So, there are only 99 days left in our contract with Songwon Elementary School and boy are we glad to be near the home-stretch. Our time at the school has been less than pleasant, although we have enjoyed our time with friends and traveling.
In actuality it seems that there is less than 99 days to go. Unofficially so far, our classes end July 22 and we then have English Camp from July 25th - August 12th. (Our contract actually ends August 19th.) This means that we might be able to leave a week early and get a full 3 weeks at home to visit everyone.
On that note, we got a new job for next year! Neither of us knew how much longer we could take being here at Songwon and we both knew that we couldn't take another year of it. But this new job comes highly recommended by our good friends here who have said they enjoy their time at work.
Don't get us wrong. We aren't in the hardest jobs of our lives here at Songwon. The vacation is great and the hours aren't bad. It's really the people we work with that make this experience less than it could be. We are more or less ignored except for when the teachers want us to do something for them.
It's been a rough experience from the beginning. The first semester we got here we flew in on Sunday and were at work Monday morning without any regard to jet lag. We weren't even introduced to our students. We were shown a room to go to and were told to teach. On top of that, we weren't given books to teach from. It was a sour beginning and one that stuck with us through the year.
In the second semester, we were told to choose books from the bookstore, which was fine but we didn't know what to look for. (You can tell I'm ranting a little bit here.)
Throughout the year we have been so jealous when people would talk about their co-teachers taking them to eat and actually acting excited about them coming to school. Obviously this is nothing against those who have told us these stories, it's against the people at Songwon. Instead of being asked to do things with the co-teachers we are told of how much fun they had doing things with previous teachers.
I suppose the teachers just before us left a bitter taste in their mouths for leaving after only 2 weeks. The bitterness perhaps carried over to us. There are so many other annoyances and inconveniences that I don't have enough time to write it.
With that said: We are so happy to be going home for a few weeks and extremely glad to be getting a new job and an apartment in a different part of town. One HUGE downside to all of this is that the people's jobs we'll be taking in September have become close friends to us and we will miss them a bunch. It almost feels wrong to take their job and apartment because Gwangju just won't be the same without them.
Regardless of the annoyances of this school and the annoyances to come from any job in Korea, God has blessed us both tremendously. We'll have our loans paid off at the end of our second year where we can finally be able to start a career in the United States debt free. And that will be worth it all.
Anyway… hope things are going well back home.
-Jason & Emily
2 comments:
I have been through these very same issues. I would recommend getting a book called cross-cultural servanthood. It is okay and has some good advice.
Just keep this in mind and think on it over the break. Many westerners treat jobs in asia poorly, more so than in their home countries. Even doing a good job by western standards is not right because it is done by western standards. When people before you have treated the work really poorly it gets to the locals. Also, they act the way they do because they are culturally different. They have been conditioned to live and act the way they do by their culture, as have we. Moreover, and probably more importantly we are all sinners and have been conditioned to react sinfully. We need to take Christ into the situations. Invite people in and take initiative. It will not work with everyone, also as much as you can be aware of how those patterns happen in the culture. For example, I imagine inviting people to ones house is not common when there is still relational distance, especially in the case of a manager. Again not everyone cares but we can at least try.
I am really glad you are moving to a better job, some are simply just bad! Some are bad because they have no concept of how to deal with foreigners and some are really bad because they don't care. Then you get the bosses who are simply bad bosses and create a very negative work culture. I also am not sure how foreigners are viewed there. Sometimes, here, there is very strong resentment because foreigners usually get paid very high salaries and complain a lot and don't work hard (by their standards not ours. Indeed at times working hard is simply doing what you are doing and not complaining. What we don't consider complaining they do). Here I feel like the more you get paid the less you can complain; this is a cultural issue I think.
Enjoy your break it will be really refreshing. I really hope the next job is better. I would love it if you all wanted to make plans to travel over here and we could get together. It would be a lot of fun!
Thanks for the comment. If we ever make it out that way, we will definitely give you a heads up.
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