Even though I had already been in France often enough before, it was my first time being abroad all on my own.
No mom and dad, I was a little girl lost in translation. After the festive 3-day orientation in the marvelous City of Lights, Paris, I was sent to Clermont-Ferrand, deep in the middle of France, where a cold family had awaited for me. It wasn't a good first experience, they had expected an American and instead of a blondie girl from New York City, it had been me who came along, a girl from a third-world country of Indonesia. They weren't happy and soon I had to see myself sent back to Paris again, waiting for a new host family, on probation, the first family decided to be nasty and told NOD representatives in Rodez that I wasn't a good girl, that I caused too much trouble. I wasn't perfect, but I wasn't most certainly neither mean nor stupid - for God's sake, it hadn't entirely been my fault. I had to wait several days before NOD managed to find me a new host.
A week later, I was sent to Meudon, a nice green suburb just southwest of Paris, where, as they said, all good families live. To be honest, I was a bit scared to experience yet another bad host, information about the new family being sent to me, they seemed just so different from myself.
They were devout Catholics, I was Muslim although not religious. They came from a noble family, the de Viennes, from their mother's side. They were beautiful, intelligent and highly gifted - all of them played classical symphonies with harps, violins, cellos, pianos, flutes and clarinets...While my family had raised me in modern household, they lived in an antique four-story house from the 18th century. They were just so different from me. How on earth could I be part of them for one year?? Never in my life had I ever been so miserable and lonely, I was so scared I wouldn't be able to fit in, but then the day when I had to meet the Durets came.
Anxious, worried and nervous, I was being taken to the Durets home on a fine afternoon, by the end of summer. The Durets had six children, two of the eldest ones were boys and the last four were girls. Jean-Éric was 23, Yves-André 21, Marie-Estelle 19, Anne-Solenne 17, Rose-Hélène 15, and Aure-Élise 12. Their mother, Françoise, was a strictly disciplined lady, a perfect housewife, and her husband, Pierre, was a fine man on his late fifties.
They welcomed me warmly, and showed me my room. A tiny room on the fourth floor, next to Marie-Estelle's and Yves-André's. I was to be introduced to school, the Lycée François Rabelais, the following day. I fell asleep quickly on my first night at the Durets' place, still so worried, a little bit sad, missing home so far away in Jakarta. God, I hoped so much the Durets would like me - we didn't get to talk so much on the first day. But I felt they were sincere and kind.
My first day in school was a complete fiasco. I didn't understand anything and they all thought I was an ABC, American-born Chinese, because I spoke American English all the time. It was difficult to tell people I was from Indonesia since they thought Indonesians were still swinging on the trees - it took me a hard time to explain them Indonesia wasn't a part of Bali but vice versa, and that we had a pretty good civilization! And French wasn't easy, I'm telling you! French is the most beautiful language in the world, melodious, harmonious and elegant, used in every sportive committee and world organizations around the globe, but it's one of the most difficult languages to master.
Plus, as if French wasn't enough, I had to take a second foreign language - the first one being English, I opted for German as the second foreign language, hoping secretly that I would cope well enough, having previously learnt a bit German from my half-German cousins somewhere during my childhood.
Then, on the days I was feeling sad, I would tell myself so many times, I should've gone to the US. There, at least, I wouldn't be so alienated. I would at least feel comfortable with the language. But on the other side, on the days when morale wasn't so low, I was proud I didn't choose America just like everyone else did, I was there in France to try something new, to acquire a new culture so much different than mine, and even though all my friends who went to America told me I was crazy and I envied their fab American highschool stories, I was, somehow, happy being in Europe, in the Old World, me having always been a history, culture and legend freak.
But somehow, I managed to survive. I told myself, I had to start francizing myself if I want to survive here. I had to adapt their ways, their means, their habits, I had to become one of them. And, much to my surprises, the Durets weren't as old-fashioned as I thought they would be, they were just normal people, very nice, warm, and I befriended the girls quickly. I became fond of my host family, and stopped spending hundreds of francs to call home - I wrote letters, very long letters, instead. I wrote to everyone. To my mother, friends, families. I also kept a journal. I wrote everything that happened, everything about my daily life. And it helped me to overcome the homesickness I had been feeling for the first month of my stay in France.
After a few weeks, I had made a lot of friends at school. And four best friends: Margotte, Sophia, Agnes and Hermione. We girls were sticking together as much as we could, everywhere, sharing stories about our lives and the boys, of course! We would be chatting all day long, they helped me a lot to learn French the "slang" way - at the Durets I learnt the elegant, formal use of French language, with my girlfriends I learnt all the expressions, proverbs and words you can never learn through books.
I quickly became my English teacher's favorite chap, she was an English woman married to a French man, and we got along excellently. Strangely, without me really realizing it, I was already speaking French so fluently, writing essays in French more easily, I started to discover things, and somehow, the French language became easier. I would read a French literature book everyday before I went to sleep: Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Guy de Maupassant and Albert Camus became my bedtime fairytale storytellers and best friends in their own amazing universe of dreams, discoveries, love, wars and heroic sagas.
I also found a new habit: digging on old books, novels, romans, as well as comic books, all in French. The Durets didn't have a TV, but their house was a giant library, with piles of books in every corner of it. I found so many things inside their collections. I read Asterix in its natural language and I found out that you can never completely translate a book to another language, the best thing you could do is learn the language and read the book in its original language!
Finally, I never felt I was alone anymore. Certainly, I was away from home, I was living in a country completely apart from mine, but I wasn't alone. I had a nice family, good friends, and I spoke French and German!
In the mean time, autumn came and whiled away, and slowly I got so used to Paris. I slowly became une fille de Paris. Every afternoon after school, I went to Paris. I would descend through Issy-les-Moulineaux to the metro and then catch it to the inner city. I fell in love with everything in Paris. Black and white, colorful, dark, bright, antique, modern, glorious, romantic and beautiful - it's Paris I'm describing. I became so attached to its breezy cloudy days, when I would spend hours and hours wandering aimlessly inside the Louvre just to admire Venus de Milo, sketching copies of statues and paintings from all ages: Renaissance, Medieval, Art Nouveau - later on I also became a regular of the Musée d'Orsay, with all its impressionist painting collections, I even visited Vincent van Gogh's tomb and the place where he committed suicide.
I just happened to go across so many things I can't mention them one by one here, unless if you want to continue reading my story for hours and hours...
To resume, a year I had passed in France was most certainly the most interesting year in my teenage.
In France, I learnt a lot of things I would never have even noticed, had I stayed home. A whole bunch of things.
Three months after I arrived in France, I already spoke and wrote in French, maybe not perfectly, but fluently, and started speaking German.
Four months after I arrived in France, I already became an adept to the original French culture of wine and cheese.
Five months after I arrived in France, I had learnt to keep a journal steadily, I had learnt to write, I had learnt to cook and help in the kitchen, I had learnt to be independent, courageous, and I learnt to survive. I learnt that a culture different than mine isn't always bad, you just need to adapt to it to be able to blend yourself into its people, you have to adopt it.
Six months after I arrived in France, I already finished six Rougon-Macquart installment novels from Zola, the whole series of Asterix, a complete dictionary of French words and idioms, and I had memorized perfectly all the verb conjugations in the French language.
A year after I arrived in France, I didn't want to go home.
It was with tears and sadness that I had to part from France, but my story wasn't over yet!!
Six years later, I married a French, and now, every time I speak with my hubby in French, I would tell myself, hadn't I been sent to France through NOD, we would probably never even get connected. Of course, I'm still a full Indonesian at heart, and we returned back in Indonesia after several years I spent during my university period in Germany, nevertheless, France is and would always be, my second homeland, since 1999, the year I came there through NOD.
And when my children reach the age of 16, I would definitely send them abroad with NOD, because what you gain with NOD isn't only language - you gain a whole important experience so useful for you in your future!
