Advice Post

At last, friends, we have come to the end of my TAPIF experience. Though I never saw a lot of the adventures coming - most of all the way I would leave TAPIF - I'm glad that I've taken the time here to reflect on my experiences and record them in a somewhat meaningful way.
While I would be the last person to over-inflate the importance or utility of this little blog, if it could do one thing, I would hope it could inform and advise others who are considering spending a year doing TAPIF themselves. To that end, I have taken notes throughout the year on things I wish I had known or that someone had told my less globetrotting comrades. I've tried to organize and sensibly present them here, so that others can enjoy my rich wisdom.
While I myself didn't enjoy my year in Martinique, I know the experience could be fulfilling and insightful for others. If you're considering TAPIF or study abroad, I think it's generally a great idea. I also think it's generally a great idea to keep the following in mind.

Enjoying your Life Abroad

• Try to think of the things that are different as interesting aspects of a new cultural experience. Things work differently wherever you go, and adjusting to that system takes time and will involve mistakes made, time lost, money wasted. Learn to laugh at yourself and try to take a neutral perspective on the culture / bureaucracy. You'll have time to form your judgments when you get home / go online to whine (like me!)
• Take photos. This isn't New York City, everything is not, in fact, online.
• When (not if) street harassment and generally unwanted gestures from men become a concern, talk to French women about it. Part of the gender warfare of harassment is that it makes you feel ashamed and frustrated and effectively silenced. Learn the culturally appropriate ways of dealing with it from the locals.
• If you see something in person / online that you're interested in doing, do it right then or write it down to do it later. Foreign countries are filled with exciting and wonderful sites, and you think you'll have plenty of time to do everything. You have plenty of time, then you have plenty of time, then you're gone and you never did it in spite of the fact that you lived next to it for months. 
• At least at the beginning, avoid dishing out money for the food you normally eat at home. Pay attention to what locals eat and which local products are affordable. Try to adapt the local diet to your dietary needs. Eventually, you're going to miss home so much that you're willing to dish out 5 € for a tiny jar of peanut butter, or whatever your comfort food is, but at first it's worth making a habit of trying the new stuff. Even if buying a cookbook is not your style, when you look for recipes online, search in French and look out for regional websites or blogs.
• Find your balance between the routine and the adventure. On the one hand, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take advantage of Europe / France / your region / your city, with plenty of free time on your hands to Do All the Things. On the other hand, seven months is a long time to drag yourself along from party to international foray to work unprepared to night at the airport. On the other, it's easy to get sucked into a routine and never get around to all that stuff that seemed so cool the first week once you're neck-deep into work. Everybody's process will be different, but I suggest two simultaneous routes. One, set yourself small, weekly goals. Go check something new out that's easily accessible, be it a party, an attraction, or even a cafe. Two, work your way out. See all the shit in your town while it's new and exciting. Then, once you have your gills, check out the region on day trips. Next, try a weekend in Paris or another big city. This gives you air out of your little town as you get tired of it, and gives you a chance to look forward to and save up for bigger trips.
• Rather than giving your opinion about French / local politics, instigate a local to talk about it. You'll learn a lot more that way.
• Once you've packed your bag, unpack it and throw out everything that you're not 100% positive you need (unless it's paperwork - see below). This applies both coming and going.

Getting Here and Handling the Bureaucracy

• No matter what it is, when you think, Oh, but it'll never come to that, it can't be that complicated: it will be. The bureaucracy is a nightmare. After all, miss, this is France. Check and double check that you have a physical and digital copy of every document you've ever owned concerning your visa, your bank account, your job offer, all that shit.
• Write shit down. When your phone dies or there's no Wi-Fi, you're gonna be fucked.
• This is a carry over from literally my entire undergraduate career: THE SQUEAKY WHEEL GETS OILED. I'm not saying you should be a jackass, but I'm saying a) it doesn't hurt to ask, especially if they're your contact person / there to help, b) remind people about their obligations to you, responding to emails / references phone calls as necessary - obeying the bureaucratic process is taken very seriously here, and c) ask for clarification until you understand. I can't tell you how many opportunities I missed because I didn't want to be a bother. There won't always be an exception for you, but sometimes they'll make one.
• If you apply to the CAF, fill out all the paperwork to the best of your ability, then check your account every day for notifications. They won't email or call. If nothing is moving after a couple weeks, call. If you can't get it sorted out, gather up your paperwork and go to the office. Get this sorted out ASAP. It can be worth hundreds of euros a month, so it's worth getting it settled that first month.

Savoir vivre, savoir faire avec

My students are basically the
center of my life, which is extra
sad given that I'm with them for 12
hours or fewer a week.

I just finished reading an article from the Guardian about the radical ways in which our lives are almost certainly going to change as our economy transitions due to both automation and ecological deterioration. (Caution, it is a very good, but long, read.) Essentially, there's no way we can continue the consumption-centered, hectic, all-consuming 40-hour workweek we currently suffer under, nor will it make economic sense to for long, given explosive advances in robotic technology and AI. Whatever political changes or dramatic re-structuring of our economy may occur to power the change, we will likely be soon working a fraction of the time we're currently accustomed to. All of us, indoctrinated in near-workaholic ethics, are going to have to figure out what to do with a lot more free time.
Obviously, this resonated profoundly with me. A recent college grad, I inculcated and pathologically lived a bootstraps ideology, forcing myself through extra classes, extra clubs, and extra volunteering in high school and work in the summers to get out of my boring home state. Then I barreled through four years of Columbia undergrad, holding myself to high standards in a full load of Ivy-League courses while also holding down at least two jobs and dragging my ass to church on Sunday morning. And now? My visa prohibits we working more than twelve hours a week. There are no Episcopal churches, only Catholic and evangelical, from what I can tell. In spite of my weekly visits to the community center, I've yet to find a volunteer organization to be involved in. I'm geographically isolated from my old friends, who, quite frankly, are living far busier lives, and I don't even have a secure enough internet connection to work teaching English clandestinely online.
Alors, quoi faire?
My original plan was to live in the library and do all that reading for fun that I've been putting off for ... the better part of a decade. But I ran in to a series of problems. First, there's one library in this town, and it has absurdly restrictive hours to begin with, besides mentioning late openings and basically no-warning unexplained closures. Then there's the fact that tourists file through noisily and the scary librarian won't let me (very carefully!) snack while I read for hours in the straight-backed wooden chairs. So, I brought my books home to read. Except that, at home, I can hardly read! I constantly feel compelled to do something, whether it's clean something, obsessively read the news online, or study creole. I can't manage to calm my mind enough to read for fun (which is terrifying) and don't have a comfy place to sit even if I could.
Of course, I'd love to go out and hike and swim on this fucking gorgeous island. Too bad that would require either a functioning public transit system, which Martinique lacks, or else a car, which, even with  all of my saving and English lessons, I still have yet to save up the money for. (Though I do hope to rent one soon.)
In general, being cultured is important, so I decided to check out the local cultural centers. All two of them. Which have websites designed no later than 1993, I'm telling you. And only sell the theater tickets two days a month-? By phone-? And take two weeks to respond to emails-? And whose staff won't answer questions during regular business hours or accept payments on-site-? In short, I've had a hard time trying to figure out how to get out here, without even mentioned how the heck to get home; the taxi line outside the theater last night was a lie, and the only thing that saved me from trekking up the hill at 21:00 alone on the dimly-lit sidewalks in my business attire was a kindly old lady from my creole class, who offered to drive me home.
I'm not saying it's a total loss. The play last night (Les Hommes, about a group of women imprisoned by the collaboration government in 1942) made me cry, i.e. was pretty good. And the tickets were so much cheaper than theater in NYC! In the fall I took to cross-stitching while listening to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, which is apparently the right level of busyness for me to avoid feeling guilty.
On a more fundamental level, I worry about what sort of psychological damage I have endured that doesn't allow me to relax and read for fun, and if it'll ever go away.
Then I remember that, starting in June, I'll be working in a school full-time and taking classes at night, and won't need to worry about having free time any more. At least I'm dabbling into that French savoir-vivre a little bit first.

Mo' (Bills) Mo' Problems

You know what's really unfair? When the pathologization of poverty is so deeply entrenched in our society that certain formative experiences are reserved for individuals of financial means, since they are assumed to be the ones worth investing in to begin with.
It was apparent that this underlying prejudice had pervaded the logic of TAPIF (the American recruitment process to become an English assistant in France) when the introductory materials mentioned that each assistant would need about 2,000 € to start off, before they were paid. You see, pay is normally withheld one month for teachers in France, so normally, since we start in October, our first paycheck wouldn't come until the and of November. Even though we're offered an advance of part or all of our first paycheck at the end of October, significant cash has to be doled out in initial expenses long before we get here: a plane ticket to our new place of work, lodging until we can find a new place to stay, the first month's rent and deposit on our new home, etc., besides just living expenses, like groceries, phone bills, insurance, and public transport, or, if you don't live in a major city, either the rental fees or the entire cost of a car. On top of all that, starting out somewhere new entails higher spending that what you will spend after you get settled, as you're eating out more to try to make friends, as you don't know where the cheapest stores are to procure what you need, and you have to buy all of the things that you could not fit in your suitcases but still use regularly.
In spite of my considerations of all this, I was sure from the beginning that I would never spend 2,000 whole euros in my first month or so here. That figure is so far above my usual spending habits, I thought for sure the data they had collected was skewed by the fact that most of the people who come here already have to have the socio-economic means and independence to have a Bachelor's and the idea to come skipping off to France to work part-time.
How pride doth come before a fall ...
I offer, dear reader, a screen cap of my expenses since I left the U.S., from my flight here to my first paycheck. Note that I spent not 2,000 €, but $3,000.61 (2582.39 €). My only consolation is that this budgetary faux-pas entails multiple mistakes that I can easily avoid in the future: buying black thread in a store that I won't even be going to anymore, going to out eat with totally flaky friends I'm done trying to establish a connection with, and taking a ride from friends who think that because you offered to get their lunch since they're driving that they should order 6 € worth of ice cream. That, and the number encompasses my flight home for Christmas, which really isn't negotiable in my family.

If I distribute this deficit across every month, along with the cost of my flight home in spring and my break in February (when I'm hoping to rent a car and actually see this damn island, which can't be pulled off on public transit), my budget actually gets quite tight, all when I thought I'd be floating in plenty this year. Part of the problem is also that the cost of living is considerably higher here, as everything from transit (1.8 € instead of Paris' 1.1 € a ride) to phone service (14 € for a plan with 1G as opposed to 2 € in Paris) to groceries is more expensive than in the métropole. Fortunately, I think I have a tutoring gig about to come through - which, by the way, is already in defiance of my visa, which requires that I work no more than twelve hours a week. Because they only want assistants coming who already have the financial means to draw from savings to support themselves while they're here. So much for égalité ...

I am lucky enough, however, to have a good friend who will pick up my flatmate and I and include us on their fabulous picnics, like the one here in Coeur Bouliki.