"Through the eyes of a child"
Author: Laura Selby
Program: IES Nantes
In many respects, living abroad is like returning to childhood. Most 22-year-old people are used to knowing things like when to use which piece of silverware and what to say when someone sneezes. Living abroad changes all that. Daily life feels like playing a game whose rules you haven't quite figured out; you devote significant time and energy to surreptitious observation of other members of your target culture, trying to decipher the unwritten codes that govern their behavior. In France, I felt like someone had opened a trapdoor beneath my feet and dropped me straight back into my early childhood. Another social gaffe was always just around the corner; I despaired of ever growing up.
Luckily, I had a companion in my throwback to childhood: I was lucky enough to have landed in a host family with a real, live eight-year-old. Edouard was cheerful, bright, independent--and struggling to figure out many of the same questions I was. "Can I have cheese and yogurt?" he asked one night after dinner when the rounds of cheese and containers of yogurt made their usual appearance on the table. No, replied his parents. "Why not?" That's too greedy, explained his father. One dairy-product dessert is enough for one meal. I, listening intently while trying to look casual, leaned back in my chair, suppressing a grin of triumph. So this was the secret behind the cheese vs. yogurt choice! Both were considered a dessert--and while it was acceptable to have two desserts if one was a fruit, eating two dairy-product desserts was not acceptable. Edouard, across the table from me, was scowling darkly as he peeled an orange, but I felt like dancing. Thanks to him, I had learned one more thing not to do if I wanted to behave like an adult in my new culture.
Although Edouard was first my companion in the quest for good table manners, he quickly became my ally in other areas as well. Whenever anyone used a long word in conversation, we would both pipe up plaintively, often at the same time: "What does that mean?" As the youngest of four children, the next-oldest of whom was fourteen, Edouard rejoiced in having another person like him in the house--someone else who sometimes mixed up words or was suspicious of what was for dinner. At breakfast, we shared the children's newspaper he received in the mail every day. Written at a ten-year-old's reading level, with unfamiliar words highlighted in yellow and defined in the margin, it was at exactly my linguistic speed. After school we often watched the Harry Potter movies together in French, with Edouard providing a running commentary in case I wasn't understanding. Eventually he took to stopping by my room after dinner to tap on the door: "Are you working, Laura? Because I thought if not, we could play a game." By sharing his daily routine with me, Edouard helped me discover that being thrown back into childhood has its advantages. You may make a lot of humiliating mistakes, like losing over and over at Monopoly because you keep forgetting how to count in your new language, but there are moments of pure joy as well. And slowly, gradually, the two of us began to take faltering steps toward adulthood. I learned the sequence of responses to make when someone sneezes; Edouard mastered the rules about dessert and stopped trying to change them through whining. By the end of the semester, in my estimation, the team of Big Kid and Little Kid had made significant progress toward growing up. We may not have followed the rules all the time, but we were at least starting to understand what they were.
