Author: tushe@nd.edu
Do I want to leave?
Luckily, I think my host mom sensed that I needed to be saved from sinking in the boat of nostalgia and she kicked n with her sweet gestures to remind me of why I need to keep my head up and enjoy France. She told about the other students she had hosted for the longest time had gone through similar phases. She continues to wave for me when I left the morning for school, she would routinely ask me about my day at school. She told me about her vacations to Japan and how she yearns to travel more but her age makes it hard for her to go through a lengthy plane right. I feel much better now because I found a pharmacy that had the right medicine, eventually. I explained to the pharmacist in French about my condition and was impressed my with my fluency, although it was clear I was not a French native.
Chateaux and more chateaux……Paradise?
A taste of the French Schooling Experience
Integrating into the French day-to-day
At my school, Institut de Touraine, I am one of the few students who reside far away from campus, so much so that I have to get a month’s Student Pass with FilBleu for commuting every day on the city’s tram network. The curvy-edged, metallic-silver machine that slid smoothly across the city’s green lawns is one of the reasons I am having no problems with staying far from school! I am impressed with the technology that has been invested in this vehicle; the automated door system, the precise time of arrival of each scheduled train and the barricaded yet transparent driver area with cockpit-like equipment. If anything, this is a sign of how advanced the French public system is. As an ambitious young pan-African scholar, experiencing such exemplary standards for the greater good of the public is truly an eye-opener and an inspiring testimony I hope to contribute in bringing to my own continent. I could not resist the edge to pull out my phone and record a ride’s length of video footage for my own archives. For those who will wonder why I was impressed with the train system in my host city beyond expected levels, my response is that the train is a microcosm reflection of the sustained, broad-based development that European powerhouses like France have enjoyed for long, the Middle-east and Asian Tigers have started to start and the African and South Americans can only dream for at present. I am reminded of my duty to learn of this trip as much as my brain can take to begin gathering the pieces for the surmountable task I have ahead to contribute to the betterment of Africa. However, my image of France has not been all glittering gold….
The tale of two Mysteries: France and the French Impact
As a first-time visitor in a beautiful country rich with life that is more foreign than similar to my own, I was more observant than usually as soon as my feet touched the French soil. One of the first impressions I registered was the racial (and when possible, national) representation in the spaces I was entering. It was interesting to pick that I had seen most people of African origin at the train stations in Paris and Tours, my ultimate destination. There were more descendants of Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Niger in Paris at Gare de Montparnasse, and the numbers began to dwindle as I moved away into my host community. Additionally, I noticed that there were a significant number of people of Arabic origin, and when I had the chance to spark a conversation with some of them, I learned that they came from countries like Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. As minor of a detail this may be to someone else, it was essential to me because I was witnessing firsthand the continuing effects of the colonial residue of the French’s occupation of most of West and North Africa. There is something irreplaceable about the mesh of race and class I am experiencing on this trip, and as one of my goals is to understand better the French culture and the world it extends to beyond the country’ s borders, I feel I am on the right track!