After having spent the best part of the last forty eight hours of my life sobbing in the most melodramatic fashion, because an accident at a night club left me with a pathetic seven stitches in my right elbow, I’ve realised that there is definitely a moment when the toys come out of the pram. Silly me, I thought I’d braced myself for the homesickness being on a small French island in the Indian Ocean would inevitably entail. Ha, of course not! What seemed to be the most disconcerting aspect of all of this drama was that I was willing to pack it all in literally, cry all the way to the airport, max out my cards and board the next flight back to la Métropole and never glance back at La Réunion. Crazy! They say you either fight or flight, well the flight option was most appealing but now a week later think I’ll stick it out for the fight.
Back at the ghetto school things seem to continue in their usual disorganised way. As it’s a technical school most of the pupils are off on their stages (training experiences) so I have hardly any students at the moment.
‘Great!’ I think. Oh not so great at all. I took a class for twenty minutes last week under strict instructions to do a listening activity on buying clothes. Could I find that particular exercise on the tape? You’ve guessed it, no. So after ten minutes of frantically searching for it whilst my stitched up arm throbs in pain and the chatter in Créole gets louder and louder I go for plan B-make it up! Hence, I end up playing lord knows why both male and female characters; the customer and the shop assistant. My attempt to do the best BBC British accent descends into my usual Irish-Jamaican-Pirate jumble. The pupils look confused, one plucky girl with fabulously ghetto gold earrings and pencil drawn eyebrows asks, ‘Madame, people are speaking like thiz in England?’
I reply, ‘Of course, people from all over the world live in England the accent is melangée n’est-ce pas?’ (The accent is mixed innit?)
Luckily she seems to accept what must be the most utter load of nonsense ever and lets me continue. Once the Irish-Jamaican-Pirate accented customer has accepted to buy a pair of stripped trousers for a reasonable £13 all seems well. We’ve got singular and plural nouns down so maybe it does help to teach in ‘character’. Next lesson who knows I might turn up dressed as my accent swigging from a bottle of rum dressed as a lepricorn whilst teaching but perhaps this is not the best message to convey.
I would like to take a moment to point out that I take my role as language assistant seriously, after all as the very (not) helpful handbook stresses I am an ambassador for British culture and society. However, I now fear that when the pupils depart for their stage in Ireland they will have copied that accent and be delighting the locals with it. It turns out that I’m just as "eccentric" in Réunion as I am in England. And it’s not even Christmas yet....
