Hello everyone and good afternoon from Haba!
A couple times someone has asked how I ended up in Korea, so I decided to throw in a special entry that addresses that question. A few years ago, right after I graduated from Calvin, I first looked into teaching abroad. I've always been more curious about/interested in Southeast Asian culture and language than I've been for most other places around the world, so I started to dabble in information concerning Japan and China and Korea. Very quickly I found that Korea was undergoing a big push to bring in more native English speakers, so I worked with a recruiter to find a school. During the fall of 2008, actually on Thanksgiving day, my recruiter gave me an offer, and I had to let her know with a day or two if it would work, but at that time, a few other factors got in the way, and I ended up turning it down. Truthfully I probably shouldn't have started the process then because I heart wasn't set on going yet … I had to spend a little more time around the States before I could leave them.
Then, starting in June of 2009, I served 2 consecutive AmeriCorps terms with the Red Cross in Grand Rapids. These terms were great times for getting to know people in GR outside the Calvin bubble and especially after my first term, the seed to get up and go somewhere was again planted in my mind after about half of our members from the year ended up at least leaving GR if not departing the country entirely. I spent the first 2 years of college rooming with a great guy named Casey Nagle and for most of 2010 he and his wife, Anna Pettinga, taught English at a school in Gwangju (where I am now). When Casey returned in late Fall of 2010, he and I got together for dinner, and during that dinner he told me about his school and how great the experience had been. After that meal, it wasn't until the beginning of the next year that I actually began to talk with Brian about coming here and taking his place.
Back in February we exchanged a few emails, and we quickly found out that he wanted to leave at the beginning of July, and I would not be available to teach until later in July. At that time we left it saying that when it was time Brian would talk with his director about me, but it didn't seem like it would work out. After that, I had all but dismissed this possibility, and it wasn't until May that Brian emailed me again, and it turned out the timing would work out. For the next 2 months, I scrambled to pull together all the things I needed (FBI background check, apostilled documents, college transcript, etc) to send to Don to make sure that this would actually happen. And it wasn't until the beginning of July that I had my visa and everything was in place. And then I bought my plane tickets, and here I am now!
So in this process, normally one would use a recruiter to find a placement with a school, and that's what Casey and Anna had originally done, but I was both blessed and cursed (a bit) with direct communication to my school's director. I found that it was nice to have an insider's scoop into the policies and practices of my schools before I arrived because then, obviously enough, I knew more about what to expect when I started. Granted, there was lots that I didn't know (and that I'm still learning), but I had more of a heads up than do many teachers who go through recruiters. The only frustrations from not having a recruiter came when I need to compile some of the documents, and I didn't really know how to go about finding them and/or what they even were. This was the first time, for example, that I'd ever heard of an apostle. As a final note here, if any of you or anyone that you know is interested in teaching around this city, I do now know a recruiter (the same one Casey and Anna used), and I will gladly make that connection for you.
For this extra message, I have one more thing that was brought to my attention by another friend because of something I wrote last time: I gave that list of some things that I would gladly accept, and in there I included "a power strip." Today, while chatting with Drew, he pointed out that just in case more than one person wanted to send me the same thing, I probably didn't really need 25 power strips … or even 2 for that matter. I realized that he was right. Drew suggested some sort of registry, but I think that's a little much … something as simple as this could work: if you're inclined to send me something that can't be used in multiples, let me know before you buy and/or send it … just so that no one wastes any resources on me.
Ok, maybe I just lied a moment ago; I just remembered something else that came up during my chat with Drew: if you don't have a Facebook account, you'll be able to follow the specific photo link I sent to you, but you won't be able to navigate among the different albums from Facebook itself; you'll have to use each individual link to look at different sets of pictures. I will try to always send out an update when I've added new photos to an album, but you should hold onto the links I send just in case you want to check out the pictures some other time. Also, still for those who don't have Facebook accounts and for anyone else really, I'm working on using Picasa to upload pictures as well, but I haven't really figured that out yet. Once I do, I'll let you know.
Oh gee whiz. Here's my actual last thing (I think): I have also uploaded all these emails to a blog, so feel free to pass this along to anyone else who might be interested in hearing from me during my time here. You can find my blog at: http://bginkorea.blogspot.com/. I will reiterate once: this blog will have the same information that my emails contain, so if you're content reading my messages this way, then you need not necessarily visit the blog, but feel free to do so if you want.
Much love to you all.
pfn,
bg
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