If It Isn't En Grève, It Isn't French

What I'm up to when I can't visit my schools because they're on strike

If you've never lived in France or had the deep, gratifying pleasure of traveling in France during a time of social unrest (ever), then you, dear reader, might not be aware of just how important the strike is to the well-being of French society as a whole.
My French/American professor once told the  joint seminar on Diversity that, whereas in the U.S. the government decides what's legal, and the citizens may or may not try to influence it, in France the attitude is much more than the citizens decide what will and will not fly, and the government may or may not attempt to disagree.
And, boy, are the French good at putting a brakes on the world turning.
One of the very first vocabulary items I learned was opération molokoye, known on the mainland as opération escargot. Yes, escargot, that weird snail food found only in American cartoons about France, American restaurants pretending to be French, and at the café at Fontainebleu catering to American tourists. In France the snail operation and in Martinique the turtle operation consists of protesters getting into their cars and driving on the most important roads in a town as slow as they possibly can until a meeting is called to meet their demands. During my first week in Martinique, the molokoye was a serious impediment to my going to visit my news schools and potential lodgings. The cause? According to my supervisor, the supplementary mentoring program, providing part-time work to young people and helping teachers reach out to students having troubles, was suddenly cut off, right before the start of the school year. I had the opportunity to listen in as my supervisor and her colleagues discussed it a bit, and it seems that their sympathies (at least so far as they express them in the office in the presence of the new, foreign teaching assistant) seem to lie on both sides: the financial situation that the new administration inherited was impossible to manage without making cuts, but at the same time, both the laid-off workers, the students, the teachers, and the parents lose out in this new arrangement.
Current searches for news in Martinique are actually flooded with word of a different grève, this one concerning transportation workers at the airport. I don't have too many details on that one, but it seems they've also been blocking traffic, which, as one teacher reported in a school I visited today, is keeping some students from getting to school. She called it an aberration, but most of the other teachers and administration I've spoken to simply agree that this rentrée (a delightfully efficient French work for "back to school") has been difficult, and that it shows no signs of letting up. All of this is also a part of the larger challenges proposed by the last French president, Holland, and the current (former banker) president, Macron's reforms / austerity / neo-liberal modifications to labor laws across France. Their changes have begun to roll out across France, but the media largely paints it as though the administration is underestimating how much trouble the protesters can cause before its over.
When I applied for this job (as well as to the Fulbright English Teaching assistantship - oops), I was interested in how politics and teaching came together. In some communities teachers are at the forefront of social and political change, but in others they are more like passive arms of the socializing/educating/civilizing State. As politically active as French people stereotypically are, I can't yet tell where on that spectrum I think my teachers here in Fort-de-France are. So far the grèvistes are an outside force, arriving in the mornings to either board up the school and write in chalk that it is closed or taking the streets to demonstrate. I haven't met any teachers who are themselves involved, though that doesn't mean that none of them are.
Training, at least, took place, and I'm already completely wooed by my tiny new students as well as by even more local sweets - as if I needed more sugar in my diet.

A bakery-ordered pain au beurre et au chocolat, once only made for communions, baptisms, and other important celebrations but now available more or less whenever you please, this one ordered so that myself and the other newly-arrived teaching assistants could get a taste of local culture. Stay tuned to hear more about my struggle to eat healthy in the very place where so many damn wholesome fruits and vegetables are grown.