A stroke of luck (or good timing) saw us offered an international secondment in our early thirties, and we decided that it might be a good idea to move halfway
‘round the world for a few years.
My husband and I are both scientists; we met at university. At the time, we both worked for the same
company, and we relocated to a refinery and lab that the
company owned in Canada. I was offered a
job that was similar to the work I’d been doing previously; my husband’s new
role was as an engineer, not as a scientist. We moved from the east coast of Australia to a
town in the province of Quebec in Canada.
And did I mention that we were both expected to carry out
our new roles in French?
We’d both been learning French for a few years beforehand –
our company was headquartered in Montreal, so a number of the English-speaking
sections of the business offered French classes to employees. We’d both started classes when they were
offered to our group. The classes were
two hours long, once a week. If you’ve ever learned a language, you’ll
understand that two hours a week is not really a lot. Unless you’re a linguistic genius, two hours
a week will not teach you to be fluent.
At best, after a year or so, you’ll be able to read basic signs and documents
(like menus), book yourself into a hotel, order your dinner and tell a taxi
driver where you’d like to go.
So, we moved to Quebec.
My husband did a week of intensive French classes before we went; I did
not. When we arrived, we went straight
into the language school at the local college – I had a three week course, my
husband did four. The language course
that we did was the course that was done by government officials who were
required to be bilingual, so they were fairly intensive. Seven hours a day of one-on-one lessons with
a teacher, living with a French speaking family during the course, two
after-class activities per week with other students, visiting places of
interest in the local area, speaking only French. My husband and I elected to live with
different families for the duration of our study, so that we didn’t speak
English to each other. Everyone around
us (teachers, other students, home-stay families, our employers) thought this
was either hilarious or crazy (or both), but by the end of the course, they all
agreed that we’d done the right thing.
Even after our language course, we were both extremely basic
French speakers. Well, that’s not
entirely true. Our speaking was not the
issue; the ability to understand a conversation was the bigger problem. One-on-one, when the other person was
speaking slowly, choosing their words well and NOT using slang, it wasn’t too
bad. In a meeting (or in a lunchroom
full of people speaking in slang with their quite different regional accents),
it was far more challenging.
Conversations on a telephone, absent of the non-verbal cues that you get
through face-to-face interactions were horrid.
Three months into our three-year stay, my French was good
enough to do my job, but it took an extra three months to feel confident on the
telephone. By the end of the first year,
I could hold my own in any meeting, have high-level technical discussions with
other scientists and write short technical documents in French. It took my husband six months to reach the
“good enough” stage, and the telephone took a little longer. Interestingly, while my husband’s French was
never anywhere near as good as mine, both grammatically or with regard to his
ability to discuss technical detail, he easily developed the ability to
understand his plant operators, speaking in their local accents, over a walkie-talkie
with plant noise roaring in the background.
I remember listening to him argue his (technical) point with an
old-school operator over a “Mike” (walkie-talkie/phone) one afternoon. My French was far better than his, but I
struggled to understand the operator over all the noise in the background.
Once we had the language under control, working in another
country became far easier. We both
enjoyed the work that we did and the people that we worked with were
interesting and (in general) accommodating while we were first settling
in. We travelled a lot in our free time,
saw much of Quebec province and Canada in general, and managed to fit in
several trips throughout the USA.
Unlike others we knew who’d been on secondment, we had two
very distinct advantages – firstly, we were both employed as part of the
secondment, which meant that while we were working, we were both out and about,
practicing the language, meeting new people and setting up our social
networks. One of us never relied on the
other for our social connections, to organise activities, to translate anything
in the day-to-day. The second was that
we didn’t have kids at the time. So many
of our colleagues had done the whole secondment thing once they had kids, and
aside from the fact that the primary parent usually stayed at home and didn’t
get a chance to have the same work interactions, there was also the negotiation
of schooling (which was not a trivial thing in French-speaking Quebec) and your
kids’ friends and all the rest, all in a language that you and the kids may not
speak.
Our time in Quebec was our last great adventure in our lives before children and it serves as a very real marker of the point between “couple” and “family”. It was an amazing experience to have had, even with all of the challenges it posed.
