"Words have no wings, but they can travel a thousand miles" (Korean Proverb)

Welcome to Flying Words, Jon and Aileen's blog of our adventures in South Korea! We will be in South Korea for a year, starting in mid-July, teaching English in a private school. We just graduated from college this past May, and are looking forward to having some adventures before continuing our education. 
We started this blog to keep all our family and friends updated and to share our photos and stories. We hope this is entertaining for you! We will miss you all, and are very thankful to have the internet to keep us in touch. 


Monday, April 27, 2009

Why we have to leave the country

Ok, so some of you have been hearing/seeing random things about Jon and I and deportation, so I thought I should set the record straight.

Last year, right before we came here, we were having some issues with the visa because the Jeonju Reading Town wasn't finished with construction yet, so couldn't get a business liscence so couldn't sponser us. In order to get us here before the school started, Reading Town headquarters registered us under a Reading Town in Seoul. They told us they would change it as soon as we got here, and then we thought they had fixed it. They told us everything was ok with our visa etc. 

You might not think it's a big deal to be teaching with a different branch of the same school, but you need a visa from the CITY that you are working in also. We did NOT know that. It's not really something that comes up in casual conversation. We have our residents' cards like everyone else, only ours says "Immigration office of Seoul" in small letters at the bottom--we figured that everyone's went through Seoul, since it's the capital and general hub of activity. Nope. Everyone else's in Jeonju says "Immigration office of Jeonju." We find out after all of this.

Anyway, somehow (we're not really clear on this part) immigration in Jeonju found out that we'd been working illegally for the past 9 months. We went with our director to the immigration offices on Thursday and again on Friday to figure out basically how pissed they were at us and especially Mr. Lee, the director. 

To make a long story short, which I'm going to because I've told this story a million times in the past 5 days, they're ending our contracts and giving us 10 days to leave the country. Not technically deported, so we can come back, and it doesn't look bad on us. Jon's trying to wrangle some severance money out of headquarters since it's their fault, we have emails to prove it, and they're trying to blame it all on our director. 

So, that's the story. We're fine. Jon'll travel with me for a little, depending on how much he can get from headquarters....

2 comments:

Mom of 8 said...

Jon, Forger about the bonus! Just get them to give you a ticket and leave. All of your family is in agreement on this. Love, mom (Are you sure you don't want me to call our congressman?)

Anna said...

Thats kinda creepy