France - 2013: France - Post 21

Hey everyone,

So I had my first field trip as an official chaperone thursday and it was pretty fun. As I mentioned in the last post, it was too a “Piscine à vagues.” It was a wave pool so anyone who has been to one can imagine what the setup was. We all met up in the morning at 10:30 and left by 11 am. There were 6 chaperones not including Wardine and 13 kids. One of us 6 was an adult and the rest were the “new” workers and interns. I say new because they are new to me but some of the people with whom I am now working have actually been there over a year but they only work the summers. This is why it is my first time seeing them since I worked the last month of school and the month of vacation. So out of the facilitators, there was me another guy and three other girls who went. Out of all of us the guy had the hardest name and I’ll just write it later when I have a better idea of how to spell it. The girls had very simple names: Alisse, Juliette, and Louise.

We took the subway which in all was about 1 ½ hr trip including the switches, the various stops that we took in order to count the kids and make sure that we had them all, and the little promenade between the metro stop and the pool.

It was a nice walk and after a month I am feeling pretty confident and now more involved with the kids. Even with the other facilitators I am interacting much better. It did take a lot of just watching to see how French people interact with each other and how guys interact with each other and girls to figure out how to construct a nice fluid conversation and I’ll admit that it is much harder one-on-one but in a group the focus isn’t completely on me so I can resp9ond and talk whenever I feel it appropriate or am comfortable. It is probably just a few select cases but in my experience I’ve noticed that girls, both my age and the kids, are easier to understand than the guys. For example, when I was working with Ibn and Foussenou, they were both really hard to understand. This could be due to my lack of having an ear for French and that it was usually just me and one of them in a conversation and not in a bigger group like it is now with the other facilitators and kids. Being in a bigger conversation is also helpful in that if you are listening and don’t understand what one person asked but understand the response that was given, you can backtrack to figure out what they may have said and then figure out how exactly it was said to be understood in a certain way. I do this more than you might think but then again, if it helps me to understand the language and grasp the concept and context of the conversation better, why not use it?

Now I’ll get back to the field trip. We had been given several safety talks before our first outing before on how to conduct every aspect of the voyage from getting on and off the subway to crossing the street and entering the pool. In the end, each one of us had the ultimate say in what one of the kids could and could not do. Some examples of the regulations we followed include but are not limited to: Having a facilitator stand in the road between oncoming traffic and the kids when they crossed the road and they could not proceed unless one of us crossed first, the kids were not allowed to sit in the seats next to the doors on the metro and were required to take a seat if one were available, they are not allowed to enter the water if not accompanied by an adult and the ratio of adult to kids can not exceed 1:3, in busy areas we are to hold the children’s hands so as to not get separated, etc.

When we finished the metro leg of the trip we proceeded to walk to the pool. This was about a thirty minute walk and we finally got to the outer park/playground area by 12:30. From there we had a picnic which consisted of tuna sandwiches, a coke, and a bag of chips. We had ordered from the place for more people than the amount that went in the end so there was an extra partitioning of food. We made a question and answer game in one instance when the extra food being auctioned off were popsicles.

As much as I would like to say that everything went off without a hitch, this is not the case. When we got to the pool, Louise and Wardine stayed to watch the stuff as the rest of us went in the water. This was also in case anyone wanted to go back and rest since the facilitators had to stay in the water as long as there were kids unless we wanted to be mean and tell them that we didn’t want to.There was a water tube-like slide that one can only imagine caught every child’s eye when we got there.I made two trips with three kids each time up and the first time went fine and the second time also appeared to be fine. I would go last so I could make sure that the kids got down and out fine. When the first kid went down the second time I motioned and told him to head over to where Alisse was with two other little girls in the pool next to us since he had to get out of the area where the end of the slide was. When I finally got down I went over back with Alisse and we thought we had everyone since several had gone back over to the towels. About 10 min later I went over to the towels and he wasn’t there. His brother comes up and asks where he was and I said he should be in the pool with the other intern and he went to look and then I see that he was actually with the lifeguard. I go over with the brother and he starts to tell me how nothing serious had actually happened. What had happened is that he had somehow gotten lost even though the lifeguard spot was next to the water slide right in between where the other were in the pool. We still don’t know how he managed this knowing that there were people at the towels on the grass area.

Other than that small incident everything else went off well without much of a hitch at all. Anyways, tomorrow is bastille day so I will probably write about that after.

Thanks for reading and until next post!