wanted: french teacher
Today we found out that Vivien (our 24 year old [ex]recruit from France) won’t be joinng us after all. He was meant to arrive on Saturday but after being told by the Dominican embassy in France, and then again at the airport, that he didn’t have the right papers in the right languages and that a one-way ticket would land him in prison (or something along those lines), he decided it was probably best if he didn’t come at all. And poor old Philippe drove all the way to the airport to pick him up on Saturday only to find that he wasn’t there.
The guy just spent the last month upgrading his passport to come here and then announces at literally the last minute that, in fact, it’s probably not such a good idea after all. Philippe had him on the phone today and tried to explain that 99% of foreigners in this country don’t have papers and get away with it (that’s to say that 99% don’t have papers and 100% get away with it), but to no avail. The bloke even suggested that the whole thing was a scam. This was the last straw for my headmaster – who, I might add, is too kind for his own good – so he told him not to bother coming if that’s what he thought, and hung up on him.
Dear oh dear. Philippe really hasn’t had much luck what with all the missed flights, delayed connections, missed connections, multiple trips to multiple airports, etc. All of us new recruits have experienced at least one of these problems (if not all of them) and it has only made life harder for our hosts. And to make matters worse, they now have to find a new French teacher who can make it here as soon as possible (preferably by next Monday). Parents are starting to ask why their kids haven’t started French lessons and, as you can imagine, this isn’t good for business or the school’s reputation.
If any of you lot are interested and feel like quitting uni to become a French teacher in the Caribbean, raise your hand now. I’m serious about that (although the quitting uni part probably isn’t such a good idea).
For those of you who don’t know, my email while I’m here is: daniel.lucas2006 AT hotmail DOT com (Use correct formatting, obviously. I am just trying to avoid being seen by any prying spambots in the vicinity).
You can reach me on MSN at the usual Spymac address (this does NOT work for email).
Charly said,
September 19, 2006 at 7:05 am
Hey Daniel, where’s your entrepreneurial spirit? Surely, as a French-English bilingual, you could be teaching English by day and French by night. Double your money and sublet the third bedroom in the apartment
Love, Dad
dominicanjournal said,
September 20, 2006 at 9:53 pm
My entrepreneurial spirit is more alive than ever. However, school finishes at 4pm and I have English lessons all day every day entonces no tengo tiempo para dar clases de frances, si non je le ferais.
In any case, it appears we’ve found a potential recruit who should be arriving this weekend, if all goes according to plan (which, going on past experience is unlikely to be the case but fingers crossed). Where’s the “fingers crossed” smiley/emoticon when you need one?
Charly said,
September 21, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Suggested “fingers crossed” emoticon = >
Charly said,
September 21, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Mr WordPress chopped off my message half way through, so please ignore it.
dominicanjournal said,
September 21, 2006 at 11:50 pm
I wrote an entire post the other day only to find that the whole post minus the first four words had been chopped. That hurt!