A New Chapter

The first week of our second year in Korea has already come to an end.  As I mentioned before, this second year will end up being quite different than the first.  Eric began a new job this week as a part time kindergarten teacher at Little Planet.  He works at a Korean kindergarten that offers an English class.  He teaches English to four different classes of kids ranging in age from 3-6.  The first week was a bit of a challenge but he thinks it will work out to be a nice job once the students become more used to him.  Many of the students have never seen a foreigner before so there were many tears the first couple days!  That is still such a foreign concept to us, that some people have never seen someone in person that doesn't look just like them, but I guess that's what happens when you live in such a homogenous society.  Just something else you never think about until you actually experience it!  Unfortunately he has to commute a pretty good distance, about 50 minutes by bus, since the school is actually a bit outside of the city limits of Seoul in Gyeonggi Province, but we are confident all of the adjustments will be worth it.

Now that most things have been resolved with our previous employer I can explain the situation that led to our decision to make a last minute job switch (though it's quite a long story!).  I officially received the paperwork that I needed from our boss on Friday that allows me to legally transfer my work visa over to another employer.  Basically as a foreigner on a work visa we can only work for the employer that is sponsoring our visa.  We thought things were going pretty smoothly at the place we had worked for the past year so went ahead and signed a second year contract and the employer extended our visas for another year, meaning we could only legally work for them during that time unless they agreed to let us go and transfer them to another employer.  However, after we had signed the new contracts, we began to get a very uneasy feeling about working for this employer.  It seemed that something had changed with their finances in the last couple months as they had begun to pay us a day or so late and not give us everything we were due according to the contract.  Additionally, we discovered the boss had been deducting more income tax than was legal (supposedly a common problem with Korean hagwons but still very much illegal) and some of the Korean staff weren't getting paid at all.  This made us feel very nervous and unsecure financially and we felt like we needed to try and get out of the second contract we had signed.  We assumed this would be an easy process since the employer was the one that had broke the law and broke the contract.  However, it was definitely not.  When we informed her we would like to complete our current contract and cancel the second, she was originally fine with that idea, realizing the amount of money she could save since there was no reason to replace both of us with the lack of students the school had.  Unfortunately her mind quickly changed and she decided to throw a lot of bogus threats our way, I guess with the intention to scare us into staying.  Well it didn't work and we pursued legal action through the Korean labor department but found out that process would take much longer than we really wanted (by this time we had jobs lined up to start the first of March so needed to get the legal paperwork from her asap).  We had to resort back to trying to negotiate with her and eventually she did consent to giving Eric the necessary paperwork.  I had to stay.  She claimed that if I left she would lose students (aka money) so I wasn't allowed to leave (I guess that was maybe intended to be a compliment to me?  But I felt more like a hostage!).  I continued to try and negotiate and finally she consented.  I had to work a week longer than I wanted to since my new job should have started this last week, but fortunately the other school held the position for me.  Needless to say it has felt like a rather stressful few weeks lately with multiple trips to the labor department, immigration department and negotiating with a lot of people! We are so fortunate to have a couple of great people to help us out with the language barrier and give us advice on what to do and are also very blessed that things have come together for us to start new jobs right away!  So now that you have read this long explanation the bottom line is that we are both out of what we felt could become a very unstable situation and appear to have each found a much more secure place to be for the rest of our time in Korea.   I will start at Guji Public Elementary School on Monday as their foreign English teacher for third and fourth grade.  I will also have to commute about 30 minutes by bus.  Our previous employer still owes us quite a bit of money in severance pay and deposits, which we are doubting we will see anytime soon so we aren't completely finished with that yet.  Fortunately, we still have another year to pursue that while we are still in the country.

Leaving the school was definitely a hard decision and not something we particularly wanted to do but something we felt very strongly we had to do.  The more we research and learn, the more we realize a lot of foreigners just take whatever the hagwon boss does (or they go home) which is why they can get away with cheating foreigners a lot.  No one seems to ask questions, or research the laws and their rights, or care enough to say anything.  Maybe we were crazy to bring it up but we felt like someone needed to say something and stand up for their rights and we won't be backing down now.

In other news... it was over 60 degrees today!!  We walked over to Children's Grand Park to spend our Saturday afternoon walking around the park and enjoying the warmness.  We're sure winter will come back before spring comes to stay, but we did our best to take advantage of the first spring-like day of the year!

 This is park food in Korea: Pork cutlet, sausage, egg and rice  It was pretty yummy!

All the animals were out at the zoo within the park.  Here is a baboon family.