2 Months with Koreans

Before Lora completed her time with the Peace Corps, we headed to Iloilo City on the island of Panay (Lora's home island for the past 2 years) meet with Reo, the manager of English to Koreans at English Initiatives in the Philippines (EIP) to discuss the terms of our employment as "native English speaking tutors." During the meeting, we agreed to stay for 2 months, to get free room and board (living in a dorm with some other students) and teaching full time (ie 40 hours/week). We left the meeting satisfied with the deal and eager to begin our work.

After our trip to Romblon, we moved to the dorm to begin tutoring. Life was ok. We were told to teach American pronunciation and sat back to wait for the students to come rolling in. But, to our surprise, not many students did come rolling in. At the end of our first 2 weeks, we were each teaching less than 15 hours a week, mainly on MWF. Maybe life wasn't all that ok. We were frustrated and bored. We were frustrated because we had planned on making enough money during our teaching stint to cover at least 1 month of traveling in SE Asia and this (obviously) wasn't happening. We were bored, well, because we were just hanging around our dorm and we weren't making enough money to be able to avail of all that Iloilo has to offer (ie malls and movies).

Then we had to pay for our visa extensions: P4000/each (aka US$80). OUCH. There went 2.5 weeks of pay. Our relationship was strained from Lora constantly bitching about the situation...a slight exaggeration, but you see the point. We finally got so fed up that we spoke to the manager to tell him we would be leaving at the end of the week. He said he too was embarrassed by the piddly amount of money he's been throwing our way and he said he would start giving us a salary, if we stayed until Sept. 15. We told him, "Sure! We'd love P15,000/month!" and walked out feeling somewhat satisfied. However, after our last paycheck, we're not feeling so satisfied anymore. Apparently Reo thought we meant P15,000 TOTAL when we meant P15,000 EACH so really, we're not making much more than we were to begin with...and we're STILL only working about 15 hours a week.

On the bright side, there's only 2 more weeks left, we just moved into a new dorm complete with hot water (gasp!), we're diligently studying for the GRE's and we get to hang out with some amazing Koreans!!

The Koreans are a different matter entirely. Some of the Koreans are extremely shy talking with the "scary" native speakers. These tend to be the newer students who are still unconfident about their English capabilities. Others, are extremely eager to talk with us about any and all topics. It has been very enjoyable learning about Korea and its culture. Some of our students have been kind enough to take us out for Korean food and soju, the most popular alcohol in Korea, which is made from rice and/or sweet potato.

It has also been interesting to see the interactions between Filipinos and Koreans. Most of the time, they get along great. There are many similarities between the two Asian cultures, but they also have many differences (am I stating the obvious?). Lora finds it extremely humorous to listen to what the Filipinos say about the Koreans in the local dialect right in front of the students!

One example of cultural differences is the EIP bash we attended last night. The party was organized by the Filipino tutors. They broke everyone at the academy up into 5 groups and told each group they were required to perform a dance, skit, song, etc. Now, this is an extremely Filipino thing to do and it did NOT go over so well with the Koreans, who pressured the tutors enough to DROP the acts. However, the tutors couldn't bring themselves to completely abandon the limelight, so they still broke up into groups and performed.