TAPIF blog # 3: Expect the unexpected
December 10
I admit that I haven’t written an update in so long because there was about a month where I truly didn’t know if I could do this. In the past, I’ve said I could live anywhere for a year. When I started to say this, I thought I was seasoned in the experience of living in new places with no idea of what to expect. I moved to Eugene, Oregon, to attend the University of Oregon without setting foot on campus or even really seeing pictures. My first time in Paris was the day I moved into an apartment I found on the internet and hoped was real. What I didn’t consider when I said I could live anywhere – aside from sounding naive – was that truthfully, I could only live anywhere if it had all the amenities I needed, such as reliable public transportation.
It was quite the reality check when I moved to a tiny town in the countryside of France with a bus that only came a couple of times a day, no stores I could walk to, and weirdly, a forest full of sand that made it comically insufferable to bike through.
I’ve been spending a lot of time alone. I explore the forests around my house, sleep late into the morning, doom scroll, and read more than I ever have. Still, there have been bright spots. I’ve also managed to hang onto the friends I made in the first week, so I escape to Bordeaux on the weekends. One weekend, we even made it to Saint-Émilion for wine tasting. We wandered through the cobblestone streets and into a tiny wine shop where a man about my age sat eating duck confit with a quarter of a baguette. When he saw us, he scurried through a tiny door to hide his feast before returning to attend to us. Some of the wines were almost 1,000 euros per bottle, yet he poured us glasses like it was our very own soiree. He maintained awkward eye contact as we tried to maximize our time and wine intake in the store until we’d tasted five wines from the southwest of France. I even managed to impress him by name-dropping the city I work in, which is also a very prominent wine region.
Aside from my outings with new friends, I also spend quite a bit of time with my host family. One of the aspects of French culture I’ve started to hold near and dear to me is Apéro: the period before a meal with small plates, lots of wine, or other drinks. Apéro is also when my conversational skills are put to the test with their friends/family, but the steady flow of wine and gin & tonics helps with that.
I do feel I’ve improved a lot in speaking French, but I’m aware my accent reeks of American English. If there’s one person who will never let me forget I don’t sound French, it’s the 6-year-old boy I live with. I only speak French with the kids, yet it seems they can’t quite wrap their heads around the fact that I also speak English. Whenever a song in English comes on, they check to make sure I can really understand.
School, on the other hand, is a different world. I tell all the students I don’t speak French to give them an incentive to speak English with me. Some of them are (rightfully) suspicious, and others are convinced I am a French person pretending to be an American person. While I haven’t quite made any friends at school, every now and then I have an interaction with a coworker. Baby steps?
But if teaching has been an adjustment, the events at school have been something else entirely. They’ve easily been the most intense and unique part of my experience so far. By “unique” I mean that there have been seven bomb alerts at my school since September. For weeks, there were messages sent, apparently through the dark web, to my school saying that there were bombs at the facility. Even though they were technically false alarms, the stress and anxiety I felt every day going to school was heavier than I knew what to do with.
Before the last evacuation, I was standing at the front of the class giving a presentation on Thanksgiving when I saw a group of about 12 police officers walking through the hallway. The students were all facing me, so I was the only person who could see this out the window. I tried to stay composed to avoid causing any worry for the students, but my heart was racing, and my legs felt like they could collapse under me at any moment. Less than 10 minutes later, an alarm blared through the school, and for the seventh time, we had to evacuate.
Some of the students made jokes about the evacuations and how it caused them to miss class, but others stopped coming to school out of fear. I genuinely didn’t know what to do. Why wasn’t the school closing? Why did this keep happening? I didn’t feel safe going to school, but I didn’t know if I would be able to stay in France if I stopped going. In the back of my head, every time I went to school I thought, this could be the time that it isn’t a false alarm.
Recently, the authorities took the 14-year-old student responsible into custody. Even though the alerts might be over, the experience of carrying that anxiety with me every day is not something I could just shake off right away.
Whenever I told someone back in the US about what was going on at school, their immediate response was, “I thought this kind of thing only happened in the US.” There’s no question about the prominence of violence in schools throughout the US, and I think this reality played a big part in the anxiety I felt as this situation unfolded.
Things have been hard. But despite all of that, I do feel that they’ve become better, and I feel like I can make it to the end of my contract.
The friends I’ve made here have given me a sense of community and companionship that gives me something to look forward to. My friends, family, and boyfriend back in the US have continued to support me and keep me connected, and I really don’t know what I’d do without them.
I miss home, the people I love, and burritos more than I can explain. At the same time, I’m feeling grateful for the little wins that I’ve taken recently, and for the life I’m building here.
I can’t say I’ve settled in or that everything makes sense yet. It doesn’t. But I’m starting to understand myself a little better amid all this; what I need, what I miss, what I can handle, and what I can’t. There’s no neat conclusion, just the reality that I’m still in the middle of it, and I’m feeling OK with that.
