I guess many of you have already dreamed of living in a foreign country and since I am not different from anybody else, I’ve also had this idea in my mind. I always wanted to have the experience to live abroad. As a matter of fact, I had the chance as a teenager to live in the States, in San Francisco, as an exchange student. It was a wonderful and exciting experience apart from the kilos I’ve gained (lost them afterward!). But what I really wanted was to actually live and work abroad not as a student but as a citizen.
I don’t know about you but I’ve always thought that my ordinary problems, worries, and my stressful life would simply fade away if I went to another country. Big mistake! You just change problems. At this point of my story, you might have figured out that I don’t intend to extol the glories of quitting your country but to make you aware of the pros and cons so that you can make up your mind consciously.
In December 2002, I reached the glorious moment of coming to live in France. At first, I was supposed to come in order to have my Ph.D. in marketing with all my family support including my ex-husband. I said “ex,” that’s right. I don’t want you to get involved in my personal life but the fact is that after a year in France I got divorced. And to end up this part pretty fast, I found myself completely alone in the middle of a bunch of French people without being able to make myself understood .The reason for that is that during that first year here, I spent 50 percent of my time in front of a computer at the university making research and the second half at home cleaning up the mess the others had made during the day. As a result, no contact with French apart from “bonjour “and “ça va.”
There comes my first lesson: If you intend to live in another country, learn the language as much as you can before coming!
In a nutshell, since I got divorced I had to quit school and make a decision: either come back to Brazil (yes, I’m Brazilian) or stay in France and find a job. My kids were all here with me and they also had tough moments trying to cope with their new way of life. Besides, I thought that it’s unique for kids to have the chance to live in the first world, to experience a different culture and to have access to things that they might not have had if they had stayed in Brazil. Nowadays I have second thoughts about that too! So I finally decided to stay and there is the climax of my story. I still don’t know whether I’ve made the correct decision, as a matter of fact, I guess I’ll never know it.
My professional and educational background made me believe that finding a job in France would be as simple as a snap of fingers. Wrong again! I forgot a very important detail. I was forty-one, too old to get into the market, no experience in France. Here you must have experience, they don’t care if you’ve had it elsewhere, I promise you. What really got me out of trouble? English! I started giving classes in English but I had another big challenge: French students want to have classes with native speakers, mainly British and their methodology for learning languages belongs to the nineteenth century. Now you understand why French do not speak English. They memorize tons of verbs, translate every word they don’t understand and keep their strong accent believing that they are understood—a real disaster! Anyway, I started teaching English Portuguese and Spanish and step by step, I made my way out.
