France, 1994
Fifty years to the day after the D-Day invasion, I found myself in France, sweating my butt off in a major heat wave. I had secured a Georgia Department of Education scholarship to study abroad, and I was experiencing serious misgivings as I sat on the métro, holding a handkerchief to my mouth and nose to combat the body odor emanating from literally everyone in our unairconditioned train car. It was never supposed to be 90 degrees Fahrenheit in June in France! Everyone knows that!
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Very few restaurants and public places were air-conditioned, and even fewer private residences were. Yet the heat wave was very real and very intense. News reports came through every day declaring the number of people (mostly elderly) who had died as a result of the extreme heat.
But as I was writing this article, I researched heat waves in France, and 1994 wasn’t even a blip on the radar. However, I remember the extraordinary heat, and I remember the impact that summer had on me as a young adult.
In 1992, Coweta County Schools hired me through a Georgia Department of Education grant for Elementary Foreign Language Education. I was the first person employed by the system to implement foreign language instruction for students beginning in kindergarten. Each day, I taught in two elementary schools on opposite sides of the county. Two conditions accompanied my contract: I had to teach my French classes entirely in the target language (immersion style), and I must take advantage of any opportunity to study abroad to authenticate my classroom instruction.
By 1994 another French teacher had joined me in Coweta County. Katherine was authentic, crunchy, selfless, bohemian, and brilliant. She gravitated toward the younger children, while I kept moving up with the oldest children each year. Katherine was my rock, my lifeline, my support when things went sideways because we had no curriculum, no precedent, and honestly, little to no support.
We both won a scholarship to study abroad that summer. Our funding covered airfare, lodging, transportation, food, and miscellaneous expenses. We were literally going to France for free.
Katherine and I were both in serious relationships, and her fiancé was uber-supportive, while Jeff, my significant other, believed that my place was at home, creating meals and curating a lovely home, instead of “galivanting across the boulevards of Paris.” It was the beginning of the end of the relationship for me, as I was finally discovering who I was and what I really wanted out of life.
Because Jeff couldn’t be bothered, my mom took the day off work to get Katherine and me to the airport. Mom made sure Katherine and I had francs and snacks, and then she dropped us at the terminal. We boarded the plane, talked half the night, slept little, and woke up in Paris. Mon Dieu! How lucky we were!
Our first night in Paris, we shared a hotel room. I’ll never forget it. We opened our wooden-framed floor to ceiling windows, and perched on the rail, listening to the unique Parisian street sounds. Katherine whipped out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. She told me she only smokes while she’s in France, and, true to form, I never saw her smoke any other time.
We split up after a couple of nights in Paris. The terms of our scholarship had us staying with local families and spending time in French primary schools, learning pedagogy and talking to teachers.
Katherine ended up staying with a posh family just outside of Paris. Her host family’s home was a gated three-story mansion. They did things like take tea with sugar cubes and go out for sushi. The house was a short five minute walk to the nearest metro station, from where Katherine could go almost anywhere. I couldn’t wait to see where I was going to stay!
I really should have looked up the meaning of my host family’s town name before I arrived. Chaumes-en-Brie (which means “soft cheese” or “thatched roof and cheese” depending on the source you consult) is a small town located about 28 miles southeast of Paris. No train station. Little to no tourism. Lots of cows. Cows made up most of the population there. The town’s name says it all.
I stayed with unorthodox radicals in Chaumes-en-Brie. The apartment they lived in was minimal and eclectic, a place where they could raise their children on their terms and exercise their spirituality and politics in their own way. The dad smoked like a chimney.
Katherine and I had definitely been mismatched.
On the weekends, when I could catch a ride with someone, I visited Katherine in Paris. The father, an older gentleman, told me over and over again how the Americans had saved the French in World War II. He told me that he and his neighbors celebrated the Americans each year by flying our flag and celebrating the risk we took by literating them. We were heroes, he said.
By contrast, the father of the family I stayed with drilled me nightly on United States’ foreign policy, particularly our involvement with Cuba. I felt like every day was a test, and I was failing miserably. In retrospect, I wonder why he held me, a young girl of 24, personally responsible for all of the United States’ decisions.
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While I was in Chaumes-en-Brie, I didn’t take my tea with sugar cubes or sleep in hotel-grade bedding. However, I spent my days in the local école maternelle, observing students and talking to their teachers about how kids best learn French. I walked to the school by myself each day, and I went to the town center to buy my lunch. And while I was fluent in French before I arrived, it’s a different thing to be immersed in the country’s language and culture. Thinking and communicating in a foreign language all day every day is hard work. But the more I did it, the more my confidence and independence grew.
I learned how to buy a ticket and negotiate a train ride. I bought a ticket to see “La Haine “ (the hate) at a local cinema, and I watched the movie with real interest and appreciation, and I learned how people stood up for themselves in the face of ignorance and racism.
I walked with my host family and their cows down the trails on the outskirts of town. I listened to local classical music performances at some of the beautiful old buildings in the town’s center.
I learned how to make authentic French dinners using fresh, local ingredients that I would pick up after school let out each day. It wasn’t a “cushy” stay by any means, but it was inspirational and transformative.
At the beginning of my trip, I battled homesickness every day. Nights were the worst. In the pre-cellphone era, international calls were a challenge, but I called home as often as I could. Jeff never answered. I called before he went to work. No answer. I called later when I knew he was home from work. He never accepted a single call from me.
My return flight was delayed, and I didn’t arrive in Atlanta until after 9 pm. Begrudgingly Jeff picked me up but didn’t say two words to me all the way home. He didn’t kiss me when I landed, and he didn’t even ask how my trip was.
The next day, I had the pictures from my trip developed. When I received my prints and examined them, I didn’t even recognize the face on the frames. I knew that I could never go back to being the naive young girl I was before. I had evolved into an entirely new confident and savvy person.
I came back to the United States a changed person, and I severed a relationship that had reduced me to subservience and stereotypes. My new-found independence tipped the scales and forced me to step out on my own. France, 1994, changed my life. I was no longer timid and insecure: those descriptors disappeared when I had to find my way through a Parisian heatwave in the summer of 1994.
