "Let's not talk about that money," and we just put it in our savings. And we had become Christians by then and at the Lutheran church, the pastor asked us to give a talk about the Executive Order 9066. And I said, "You know, we really don't want to bring that kind of attention to ourselves. We don't want to talk about that." I said, "People really are good to us now and if we bring that up and about the redress money there might be resentment, so we don't want to talk about it." And then later we were at another church and the assistant pastor wanted a series of talks on journeys people had taken, and she wanted us to talk about our camp journey. And she was persistent, she wouldn't take no for an answer. [Laughs] So we decided, "Okay, we'll do it." And then that's when I made a little PowerPoint and my husband and I shared our stories. And the people were very touched by the stories. Some of them didn't know anything about us having to go through that. And then one lady knew a teacher teaching at Blackford school who was teaching her class about the internment. So she said, "Would you be willing to go speak to her class?" So I thought, "Well, I already have the PowerPoint ready, so sure." And we did that for four years until my husband passed away. And then after he passed away I thought: "Oh, maybe I could go to the museum and volunteer." And so then I came here and then Leslie Kim interviewed me and she said, "I think you could be a docent." So that's how I became a docent here.

DT: Wow. And you've been a docent for how many years?

YK: Oh, just a year and a half.

DT: Oh, a year and a half, okay.

YK: Yes, almost two years now.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.