I got truly tragic news today.
Sam Lee, a marketing and teacher training representative with Pearson ELT Asia Pacific, was brutally murdered en route to his hotel in Medan, Indonesia, where he was due to present a series of teacher training workshops.
I only knew Sam relatively briefly, but he was one of those people who instantly leaves a mark on you. A warm, positive mark.
I met Sam just after he'd joined the Pearson Korea team. I was about to leave Korea after 10 years there, so there were swinging in and out doors happening, in a way. Sam helped me prepare for my final professional Pearson author presentation in Korea, at the Korea TESOL International Conference in 2008. I was presenting on how Boost! Speaking contained specific elements to help prepare younger teens for the speaking sections of the iBT TOEFL.
We'd drawn a bad slot: first up on a Sunday morning (the very worst timeslot you can get at the KOTESOL conference, in my opinion). We only had 20 or so people in the room, but Sam was upbeat and just so bloody positive and supportive. At the end of my presentation, he came up to me and said what I'd prepared and delivered was far too good for such a small audience. He knew the subject matter. He wasn't lavishing false praise.
On a bleak and rainy Sunday morning, with a small attendance for a presentation you'd spent months preparing for, Sam's words and attitude turned a potential downer into more of a plus. That was the sort of guy Sam was. He saw the positive in everything. Making others feel good and worthwhile about themselves was intrinsic to him.
I didn't cross paths with Sam again after that, having left the country, but through my good friends Rilla Roessel at Pearson and Aaron Jolly (both of whom became very close friends of Sam's), I continued to hear a regular stream of positive things about him.
He was, by any standards, just a brilliantly warm, generous and talented human being.
He got married in January to a lovely young lady. My heart goes out to her.
Maybe you, the reader, never heard of Sam Lee prior to reading this post. But let me assure you, this week all of us in ELT lost something really quite precious: a genuinely good person with a whole life of potential in front of him.
My sincerest condolences go out to Sam, his wife, his family and his close-knit network of friends and colleagues.
And the manner of Sam's passing ought to really light a skyscraper-sized firecracker of warning for global ELT publishers about their responsibilities to really protect their employees in regions of relative risk. If you are an ELT author or publishing representative who has found yourself waiting alone at an airport or train station late at night, or in a taxi not knowing exactly where you are going or how to speak the local language, or in a dark side street looking for something to eat because it's late and you've been doing the ghastly schedule of presentations and seminars commonly crammed in for visiting 'foreign experts', you can probably quite vividly imagine how Sam might have felt in those last moments before his tragic murder.
Remember Sam Lee. Think about his young widow.
Make sure there are company representatives to meet people at airports and train stations to transport them to where they need to go. Safely. Even if they claim they don't need the assistance, can do it all on their own, etc. You know the local territory better than your visitor does, so make sure it is a matter of policy.
And if you're a visitor and your publisher has made plans to meet/pick you up, etc., depending of course on the location, think twice before putting them in a potentially tragic situation as well. It's all very well to 'not want to put them out' or make them go out of their way, but if something goes very badly wrong I can assure you that you WILL be putting them out, possibly even catastrophically...
Let's all do what needs to be done to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.
- JR
