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.

The Secular Spectacular

The French, at least theoretically, really pride themselves on being a secular society. The rantings of snobbish mainland philosophers aside, this has a lot of concrete manifestations, even out here in the DOMs. On the wall of every education department office I've visited and in many other locations, the French charter of laïcité in education is proudly unfurled, a product of an early-19th century, rather avant-garde at the time policy making public education (again, at least theoretically) free, secular, integrated, and obligatory. At our official training, language assistants were reminded to include no religious inclinations in our lessons (nor to divide our classes by sex, a rule which I've seen at least a few teachers break so far). And, of course, all "ostensibly religious symbols" are banished from schools - which is far less polemic out here than in the mainland, where the islamaphobic implications are more evident.

That being said, anyone coming to work in French schools may note, in there joy of discovering a two-week vacation every six weeks or so, that their extended holidays revolve around Christian, and specifically Catholic, holidays: All-Saints, Christmas, Mardi Gras / Carnival, Easter, etc. Of course, Catholicism is a strong cultural marker here in France, as well, and it's perfectly understandable that the rhythms of vacations would carry over from an earlier time.

However, one's pace in life is determined by the Church in other ways, too, here. I was just reminded of such this morning, when a craving for a chocolate bar set in at about 11:54 am, which is about 6 minutes before all the grocery stores, all of which I know about are at least 15 minutes away from my home, close for the day. That's right, almost all businesses are closed on Sunday afternoon. In fact, except for grocery stores, which are allowed to open in the morning, tourist-oriented businesses (after all, gotta eat), and pharmacies, one of each per community is open each Sunday, all businesses are obliged to be closed on the Lord's Day throughout France, though evidently a few loopholes around this rule persist. This regulation is ostensibly oriented towards the rights and dignity of workers, who need a day of rest - which is of course only coincidentally an opinion found in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. I have also recently read it reclaimed in a Parisian publication as a necessary break from consumerist culture - as soon as we all get out of the traffic jam outside the grocery store, of course.

All of life is about the search for the middle path, amirite?

Every society is fraught with contradictions, I suppose, and France, this proudly secular, socialist society, is no exception. Everyone just has to find their own ways of navigating it. Here in Martinique, where most of the population is more or less directly descended from slaves forcibly converted to Catholicism upon importation, religion seems to figure more visibly in the day-to-day life of the society.

Take, for instance, a certain primary school teacher who works with my flatmate, another teaching assistant. She offered, after having met the new assistant only once, to include her on a family beach excursion this weekend. They exchanged WhatsApp numbers to facilitate the planning. Immediately after school, my flatmate was included what is an apparently regular round of evangelical messages declaring Jesus to be the solution to a number of life's problems. Once we arrived at the beach, the first thing the teacher asked each of us, individually, is whether we were Christian. I didn't feel threatened by the question and in fact had a somewhat long conversation about being raised as a kind of baptist then becoming Episcopalian, a church that is not represented anywhere on this damn island. She then asked each of us to join her for church on Sunday, once on the beach and once immediately after buying us tropical-fruit flavored pastries, which I'm ~sure~ weren't intended as bribes.

As what I will cheekily call a recovering evangelical, such behavior is pretty ostentatious, and I'm sure my non-religious flatmate felt it even more so. But all of this flies, and is in fact quite normal, in this particular corner, adorned with large crucifixes at the frontier of most communes, of the ostentatiously secular French society. 

Meanwhile, I'm still craving chocolate.