A lot has happened since my last post in November, but I’ll try to highlight the most important stuff. First on my priority list: I’m still in the midst of trying to validate my visa, making it legal for me to stay here past December. Much easier said than done. As you may or may not know, French bureaucracy is a real pain in the ***. The OFII (French immigration office) sent me a notice in October that they had scheduled me a chest X-Ray appointment, which I dutifully went to. On this same notice was a brief and very vague sentence stating that after the x ray I would need to go to an alleged “Clinique St Genevieve” for a general check-up (I guess to make sure I’m not bringing the Ebola virus into Guadeloupe?). At the x ray appt, I asked the secretary about this check-up, and from what I understood (she had a really strong accent and mumbled even when I asked her to speak up), the OFII would send me another notice about it in the mail. So December rolled around and I still haven’t heard anything, so I asked my employer here and also the program liaison back in the US, and they both told me to contact the OFII directly. So someday soon I need to muster up the courage to go stand in line around 5am with other hopeful immigrants to talk to someone about a general check-up I still haven’t had. Oh and that x ray appointment was no day in the park either. I spent 4 hours at a clinic waiting in line with about 35 people in a room a little bigger than the size of my bedroom at home. No air conditioning, the secretary was mean and I couldn’t understand her, and the procedure itself took less than 5 minutes.
In other better news, I have health insurance!! Exciting, since it’s been a year since I haven’t had any in the US…I went to an ear doctor here and it costed 33 euros ($43), and I should be fully reimbursed. And I haven’t paid a penny for it yet….other than the money that’s taken out of my monthly pay for social security. Wow. After many months of attempting to get affordable health insurance back home, this has been so strangely easy.
In November, there were 2 weeks of the “Route du Rhum”, a catamaran race that only happens every 4 years! It was actually pretty neat, there were tents set up in Pointe à Pitre with food, jewelry, and clothing vendors, and in the evenings there were dance performances and concerts. One night I got to see a bunch of little kids dancing a traditional dance. I’ve never seen an eight year old with hips that could move like that before. Another night featured karaoke, and unfortunately a couple of people slaughtered the songs, “Beat It” and “Imagine”.. (By the way, MJ is a huuuge deal here. One of my students told me one day that he had made up a dance à la The Jackson 5 to the “Hello” song I had taught them, and that he wanted to perform it for the class—really wish I’d had a video camera for this moment. It was quite possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, and the dance was not bad either. ) Anyway, the skippers of these giant catamarans start out in the northeastern French town of Saint Malo and race to Guadeloupe across the Atlantic Ocean, by themselves. I was lucky enough to see the first Guadeloupean arrive at the finish line because a friend of ours here invited me and Marina out in their speedboat to see him arrive. It was pretty special; there were tons of other boats out there all waiting to watch this guy complete his long journey.
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| Pointe a Pitre during La Route du Rhum |
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| one of the catamarans |
In other news, I am now teaching at an English school on Wednesdays—it’s a school where kids come for the morning from 8:30-12:30 and have an English lesson and then do some sort of craft and have a snack. It’s sort of part teaching, part baby-sitting. It’s a lot of fun, but definitely challenging, mostly because I am in charge of 10 5 and 6 yr olds for these 4 hours. And I’m not so good with this age group—granted, they’re adorable, and a lot of them learn really fast and are very bright, but I have a hard time getting them to cooperate and not just run around all over the place or pick at each other or play with their Pokémon cards or sleep. But I’m learning, sort of. They also can’t read or write yet, so all of what we do is oral work. They really are cute though and they make me laugh, even if I leave every Wednesday completely exhausted and thinking I hope they learned at least something that day. The owner of the school is insistent that the teachers at the school be native speakers, so she contacted me when she saw my announcement I had put up on a website about giving private English lessons. When I told her that I didn’t have experience with this age group and that I wasn’t completely sure how to approach the lessons, she insisted that I would be fine, and that the most important thing was for them to learn from a native English speaker. I guess they’re hard to come across in Guadeloupe. So anyway, I’m doing my best, and even though I’ve never been the artsy craftsy kind of person, I try to make it work. Today one of the little boys named Yanis, who is 5, told me that he had a girlfriend in his class, in fact he called her his “amoureuse” which is more like a lover. And one of the little girls who is 6 told me that I wasn’t pronouncing truck correctly. “It’s not truck, it’s ‘truck’” (pronounced with a French accent). I’ve gotten pretty used to my accent being corrected, that is, my French accent, but that one came as a surprise.
In my regular job, teaching is going pretty well. I learned a couple of games and songs from the Irish lady who I replaced at the English school, and there are a lot of resources (exercises and books) there that I can use for my classes so that has helped me out. I gave a basic evaluation last week, testing the kids on a few easy questions that we had gone over, and seeing how their oral comprehension was. There was a huge variety in the scores; a lot of kids did really well, a lot did really badly, with very few in the middle. I realized that maybe the written part was a little too hard for them, but considering I had no idea how to give this evaluation and had no format to base it off of, I can’t really blame myself. I only found out I needed to give an exam from one of my teachers, anyway. So this week I guess I’ll try to teach them an easy Christmas song, of course one that doesn’t mention the birth of Jesus in any way, even though that’s what Christmas is about after all. The French are all about separation between church and state.
I almost forgot, my roommate Marina and I bought a car in November, and after dealing with paying for insurance and then having to fix the brakes and get a mechanic check it so we could legally own it, it’s really great to be able to move around, especially on the weekends. It’s a 12 year old Fiat Bravo, Diesel, umm that’s basically all I know about it other than that it functions. But it’s great. Now on Sundays, we can take the whole day if we want to and go to the other side of the island, and during the week we go to the beach for a swim after work. It’s really nice. And I took it out for a spin for the first last Sunday, and am still alive to tell the tale. (It’s a stick shift). Hopefully after a few more lessons, I’ll be feeling more comfortable, but for now it’s still pretty nerve-wracking, even after having learned the basics from my dad before leaving home. Will try to post again soon, miss everyone a lot, and hope eveything is going well at home. Gros bisous
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