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.

A Break from Whining

While I pride myself on the objective accomplishment of writing a blog composed of purely insightful, top-quality cultural insight that never descends into self-pitying complaints, I have been feeling pretty down lately, mostly because of some gros problèmes that the community is currently experiencing with the bus system. (Apparently one government agency has just decided to not pay its share of the cost of running the buses, so now there's no money to run them at all ... ) Still, I think that my constantly negative consistently critical mind has been contributing to my unhappiness.
So, today, rather than providing you with totally concise and provocatively penetrating social analysis, today's post is a list of things I like about being here.

1. My Job

The administration? No. The red tape? No. The teachers? Not 100% of them. But my students are the cutest creatures on the planet, and I have the best job on the island. They all have a natural curiosity verging on obsession about English / the U.S.A. (for both good and bad reasons), and when the older students try to play the blasé know-it-all, I see right through it and it makes them even cuter. I don't grade, discipline (besides occasionally yell), or spend enough time with my little angels for them to grow to dislike me. I basically show up, sing songs, dance and play, correct pronunciation, teach them fun things about culture, and leave, dragging myself out of hug attacks to get out the gate. Does it get better?

2. I'm Getting Super Fit

On days that I work, I walk a minimum of 5km. Since I have so much free time, I work out nearly religiously (though tonight might be an exception, uuugh). I sweat out anything I eat in the constantly 80 degree F-weather. Any food I buy at the store I have to carry home, so I buy less and am getting ripped triceps. When I am on vacation and don't have a car, my primary way of getting out is walking somewhere really far or taking the bus to the mall and walking around. When I'm on vacation and I do have a car, I swim, hike, or both every day.

3. I'm Working on a Several No-Consequences Projects

Especially when compared to my past academic life (since I was literally fifteen), I commit a huge proportion of my time to loisirs, in the deepest sense. If I do shit in creole, don't work on my cross-stitch project for two months (my present situation), if I don't read that chapter I intended to get to or watch a TedTalk today, what's going to happen? If I mess up that calligraphy I'm working on turns out ugly, who's gonna bring it up? I don't fail anything. I don't lose any money. Nothing hurts. It has allowed me to be spontaneous when the opportunity has arisen and has given me the mental space to re-evaluate my priorities.

4. What is it like to Live Completely Alone? To be Able to Walk around in My Underwear? Now I Know.

Technically I do still have one flatmate during the week. But during the week I typically act like a normal, if unlikeable, human being. Then he leaves mid-afternoon on Friday and there is no one to witness me promenading nude, eating at 2 a.m., screeching along to Pure Prairie League, or wasting my life on Tumblr. I can take as long as I want in the bathroom, I can use every dish in the kitchen at once, I can talk on Skype until sunup. There are no consequences. Given that when I repatriate I'll almost certainly have a full-time flatmate and re-commence my search for a romantic partner, who knows if I'll ever be this free again? Now I'll never have to regret not knowing what it means to eat cereal on the kitchen counter in your undies.

5. I am SO INFORMED RIGHT NOW

Which, I'm willing to admit, can be stressful. But I never have to worry that I'm an uninformed global citizen or not reading enough, because I spend 2-3 hours a day reading news and commentary, which my poor Tumblr followers probably wish I wouldn't do, or at least not share so much.

6. I have Eaten More Avocados and Bananas than Any Wretched Human Deserves and I'm Not Stopping Any Time Soon (by FOB)

7. GUAVA JUICE

8. The Nice Old Ladies from my Creole Class

I've learned more about Martinican culture from them than from anybody else. They're hilarious and sweet. Two of them drive me home on Mondays now. #GodBless

9. (*Knock on Wood*) I Think I'm Actually Making Money

Despite my financial worries at the beginning of this adventure, it appears that I'm actually putting back a significant amount of cash right now. As it turns out, when you can't go anywhere, you're far away from your favorite shops, and you effectively can't get anything delivered, you don't spend a lot of money. Coupled with my tutoring gigs, the ink has turned green, unbelievable as that would have seemed a few short months ago.

10. I've Learned to Appreciate Little Things

By living a far less stimulating life, I've come to get really excited about the small things in life, including my friends' blog updates, mail (more than ever), Spotify Discover Weekly, perfectly ripe fruit, good ice cream, leisure reading, the feeling of line-dried laundry, good health, and sales on food you regularly buy.

11. Getting to the Bus Stop Just as the Bus Rolls Up and Feeling Like a Genius for the Next Hour

12. Online Shopping

I did it some before, but right now my sanity hinges on looking at black cutoff overalls online and picking out gifts for my friends' upcoming birthdays.

13. Seeing the Ocean Everywhere

It's cliché, but seeing the vast ocean enveloping your tiny island home every day on your walk work puts things into perspective.

14. Honestly? Things are Fucked Up Here, but When You Come From the U.S....

Macron married his teacher, but he doesn't have a dozen accounts of sexual assault against him. Any violence or homelessness (/social violence) is unacceptable, but those are bothers here compared to the epidemics in American cities. The unemployed, the under-paid, and the elderly have relatively consistent access to public assistance. I've witnessed a grand total of one public xenophobic insult here, rather than hearing them everyday back home. Each person I've met has hobbies, because they're not nearly so worked to death. Other than assistants still awaiting their social security cards, I don't know anyone who doesn't have health insurance. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

On that somewhat conciliatory note, I still hate it here and can't wait to leave. But I think being grateful is good for you, and I appreciate your wading through this therapeutic exercise with me. 

Please enjoy this photo of a cat playing in a graveyard that I took this morning.

You deserve it.

 

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.

Eating au Paradis

Today I open with a confession: I really, really don't know how to cook. First, there's the fact that I can't smell - I can't tell when things are burning, and my taste isn't nearly as sensitive as most people I might be cooking for. Secondly, I moved off to boarding school at 15 and proceeded to be on some sort of dining plan almost all the time until age 22. Thirdly, I'm just not that interested. Especially now that my sense of taste isn't that great, I really care mostly about texture and sweetness, so I can do cakes, cobblers, cookies, and basically anything that's loaded with sugar like a pro, but I've never bothered to improve my cooking skills much.

Not my momma's cookin'

Perhaps worst of all, growing up our diet was oftentimes hardly healthy. As Southerners were want to do, my family fried nearly everything, including our nice garden vegetables in the summer. We ate a lot of starch - above all corn and bleached white flour - but not nearly enough vegetables most of the year. And obviously we loved sugar, just obviously.
In spite of my years of body image issues and trying to diet myself to skinny, I never actually started to eat wholesome food until college, where the dining hall had lots of healthy stuff and I could force myself to like raw vegetables one leaf of spinach at a time. Eventually I became vegetarian to cut carbon emissions to my name, further distancing myself from my "home" diet. Eating differently, though, is different from cooking differently. As I weened myself off a meal plan I mostly had rice and beans or frozen vegetables, which is very balanced but not particularly adventurous. But hey, I didn't go to the Ivy League to become a chef.
At home, especially this last summer, I tried to take advantage of my parents' well-stocked kitchen to approach cooking the way I suppose any person my age who feels they don't know how to cook would: by trying recipes off the internet. My parents were just shocked that someone would ask them to eat so much green without any meat.

Flash forward to now, where I live on a beautiful tropical island, of which a solid percent is covered in fields. Surely I can find some way to be healthy here while enjoying the local cuisine, right? Problem: it's an island, and I'm allergic to fish and seafood. Most of the cuisine has fish and seafood in it. That which doesn't, including a great lentil stew that a friend of my supervisor let me try, has meat in it. The rest is mostly dessert an alcohol, based on restaurant menus, internet searches, cookbooks in gift shops, and conversations I've had with my supervisor. Except maybe soup.
I consider a plant-based diet to be more of my ideal, anywho, so why not just buy fresh veggies and chomp down? Since the bus freaking never comes, I can walk to a grocery store of some size in about 45 minutes, but they take a very laissez-faire approach to stocking: they have what they have, and when they don't have something, its bin is empty - can you imagine the riot that would happen if your local Wal-Mart was out of onions? Next, I sauntered over to a street market, where all the vendors have the same things for sale because the same plants get ripe in everybody's garden at the same time. Plus, I paid 6 euros for two avocados.

I strive to be as attractive as humanly
possible at all times.

I tried to bend my goals and cook lentils, a favorite here, even on the beach, made with locally-grown
supplemental vegetables based on a non-local recipe I found on the internet. Too bad I couldn't smell the lentils burning to the bottom of the pan and didn't realize the rock-hard surface my spoon was scraping as I stirred was not the bottom of the pan but a layer of blackened lentils. That added an interesting flavor.
Basically, I'm back to dried grain and beans and frozen vegetables, the most notable exception being that I'm eating entire avocados until they go out of season in a month or so.
Isn't that just exotic.

Exploding Bananas

Today's Fun Fact: Bananas can explode.
My new flatmate, in my apartment that I just moved into yesterday, warned me not to leave any food on the counter, because the ants would get it. Seeing no ants around, I thought it would be perfectly fine to leave my undamaged produce (a couple of tomatoes and a few bananas that were a little more ripe than I like them but, hey, not great selection here) out. She insisted and picked them up to place them in a microwave cover.
This morning I walked in to find banana and ants all over everything, the backsplash, the counter, the floor, and one banana missing some mass. Apparently, be it do to the heat or just their sheer number, ants can break into undamaged produce here, and somehow they explode.
Today's Useful Fact: Bananas, so long as they are already as ripe as you want them, can be stored in the refrigerator.

Don't you pity me right now?
(This is where I went to swim today,
just up the road.)

Now, I could go on and on in a sob story about my four-twenty-ten-nine problems with bureaucracy (just imagine it, French bureacracy*small town pace*island isolation) and all the hours I've wasted looking for housing, dealing with talkative landlords that didn't actually have to offer what they put online, and trying to get a phone that requires a banking account that requires an address for a lodging you can't rent until you can call the owner on the phone. Instead, suffice it to say that what actually got me in my actual apartment was not filling out my paperwork on time, nor going to my meetings early, nor diligently searching online using all my resources, but through good, old-fashioned, small-town gossip. My supervisor talked to her coworker who is also supervising an assistant and ... Ben, bref, I landed a decent, clean place to sublet, a little far from my work and town but within my price range and totally liveable.
I thought I'd left the world of small-town talk and everybody knowing my business back in Alabama.
Let's just hope that the bus system here works better than the one there (or else I'll never make it to work tomorrow ... )