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.

Fare Frights

This photo has nothing to do with
this post, I just liked the art
commissioned by the board game
store too much to not share.

A word to the wise: when it comes to flights, you get what you pay for.
Don't get me wrong, I fly as cheaply as possible. I am a member of countless airline rewards programs, but I never receive any rewards, because I'm completely un-loyal. Money is a tool, not a good in and of itself., but I just don't think that paying for access to a lounge or to three more inches of legroom for three hours is a sensible way to spend it.
As I have recounted here before, my flight from NYC to Martinique was a nightmare. Fortunately, since the cheapest flight in this case was serviced by Norwegian Air, it fell under European consumer protection law. Unfortunately, even Norwegians have the gall to argue that snow at JFK in January constitutes an "unpredictable" disaster, meaning that, despite my hours-long trials, I did not get a refund. The airline did nevertheless agree to pay me back for my travel costs to the airport and even for my $163 phone bill that I racked up when I called the Norway-based helpline they texted to me at my U.S. number.
Here's the thing though: my mysterious hair loss has responded faster to my complaints.
I finalized my complaint on February 11th for both costs. They responded to my complaint about the travel costs on February 2nd, twenty-two days after, and to my complaint about the phone bill (which I understand is probably stranger) on February 21st, 41 days after. Both emails assured me that my money would be wired to me "in a reasonable amount of time". But the money has yet to appear in my account.
Then, this morning, I received an email saying the travel costs will be reimbursed in fourteen days, 68 days after I filed the complaint. No word yet on the phone bill costs.
Is this normal for corporate business? Does everything European work at a French escargot's pace? Does all of being grown up require this much patience?

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.

Movie Review: Les derniers maîtres de la Martinique

A fellow assistant sent me a link to this video, telling me that she had learned a lot about how this island runs and answered a lot of the questions we'd been dwelling on since arriving here. I didn't get the chance to watch it until just now, but since I have I agree with her - it answers a lot of questions.
First of all, context. This video was produced in 2008 for a series called Spécial Investigation, which ran on Canal+, a major player in French news television. The show ran until 2016, when all of its episodes were apparently made available on YouTube, hence the free link. Canal+ isn't exactly what one would call academic, purely journalistic television - a lot of what they do is about scoops and stories that would strike Americans as celebrity gossip. Yet, the culture of uncovering dirt on politicians is much stronger in France, and such discoveries are more likely to have real effects there (thinking of the American president exposed on film bragging about groping women before being elected ... ).
Though it can seem at times to have been filmed on a home camcorder, the show is well-filmed, with punchy editing, beautiful views of Martinique, and unexpected access to private meetings and interviews on reclusive béké estates. The creators start at the funeral of Aimé Césaire, leading author of the négritude movement (which could be impiously summed up as, "Oh, black people aren't intellectual / rich / analytic? Maybe so, but we have more lyricism / agriculture / spiritualism than whites, so we're equal to you."), largely thanked for the psychological liberation of the descendants of French slaves. Césaire was also at the center of the legislative move to integrate Martinique as a department of France, and the film moves quickly to introduce, from among the crowd at the funeral, the main players in Martinique's contemporary story. The békés, dry-eyed and aloof, are the white descendants of slave owners, never dispossessed during the French Revolution thanks to British protection, and still massively rich and influential in the Martinican economy. The majority of Martinicans are black descendants of slaves, suffering from a far higher rate of poverty than the rest of France and struggling with unusually high costs of living.
The bulk of the film attempts to explain this high cost of living. In spite of French anti-monopoly laws, békés collectively control almost all agriculture, retail, wholesale, distribution, and imports. In spite of special défiscalisation laws in the DOMs allowing business owners to invest what they would pay in taxes in their machinery, almost all food products are more expensive here than in the mainland. In spite of the fact that bananas and other produce are grown here, they cost more in Martinican stores than they do in the mainland, to whence they had to be shipped. The working class insists that this is because of the béké monopoly, and the békés, interviewed on their centuries-old estates on the north of the island, insist that production costs are simply higher here.
The editors also lay bare a startling contrast of political priorities. Towards the beginning of the film, banana farm workers protest, threatening to prevent the export of bananas they say they were underpaid to pick and are overpriced in their home. The békés are unperturbed except by the risk of bad publicity, with a careful mix of (white) national guardsmen from the mainland and (black) local police, get their trucks through. Towards the end, the E.U. considers dropping high tariffs on South American bananas, and the békés successfully form a coalition with European and African leaders in Brussels to maintain their bottom line. The profits of the békés merit the attention of Quai d'Orsay ministers, who are surprisingly friendly with the békés, but the protests of their impoverished employees does not. Békés and reporters alike maintain that the békés have no political sway, yet photograph the békés seated with international agricultural advisers in closed-door meetings.
Near the end of the film, an early-2000s controversy surrounding a now-banned pesticide is invoked, and the filmmakers verge on the conspiratorial, suggesting that the French government allowed the békés to produce and use a banned pesticide beyond the date it was disallowed in France because they didn't care about the health risks to Martinicans, who do appear to have an elevated rate of certain kinds of cancers compared to the mainland. To my knowledge, the first study confirming this suspicion actually came out a couple of years later. Again, the filmmakers had surprising access to former and current ministers in producing this piece, and this adds to the overall informational value of the film.
If you can follow along in French (as of yet, English captions don't appear to be available), I would recommend watching this report if you have any interest in the history of the French DOMs or certainly any interest in coming to Martinique. It clocks in at about a hour but is relatively fast-paced and treats several different subjects that are important to understanding the quality of life and the political life in Martinique. And it will certainly dissuade you from trying to come live here on a low salary.

From Catalonia to the Caribbean, Independence Movements and European Identity

Over the break, a school administrator and teacher took my flatmate and I with her family to the prettiest beach in Martinique, les Salines, and on the way back I saw an unfamiliar flag over the roundabout. (For context, here, every roundabout has an identity-related installation: statues about the abolition of slavery, gardens showcasing local flora, a shape-shifting ode to Aimé Césaire, etc.) She told me that the flag was the official flag of the Martinican independence movement, which I thought was a pretty bold move on public property. This launched us into a long conversation about independence, or, more accurately, dependence on European infrastructure.

I don't live far from the (modest) headquarters for the "liberation" of Martinique.

Martinique clearly has local character and local pride in its créole culture. While I have previously mentioned that it's relationship to it's language is complicated, I saw immediately that here there is a premium, culturally and literally, on all things local, from food to music to all other iterations of culture. But what does that mean for locals' attachment to the mainland, and to the culture of France?

The friend and driver whom I was able to interrogate on the matter was clear. France hasn't done enough to help Martinique, not with its unemployment, not with its development, not with its safety, but it does enough that the island would cease to function without it. She quickly delved into the trope of welfare queens: individuals, especially women, who live better than the average worker because they claim all sorts of unemployment and family benefits, lavishly bestowed by the welfare state, then work on the side without reporting their income. When I pushed back against this analysis, pointing out that this political myth is pervasive in the U.S. where the state is objectively far less generous, she insisted that, whether or not such individuals were exceptional, Martiniquans in general have come to count on assistance from the state. Tourists from Europe both bring in revenue and jobs and inflate prices, such that Martinique depends on Europe both for work and for financial assistance when prices are too high. Unemployment here is far worse than in the mainland, where it's already problematic, and Martiniquans count on both employment opportunities in the mainland and unemployment benefits from the national government to get by. Even though in many ways the transport infrastructure is pitiful, clearly neglected on the Quai d'Orsay, the European Union's mark can be found on a number of essential projects, from bus stops to public gardens. Martiniquans may disidentify to a certain degree with France, but their belonging to the E.U. is essential, in her analysis.

This isn't the first time I came across such an analysis. Previously, in Guadeloupe, more than one local told me that the politics of this year's election totally ignored them, as French politics usually did, and that they were completely ignored and unhelped by France. Previously, my supervisor and initial cultural guide has mentioned that Guadeloupeans are more radical in their independence and cultural identity, but even here I've yet to hear of a local refer to themselves as a Frenchman or Frenchwoman, unless they were from the mainland.

Pretending for a moment that independence would be feasible or even desired, what would that mean for Martinique? As in Guadeloupe, the specter of Haiti, frequently cited as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, is immediately summoned. The French held a debt / war reparations over Haiti for years, then sold that debt to an American bank, leading more or less directly to two American invasions in the Twentieth Century that put any political stability out of the question. Could they do something like that in today's world, where surely it would be reported on, analyzed through post-colonial lenses? Have the power structures changed in any meaningful way to stop them? Would they resort to military force?

I don't think we'll see any of these questions answered any time soon, but I dare say that they're questions that cross people's minds. An awareness of financial dependence on Europe makes itself more known in this culture than any affection for France, but either way it doesn't look like many people here even get to the point of contemplating leaving.

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.