I blogged previously on 11th March, regarding our ongoing battle with Czech bureaucracy in seeking to obtain our residency permit with respective social security numbers from the Czech Foreign Police. Last week, more than a month after Andrea from the private registration agency had submitted all our signed & notarised forms, apostilled, translated and notarised marriage certificate, certified protocol regarding our flat etc, etc, we got an email saying that all was finally ready. Please would we attend the offices of the Foreign Police on Tuesday 12th May with our passports and health insurance cards, and our residency permit and respective social security numbers would be issued to us.
The offices of the Foreign Police open at 7.30am and we were advised to be there at that time as it would speed up proceedings. Sybille & I are not early morning people, so getting up at 5.30am to get washed, dressed and across Prague to the suburb of Žižkov where the Foreign Police are based, in order to arrive on time, did not fill us with joy. But bus and metro connections worked perfectly and we got there with ten minutes to spare.
As EU citizens, we had been told to use the entrance at the back of the building where there was a lift to the office on the third floor. We found the entrance and the lift but then both dissolved into fits of laughter. There on the wall was a notice in English solemnly declaring that “EU nationals will be dispatched from the third floor”. If you are familiar with European history you will know of the ‘Defenestration of Prague’ which occurred in 1618 and resulted in the Thirty Years War. The victims on that occasion were two Catholic noblemen and their scribe. Were the Czech Foreign Police reviving this old Prague custom with non-Czech EU nationals as their 21st century victims????
On the third floor we met Lenka (Andrea’s agency colleague) who had got third place in the queue. Just before 8am, we signed our papers, were presented with our residency permits and our passports were stamped. But the wording on the stamp clearly indicates the ongoing mentality within Czech bureaucracy in believing that no EU national might actually want to permanently reside in the Czech Republic. We are only granted ‘Temporary Residence’ but it is ‘neomezený’ – forever!
Schengen Visa - Image in public domain via Wikimedia
As I feared, Anna has suffered the same fate as Karen. Despite going in person to the Foreign Police three times this past week, accompanied by a Czech speaking friend, she has had to leave the country today. She was eventually told that her application for a work permit & residency visa, submitted in Berlin on 21st January 2009, would not be granted because she had exceeded the 90 days she was allowed to be in the Czech Republic as a tourist.
Anna sent me a text/SMS message with this information early on Wednesday afternoon. I rang her straight back and invited her to join Sybille & I for a meal at Grosetto that evening so I could learn more about her experience with the Foreign Police and also say a proper ‘Goodbye’. We had an enjoyable time together and discussed her future plans. She is twenty three and single and has decided to do some travelling rather than return to the USA. Her initial plan is to fly to Croatia (outside the EU & the Schengen agreement) and spend some time on the beach. Whilst being fully in agreement with her plans, we did warn her that she might observe a few things on a Croatian beach which would surprise someone whose upbringing had taken place in conservative middle-America!
Anna also spoke of going to spend sometime in the UK which is something we also encouraged her to do. Not only would she almost certainly find work there as a TEFL teacher, it would also be the best place to re-apply for a work permit & visa to return to the Czech Republic. Whilst part of the EU, the UK is NOT part of the Schengen agreement. Staff at the London embassy of the Czech Republic would inevitably speak English, thus making the application process much easier for her. She has promised to keep in touch and I do really hope that last Wednesday is not the last time we see her.
Having listened to Karen’s story on Wednesday 29th April, two days before she was forced to leave the country, I wrote an email to the TEFL Course Coordinator at the Caledonian School, particularly challenging the clearly inaccurate information regarding work permits and visas for non-EU citizens that was still displayed on their website in view of what had happened to Karen & what was likely to happen to Anna. Much to my surprise, I got a reply the following day.
The TEFL Course Coordinator at the Caledonian School inevitably blamed the Czech authorities. “The Schengen/EU rules have literally been changing before our eyes this spring, and we have done everything we can to make the necessary adjustments. The problems that we encountered recently were obviously unexpected, and we are extremely sorry for them”, she declared. However interestingly, today when I checked their website, the wording regarding visas, as quoted in my previous post, had been altered and reduced to, “The Caledonian School has a full-time visa assistant to help you through the process of applying for a work permit and visa (residency permit)”. They do finally seem to have realized that they should not be making promises they clearly cannot keep nor encouraging people to arrive as tourists and weeks later apply for a work permit and permanent visa.
A big ‘Thank you’ to those who commented on my original post. I agree with both Mike and Sher, that many language schools such as Caledonian here in Prague, have a lot to answer for. To their credit, Caledonian did agree to pay for both Anna & Karen’s flights out of the Czech Republic. I suspect that the ‘tax and social security payments’, deducted from their pay packets whilst not yet legal employees, went towards paying for those flight tickets.
Image taken from http://www.a-cesky-krumlov.com/guide#h4 assuming fair use. Please contact me if in breach of copyright
One of the things I was warned about before accepting an invitation to become Chaplain to a continental European Anglican Church, was having to cope with a high turnover of members of the congregation. Many people come to major European cities as exchange students, visiting lecturers or on short-term contracts for international companies. Therefore, they may only worship with you for a few months and then move on. Just as you feel you have got to know them, they are leaving. The constant round of farewells I was warned, could become quite dispiriting.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed so they say. Therefore when an American couple, Tom & Myra, came to St. Clement’s for the first time on my first Sunday last September, I soon discovered that they would only be worshipping with us until the year end. Tom had a Fulbright scholarship and would be teaching for a semester at Charles University. They threw themselves into the life of the Chaplaincy and made many friends amongst members of the congregation. But, on the Sunday after Christmas, we had to bid them farewell as they returned to their home in Georgia, USA.
However, in the last couple of weeks I have lost one congregational member and am likely to lose another, neither of whom wants to leave but who are both being made to leave the country by the Czech Foreign Police. This is a wholly new situation, both for me and for the congregation.
The two people concerned, Karen and Anna, are both Americans and came to Prague in early November 2008 to undertake an intensive TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) training course with the Caledonian School here in Prague. The school, like many others in Prague, offers TEFL courses to native graduate English speakers and guarantees a teaching job with the school, to all who successfully complete the course. It also promises to support all its newly qualified teachers with obtaining the necessary visa and work permit. The following is taken directly from their website.
“American, Canadian, Australian and European Union citizens do NOT need visas to enter the Czech Republic. American, Canadian and Australian citizens need a valid passport. The Caledonian School has a full-time visa assistant to help you through the process of applying for a work permit and visa (residency permit). Our visa assistant, Vera Antsiouova, will inform you about the process of obtaining your work/residency visas after you arrive”.
Back on 21st January, Karen & Anna were taken to the Czech Embassy in Berlin by the Caledonian School, in order to submit their applications for visas and work permits from outside of the Czech Republic. This procedure in itself seems somewhat absurd but apparently had previously been perfectly acceptable to the Czech authorities. However, on Thursday 2nd April, Karen was summoned the offices of the Foreign Police and Anna likewise a week later on Thursday 9th. They were both given what they believed at the time to be a four week extension to their tourist visas, to allow them to remain in the Czech Republic whilst they waited for their work and residency permits to come through the system. As they discovered a couple of weeks later, they had in fact been given deportation orders telling them to leave the country in four weeks or else face being banned from entering any of the countries covered by the Schengen agreement for five years.
As a result of all of this, Karen was forced to fly back to the USA last Friday and I fear that Anna, despite the last-minute personal efforts she is currently making, will also find herself in the same situation this coming Friday. Karen relates her experience of failing to get a visa as a TEFL teacher in Prague in this blog post. which also includes a link to an editorial in the English language weekly newspaper, ‘The Prague Post’ .
I admire Karen for not blaming anybody for what has happened to her, not even mentioning her language school by name in her blog. But I am forced to reflect on why this situation has come about even though I have been left feeling powerless to do anything to help these two ladies other than offering a listening ear. Having assessed the information available to me, I have come to the conclusion that no one person or organisation is totally to blame.
Certainly the Caledonian School does not come out this scenario in a very good light. Rather than getting Karen & Anna to apply for their visas as soon as their TEFL course finished in early December 2008, the school waited seven weeks before doing anything, using the excuse of Christmas and their visa assistant being on annual leave. Even worse was their failure to explain that what the Foreign Police gave them following their respective visits on Thursday 2nd & Thursday 9th April, was not a four week visa extension but rather a deportation order. Karen only found out the truth two weeks after receiving it when she showed hers to a Czech speaking friend.
I do also feel that both Karen & Anna were probably a little too trusting of the promises given to them by Caledonian. Apparently, a fellow student of theirs was far less trusting and kicked up a fuss several weeks earlier. As a result, her visa came through in time.
However, the Czech authorities also have to a lot of questions to answer too. As I understand it, they decided at the beginning of this year, to apply the immigration rules in a totally different way than they had previously, I suspect in part, to teach the various language schools a lesson for flouting the system as they had in the past. Karen & Anna and numerous other TEFL teachers thus became innocent victims caught in the middle of this power struggle.
The Czech Foreign Police also seem to be reacting to government pressure in the current economic downturn, to help ensure that available jobs only go to Czech people. They are therefore now taking the full 180 days they are technically allowed to use to consider work visa applications from non-EU citizens, rather than the previous 30-45 days that they used to take. This might make sense in relation to Ukrainian building workers but not to TEFL teachers. Language Schools and the firms who use them want TEFL teachers who are native first language English speakers. Karen & Anna are clearly not taking jobs from native Czechs! Rather, they are helping to provide an important service to Czech businesses and Czech business people.
There also remains a complete lack of clarity and consistency from the Foreign Police. Depending on who one talks to, answers and explanations differ. One is left with the ongoing suspicion of corruption within the system. How is it that many wealthy Russians (non-EU citizens) are allowed to reside here? Does money talk? Sadly, I think it does.
It is my fervent hope & prayer that this situation will eventually be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. That both Karen & Anna’s dream of working as TEFL teachers in Prague, living in & learning about a different culture than their own, will be able to happen. And that I won’t permanently lose two lively and intelligent members of my congregation.
Despite my good intentions, I’ve once more been very slow in writing the promised post about my first Holy Week and Easter in the Czech Republic. Although we are still in the Easter season I’m all too aware that my comments will be somewhat dated if I don’t write a blog post soon.
As in the UK, one has to distinguish between the way Easter is marked in the predominantly secular commercial world, as against the way it is celebrated in the Christian Churches. One initial observation is that the commercial world does not start displaying its Easter goodies as early as it does in Britain. In Britain, I have many times cringed seeing hot-cross buns and Easter Eggs on sale before even the Feast of the Epiphany on 6th January has passed. Here in Prague, Lent had at least begun before any Easter goods were on display.
However, the so-called Easter goods seen in Prague supermarkets seemed to me to bear very little relation to Gospel accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Various floral decorations, artificial and real, together with rabbits of every shape and description, mostly made of chocolate, filled the shelves. Other than vaguely representing new life, I could see very little relevance to the greatest festival of the Christian year. The Easter Bunny was what mattered, not the risen Christ.
Unlike in the UK, many people decorate their houses, flats and gardens for Easter. The Czechs love to paint and decorate eggs, then tie them with ribbons to trees in their gardens or attach them to sticks stuck into window boxes of their flats and shops. Similar traditions can also be found in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. However, one peculiar Czech tradition is also to place such decorations on family graves which Sybille told me she had never seen whilst she lived in Germany.
With regard to Church tradition and practice, one thing I soon discovered was that distributing palm crosses on Palm Sunday is something peculiarly Anglican! Not initially realising this, I made enquiries about purchasing palm crosses at a Roman Catholic shop that sells books and Church supplies and from where we obtain our communion wafers. My request was met with a look of complete bewilderment, even when a helpful customer translated my English into Czech. I rapidly emailed the English company I had previously dealt with when in Oxfordshire, who were happy to oblige.
Another difference between the UK and the Czech Republic is that Good Friday is not a public holiday here. Therefore, it is not really worthwhile to try and hold a service beginning at 2pm to mark the last hour of the cross, as most people have to be at work. Instead, I conducted a devotional service of Bible readings, prayers and times of silence for reflection, starting at 7.30pm in the evening.
Whilst the Good Friday service and our Eucharist on Maundy Thursday evening were reasonably well attended, as was my experience in Britain, many more people turned out on Easter Day. Yet for me, celebrating the joy of the resurrection on Easter Day is so much more meaningful if I have first sought to enter into and tried to understand the sense of betrayal and the depth of suffering that Jesus experienced on the first Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
Easter Day saw my largest congregation since arriving in Prague in September 2008. We had approximately 110 adults and a dozen children and I had to consecrate additional bread and wine to communicate all those who wished to make their Easter communion. About half were regular members of the congregation bearing in mind that quite a number of our regulars go ‘home’ for the Easter break. The other half were mainly visitors, enjoying a long weekend in Prague, together with some ex-pat ‘festival worshippers’ whom we last saw at the Carol Service in December! We ended our worship with a rousing rendition of ‘Thine be the glory’ to the wonderful tune by Handel called ‘Maccabaeus’.
Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Apologies to those who follow my blog that I haven’t posted anything for just over two weeks. I’ve got three excuses. The first is suffering from bloggers block – not really knowing what to write about. The second is we’ve just had Holy Week & Easter – a somewhat busy time in my profession and about which I will write in due course. And the third is the complete change in the weather we have experienced here in Prague meaning that it has been much more fun to be outside rather than sitting before the computer!
On the night of Saturday 28th – Sunday 29th March, all across Europe, the clocks went forward by one hour. Here in Prague, we are now two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Central European Summer Time (CEST) which remains one hour ahead of the UK who are now on British Summer Time (BST). However, calling it ‘summer time’ did seem rather odd bearing in mind that in the week before the clocks went forward, we’d had several snow showers! But in the week following the clock change, as March became April, suddenly Winter became Spring. In fact it was almost more like Winter became Summer!
For the past twelve days or so, we’ve had clear blue skies during the day with ever increasing hours of sunshine and temperatures into the low twenties Celsius. And as each succeeding day has a few more minutes’ daylight and a few minutes less darkness, the change is quite astounding. You see and experience it in so many ways.
Out of the ground have sprung a whole array of spring flowers in a variety of bright colours. You see them in the flowerbeds of public open spaces, in window boxes hung on balconies and in the private gardens of those lucky enough to have ground-floor flats or houses. Forsythia is flowering bright yellow and all those trees that should have blossom, have blossomed!
We often walk up the steep tarmac path called Pat’anka that leads from our flats complex up to a fascinating suburb of late 1920s/early 1930s Bauhaus houses above. We walk to exercise our legs, enjoy the wonderful view across the city at the top of the hill, visit the Albert Supermarket, as well as to enjoy some occasional liquid refreshment in the Na staré fare Bar-Restaurant. In just one week, the wooded slope that the steep path traverses has gone from bare trees and branches to every shade of green imaginable.
At the back of the Na staré fare Bar-Restaurant, there is a wonderful shaded courtyard which we had previously only ever seen through the window. For the past ten days it has been furnished with tables, chairs & sun umbrellas and we have enjoyed eating meals there al fresco. Likewise in the city centre, every bar & restaurant that can, now has tables and chairs outside so that customers can enjoy the warmth and the sunshine.
It is not only nature and the Hotel/restaurant/bar trade that has suddenly gone into Spring/Summer mode, so has most of the resident population. Throughout the winter months, most Prague women have dressed in jeans or trousers with leather boots. Very rarely did you see a skirt, no doubt because it was too cold. Suddenly, skirts are everywhere and only occasionally are they of the mid-calf or below variety. Nearly all the younger ladies, together with quite a number of the not-so-young ladies, wear them knee length or above, often considerably above!!! Many men are in shorts whilst the builders working on the final part of our flat complex development opposite are bare-chested & displaying their six packs as they fabricate steel mesh & pour concrete.
Whilst it has been wonderful to finally be able to enjoy this amazing city in warmth and sunshine, there are two downsides. After three months (January – March) of being able to walk freely through the historic areas and across Charles Bridge with relatively few people around, the tourist season has now re-started with a vengeance. We are threatening to start wearing tee-shirts declaring ‘I’m not a tourist, I live here!’ And today I found the first two unwelcome visitors of a different kind in our bathroom – mosquitoes! Unfortunately, one of them found me first. I have a lovely bite on my left forearm!
