Ophelia's Journal.

Ophelia · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 10:29 am Post subject: Ophelia's Journal.

I am going to write about my thoughts concerning some issues in France; primarily because it will help me to sort things out, I hope, about things I am less than certain about.

As I will probably be grumbling and griping as I write about those issues
(as in How to be a French Person, Lesson 1), I thought I'd start with an a-typical topic: most popular French person, who happens to be a man.

L'Abbé Pierre.

L'Abbé Pierre (Henri Grouès) was a Catholic priest who was very influencial in all matters related to housing, fighting poverty and humanitarian causes in this country.
During World War II, he fought in the Résistance.
In 1949 he founded the Emmaüs Movement, which became worldwide later. His philosophy was not in preaching, but in action. There was a housing problem, so he took bricks and started building a house. People saw what he was doing, and joined him.

His recognition became instantly nation-wide in 1954; the winter was particular harsh, and people (whole families) who were homeless or were being evicted for not paying their rents were dying of cold.* L'Abbé Pierre made a now well-known radio speech (it can be read on Wiki, but the words can not render what was conveyed, as no one else could have, to us --general "us", I wasn't born then--).

The TV documentaries which were broadcast again last year showed the incredible reaction he got from all walks of society. He pleaded, and a country of skeptics and individualists understood.

He could lead so well in humanitarian causes in France because of who he was, and I think because he understood French people: what was best in us and why we should be chided into action on many occasions.

He was a devout priest who said mass everyday, and he was a layman in a secular society, and as such I think he represented us. From the beginning, his actions and and Foundations were strictly lay charities (the all important word is "laïque" , referring to total separation between state and Church -- no "In God We trust" on the walls in our tribunals--.

He started a very practical way of helping people in need which is not characteristic of French people I think. We are not, on the whole, a very practical people; for example, I often hear about individual Americans, especially Californians perhaps, building their own houses: this can happen here but it's rare.
As far as charities are concerned, some people here are involved in practical actions, but many -- as I do-- think in therms of sending 1 or 2 checks a year, according to what you feel is appropriate for your income (this works too, it's just different).
So l'Abbé Pierre started unique (especially at the time) organizations in which the jobless, the homeless could learn to help one another, and thus recover their dignity and start relating to other human beings again.
His Foundations did not ask for money.

* [Now we have a law to the effect that when people cannot pay their rents, they cannot be evicted if this happens during the winter months.
I imagine there must be something on those lines in other EU countries, but I don't know.]

Among his many personal characteristics, l'Abbé Pierre openly disagreed with his Catholic hierarchy on subjects such as married clergy or the ordination of women.

He was number 1 on the chart of most popular French people for decades since the 1950's, and only stopped being so when he asked that his name be withdrawn from the chart.

When he died last year, aged 94, we grieved.

The following link to Wiki is (as usual) very good, and also gives photos of him, which I think is important.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abb%C3%A9_Pierre#Death

Audrey · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 11:23 am Post subject:

Ophelia-

I enjoy reading this journal on the french issues. It is extremely interesting and it reveals a distinction between different societies.

I acknowledge your intelligence and I cannot wait to continue reading and learning from your journals Very Happy

Ophelia

Audrey, with such encouragements I can but go on... Bananadance

My topic is immigration in France: why I don't know more about it, why I haven't been able to find out much when I tried -- I'm still trying-- and why these lacks make it difficult to understand some current events in this country.

I'll need several postings before I can start writing about the topic itself.

Why I don't know much about immigration.

Current events in France aren't my field, my interests are mainly the English speaking world (which can keep you busy forever) or Education in France.
I've rarely read French newspapers, and I have little interest in politics.
(Anyway, now that I've tried to look things up, I doubt if reading newspapers would have helped all that much).
So, I'm your average person here on this issue, I know what most people know, which is, little.

Penelope · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 2:44 pm Post subject:

I had never heard of Abbe Pierre, but I have read the Wiki link.

How wonderful....they are still among us.....

I am posting a poem for you Ophelia (and Audrey) with love and only sisterly love.

How to Hide Jesus

There are people after Jesus.
They have seen the signs.
Quick, let's hide him.
Let's think;
carpenter,
fisherman's friend,
disturber of religious comfort.
Let's award him a degree in theology,
a purple cassock
and a position of respect.
They'll never think of looking here.
Let's think;
His dialect may betray him,
His tongue is of the masses.
Let's teach him Latin
and seventeenth-century English,
they'll never think of listening in.

Let's think;
humble,
Man of Sorrows,
nowhere to lay his head.
We'll build a house for him,
somewhere away from the poor,
We'll fill it with brass and silence.
It's sure to throw them off.

There are people after Jesus.
Quick, let's hide him.

Steve Turner - 1949 -

Good Innit?

Ophelia

In the nineteenth century, many people from poor areas in Italy and Poland came to work, taking the hardest jobs in industry.

The pattern in the twentieth century is basically the same as some other rich countries ( Germany, the UK) in the EU:

1- People have come for economic reasons, in their vast majority from former French colonies ( Muslim people from Maghreb countries, and people from other countries in Africa). This started in the 1960's, after decolonization, because French industry was then booming and needed unskilled workers.

2- People come as political refugees.

The concrete applications come from a twentieth century law and European Community laws, but the founding principles date back to the French Revolution and La Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, 1989 (link below in French) which mentions resistance to oppression.

[u]http://www.memoire-net.org/etran/etran5.html[url]

This has been historically widely accepted in this country (no possible arguing with the founding texts from the French Revolution , just as you don't argue with l'Abbé Pierre, but I doubt I' ll come with many more such examples).

Note: ironically, this has led the French Republic to grant refugee status to some unsavoury characters like... Ayatollah Khomeini.
In 1979, the good Ayatollah was openly sending inflammatory rhetoric in the form of video cassettes to Iran, and was not bothered in any way by the French authorities, although his status as a political refugee clearly stated that he (or others) should not start revolutionary activities from our land while our guest.
Those were the days... post 9/11, the man wouldn't have stood a chance.

This leads me to:

Type 2 immigration is not a problem, for historical reasons and because it concerns only a limited number of people (although later the boundaries of refugee" became unclear).

Type 1 is the subject of my writings.

Penelope · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 3:12 pm Post subject:

Tout comprendre est tout pardonner!

That is what we are doing......trying to understand...and you are helping us. You are helping me to understand. Thank you Ophelia!

Audrey · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 3:52 pm Post subject:

C'est magnifique. Penelope a raison!

You are not alone Ophelia when you say that currents events aren't your interest. I just cannot get myself involved in all the currents events, because I believe it gets rid of my naivity, and that's just a shame. There are other reasons why I don't get involve such as I don't feel a need to fight with others about politics (which is all that I am surrounded by right now, with the elections drawing near), we as a society should work together! Oh the utopian world.

Penelope- I do not know how you did it, but you knew exactly what I needed. That poem is anything/everything beyond words. (Just for a laugh, I had to look up 'innit' on urban dictionary Rolling Eyes

).

Ophelia, merci pour tous ses travaux. Just as Penelope has said, thank you for helping us understand.

This quote is for you two (in thanks)

Ophelia

Merci beaucoup, Audrey et Penelope, pour votre participation et vos encouragements.

Thanks for the lovely poem and the proverb Penelope.

Note on immigration: people coming to France from the EU are not immigrants: they choose to live in another member state - for states which signed the Schengen Agreement-- and do not need a work visa.

( In the 1970's, when this first applied to the original 6 member states, and unemployment was high in France, the cynical joke that went around, perhaps from anti Europeans, was that with the European community you now had the right to choose in which country you wanted to be on the dole!)

For states which are new to the EU, things happen in stages, and now there are many people coming from Eastern European states which are comparatively poor, mostly from Poland. At this stage Polish people need work visas-- it's very complicated. My sister Sophie works in Social Services in Paris, and she tells me that what visas they can apply for also depends on the type of job they do.

Penelope · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 6:43 pm Post subject:

We are having lots of Eastern European immigrants here.

It is a dilemma - but I do know that if I were in their shoes, I would want to be in France or England too.

The Newspapers continue to print lots of 'rhetoric' stirring up people against them.....

I think we should guard against giving people a group name, like, Poles, Cheks, Albanians, Jews, Pakistanis, Muslims.....that is always dangerous, surely we must see people as individuals, because I would not like to be judged on everything that has been done in the name of Christianity, or in the name of the British...let alone the English. But then, I am paranoid about patriotism - I hate it with a passion. Love people though.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 4:48 am Post subject: Immigration within Europe

Penelope,

I have read and heard a few reports about immigration from Eastern Europe in the UK: I gathered that people feel that all the negative feelings which had not been felt or voiced in the case of previous immigration groups (from Pakistan, India or Africa) is now being expressed with a vengeance about the new immigrants, because they're white, so the attackers (verbal attackers ) can't be accused of being racist (racist remarks, as I read, being against the law).

If true, this has a bearing on what I will be writing about later.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 1:52 pm Post subject: Ophelia's journal.

Back to immigration from North Africa (mainly) and other former French colonies in Africa.

Working in Education, I was aware of the fact that there are more children failing among second and third generation immigrants from those countries than from the rest of the children population.
I haven't worked in schools with many such children, so I don't know if there are aspects that could be analyzed.
For example, is the situation of immigrants' children in Education in France exactly the same as in other countries, the UK or the US for example, or are there differences?

General explanations for failing at school, such as parents not speaking French, or sometimes not being literate in their own language (Arabic dialects or Kabyle for example) are probably correct to some extent.

What I have seen on many occasions is bright kids not really wanting to learn. Why this happens is not quite clear to me.

I have read about (quoting from memory) "the bitter humiliation of school failure " for those kids.
I understand, but for some of them this takes me to the idea of a vicious circle: not wanting to make the efforts to get the grades (out of anger?) then failing, then bitterly resenting the failure spelt in the grades which is not due to intellectual inability in the first place.

As is often the case, such phenomena are easier to notice in other countries than yours: During my year in California I met a colleague who taught French and English as a second language in another school in San Diego, and I visited some of her classes.
I saw her, for exampler, giving back papers to an ESL group. Later she told me that she had given only moderate praise -- not that I would have noticed, the French having a different conception of praising-- because for many of her Hispanic male students praise from a teacher was the very last thing they ever wanted to hear in public: she said that over the years she had learnt the hard truth that in some circles being seen by your peers to be getting good grades meant exclusion from the group: the "strong" boys made a point of failing, and only resounding failure was the thing.

Perhaps explanations on similar lines would work in France too.

As in other countries , aid programmes have been put in place in schools; some of them help, but they are often under-funded and there is not enough political will to carry out the majority of them in the long term.

Better things that have appeared in the last 10 or 15 years are local citizens' organizations offering free tutoring in the evening for children
who need help.

To sum up, I knew that there were problems, but I had hoped, along with many people, that they would die out as second and third generation immigrants went to university and got better jobs, thus accessing the middle class.
Technical colleges and universities are virtually free in France, the Baccalauréat is no longer the selective exam it used to be, there was no
reason why it shouldn't happen, and it did happen.
A number of children or grandchildren of immigrants got say, a business degree. Some got the jobs they wanted, and blended in with the rest of society.

Then, starting in the mid 1990's, it became clear that for many of those young people, this was not working.
What we call "l'Ascenseur Social" (the "social lift" meaning social ladder), which had taken generations of French people into the middle class with free education, seemed to be stuck as far as immmigrants were concerned.

Penelope · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 3:37 pm Post subject:

Ophelia - Here in the UK - well, just in this part of Cheshire. My daughter, like you, is a dedicated teacher. She loves her work. We do not have a large immigrant population. But she describes just the sort of problems that you are describing.

Bright children with no sense of self-worth.

How old are you? My daughter is 35. She cares about her pupils. She works in a town called Winsford. That was used as a Liverpool overspill area. In the 70's/80's the government moved people out of the slums of Liverpool to this area of Cheshire - promising them work. So young couples moved here for their work. Then the work dried up. So the men went back to Liverpool - leaving their wives and children here. The children were not much of a problem when they were small. Now they are teenagers.... brothers and sisters with different fathers often. Emma does not do family trees at her school - too complicated, she says.

She seems to have several classes of very bright, very angry young people. Nothing to do with race, colour or creed. How do we instill in them, a sense of self-worth? I would like to put you in touch with her, but I would need both of your permission.

It is odd, that I am hearing in your posts, the same concerns that I hear from my daughter - a caring teacher.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 4:57 pm Post subject:

Penelope wrote:

Penelope · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 5:39 pm Post subject:

Ophelia - I was brought up in a one-parent family, by my Mum. When I was at school, there was only myself and one other boy (in junior school that is) who were from one-parent families. I don't know about the boy, but I felt as though I had 'sub-standard - second' stamped on my forehead.

When my children went to school - 25% of the children were from one-parent families.

I am sure it is a higher percentage now.

We don't like to feel 'different' when we are young - we strive to conform and fit in to what 'Society' tells us is 'the norm'. Now I am older and more experienced at life, I know that what is important is how we deal with these 'growing up' situations. That is what gives us strong, gentle characters. Everyone has differing problems in the fight to grow.

When I stopped caring about fitting in and began to care about 'what was right' . Then I began to feel that I belonged. I don't know how to word it more clearly. Sorry.

I never go to church....I can't cope with organised religion.....but I do know what it means to uphold ones denomination or ones belief system and I do know that is not right.....we must uphold what is kind, loving and true.....I call him Jesus. Hence the poem. It has helped me through my life.

When I do not know how to deal with a situation or a person, I stop and think, 'What would Jesus have done or said?' However, if I were on trial for being a Christian - they wouldn't find enough evidence to convict me. Sad

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 6:04 am Post subject:

As I read about Heart of Darkness , I am sometimes brought back to the theme I am discussing in this journal.

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, at the beginning of his his essay: "An image of Africa: racism in Conrad's HD" , mentions "two very touching letters" he received from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who had studied his book Things Fall Apart in class.

One student was "particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe".
Achebe notes that this stud


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