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Community Corner

Kirkwood to France: High Schooler Recounts Journey

Kirkwood High School student Claire Salzman tells her story of her recent trip to France through the Intercultural Student Experiences program.

I knew what I was signing up for when I agreed to stay with a family in France this summer. The program we went through with this trip, Intercultural Student Experiences (ISE), made it very clear I would have to speak French with my new family. But when I woke up on June 9 next to my friend and roommate who turned to me and said, “It’s today,” the terror set in.

One week and a memory card full of pictures after arriving in Paris, the real challenge to our language had arrived in the form of the family stay.

Culture knowledge, language comprehension and speaking ability meant more to me at this moment than anything. Throughout breakfast and lunch, I listened to my classmates and friends whisper amongst each other nervously, "What if I forget the tenses? What if I don't like the food? What if they don't like me?"

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This last fear was one I had tried not to think about since I began communicating over Facebook with Jeanne, my correspondent, in March. After a failed attempt to choke down a bucket of shellfish (partially out of anxiety, partially out of my realization I don't care for shellfish), I went back to the hotel to find our guide, my teacher and the rest of the group gathered in the lobby. The first student was leaving us for five days to live with her new family.

When a woman in a red coat showed up, spoke briefly with the teachers and turned to her new American "daughter", a smile of recognition lit up her face. She asked the phrase we had known since French I, the first thing we are taught when we begin learning another language: "Parlez-vous français?" Do you speak French?

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I don't know why, but hearing her ask that settled the churning in my stomach. It almost made me laugh. We knew what we were signing up for, why would we choose to live in France if we didn't speak the language?

After all, we had a choice: Kirkwood High School offers a sightseeing tour with no family stay during spring break. I knew what I was getting into. I wanted to do this, I wanted to go to school, live with a family and eat home-cooked meals. I truly realized at that point I was ready for the biggest challenge of my life: French 24/7.

Here we go.

There were two towns where our group would be spread out to live with host families, two stops. Mine was the second. At our first stop outside our French peers’ high school, I watched most of my friends from Kirkwood unload the bus, gather their suitcases and wait for the bell. When it rang, slowly a semi-circle of French students gathered on the opposite side of our group. Some waved in recognition. Most just stared.

The program coordinator called out names of French and American partners, who stuck their hands in the air acknowledging themselves. Then the French students acknowledged their new family member with the customary greeting in France, La bise. One kiss on each cheek, maybe a hand on their shoulder, then the awkward silence as the Americans waited to go home with their new families, anticipating the language they would all be speaking for the next five days.

When the remaining students, myself included, pulled up to the stop where our host families would be retrieving us, my heart began deafeningly thumping against my chest like it was trying to escape. When a gold car pulled up, my mouth went dry. When I saw Jeanne step out of the car, the smile that spread across my face was inevitable.

She greeted me, then her mother. I hugged my teacher, who whispered. “Good luck!” then packed my suitcase in the trunk of the gold car. I waved goodbye for as long as I could see the remaining students.

The first night was a little awkward. I was tired and heard nothing but French, which terrified me a little. But before dinner, as I unpacked my things, feeling more homesick than ever, Jeanne came into my room and sat down with me. We conversed in French, about my life in St. Louis, about her life in France. She told me what we would do for the next five days. We chatted about the trip, what I had seen, how I liked Paris and I showed her all the pictures I had taken. Sitting on a bed, chatting about idle teenage problems and comparing our lives across the Atlantic, I realized I had fallen into the cliché of “we’re all people.”

So maybe I went to bed every night with a bit of a headache, because I wasn’t used to thinking when I had to speak or listening so intently to every word that is said. Maybe my accent is sub-par. Maybe I messed up on the past tense and maybe my verbs weren’t perfectly conjugated.

But despite my inadequacy, we communicated. And getting on a train five days later and leaving my second family behind made my heart ache and forced me to blink more often to stop the tears I felt welling behind my eyelids.

I climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower and saw a panoramic view of Paris. I looked at some of the most famous pieces of art at the Louvre. I walked through Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at Versailles. But I would have skipped all of the sightseeing if I could ride smelly buses, talk about “life back home” and go to bed every night with a headache as long as I got to be with my French family.

Learn more about the ISE program here.

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