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.

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.

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.