Sequel
Just like that, it’s my one-year anniversary of being an expat in France. In some ways it seems like only yesterday I walked through security and into France after 30 hours of airport hopping and waiting around terminals, but also a lot has happened since. In no particular order, I moved ten or so times, was near a bombing, carried a pony, gave out groceries, baked many cakes, was in a car accident, experienced the strangest film night of my life, travelled to Spain and Italy, was stalked, witnessed to students, attended Bible college in French, survived a pandemic, met many incredible people… Read more >>Origins
This week in my French class (sur zoom) it became obvious that I am the odd one out in the group. The class is structured around different themes, and the latest began as the others had before it: we read a bit, suffer through dictations, write a paper, and discuss it. Lately we have been talking about values and from where we derived ours. It didn’t strike me as particularly unusual until the professor opened the discussion by remarking how very different my paper was. I quickly scanned the other posted papers, and everyone else’s read like stereotypes of their countries of origin. The… Read more >>
Poisson d’Avril
Only in France do you need to make a quick fish. Today is poisson d’avril, directly translated it means “fish of April” but in English we would just refer to it as April fool’s day. Here children make little paper fish and try to sneakily hook or tape those fish onto other people’s back. This morning when I went to the kitchen for some tea and saw little Irène, one of the three children I live with, carefully cutting out a fish, I knew I needed to get going in the fish department. Studying would have to wait a while. There were fish to be caught and given. Not five minutes after I had… Read more >>Education in the Time of Corona
There is a scene in the classic claymation film Chicken Run, where Ginger, the lead chicken says “Let’s not lose our heads” to which the other chickens say “Lose our heads?!” and run screaming. That’s basically the state of things at the moment. In the shop the other day as people were bulk-buying, an elderly French woman whispered: “It’s like the war.” People are acting like corona is akin to the nazis. That qualifies as losing our heads. We can approach things in a better way. It is a serious situation, and we shouldn’t rub our faces on one another, but panic and indulging in misinformation… Read more >>