Plane ride home from 6 months in Paris

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It has been a very long time since I have written. I have been holding off, waiting for some good news of a job. Well, I have lots of leads for jobs, but nothing has come through yet, but I am hopeful. I did manage to get a short consulting contract with UNESCO though and there are talks about another. Having said that, I have not seen the contract yet, and my ticket home came up first.

The plan from the trip all along was to come home on April 1st, and here I sit, April 1st on a United Airlines flight headed for Vancouver. My 6 months spent in Paris were absolutely amazing and I was able to experience things that I did not anticipate. The biggest thing I am going to take away from my experience is my friends that I made. Mandy, Emilie, Alice, Thierry, Rovani, Raheel and Alain are people I am sure to see again in my life. These are people that I am sure will always be in my life one way or another (3 Canadians and 2 Frenchies, a South Africa and a Pakistani). I have made other friends too and I am just so thankful for the experience.

As for my schooling, I enjoyed my classes and met some good people. The classes did not consume a large amount of my time in Paris, but were good. Having done the major portion on my MBA studies in Canada was really nice to allow me to be done fast, and now my thesis is almost done! For it, I decided to write a business plan for a disaster relief and community revitalization NGO, called CAN-DO (Compassion into Action, Direct Outcome Organization). The organization has a lot of passion and is working on some really amazing projects. Currently, among other projects, they are helping citizens of Crow Creek Sioux Indian Reservation have a voice. Their human rights are being violated and the electrical company is shutting off the power of people who are life dependent on it. A women died two weeks ago there from pneumonia and another gentleman, a war vetran in his 60 dying of cancer, is having his heat shut off repeatedly and has to heat his home with the propane from his stove. If you are reading this and feel like learning more, video coverage of the situation can be found on the website: http://www.can-do.org/crowCreek.php?PHPSESSID=80c902d4ee9fc51ea72f47252b92bc2e
I am hoping to help them find some funding so that I can get paid to work with them, but I am also keeping options open.

With respect to my UNESCO experience, I really learned a lot about how large international organizations work, how to deal with multiple cultures, and projects dealing with poverty and gender. The project I have been working on in the last month a designing an online tool for policy makers to use. UNESCO is very good at producing policy papers for governments and civil society to have access to in order to help with decision making and improvements in areas such as human rights, poverty, gender equality and migration. The tool that we are using is called the MOST tool (Management of Social Transformation). The idea is to create a domain for the policy papers to be categorized in. The policy papers are then to be summarized, from 40 page papers, to 5 pages policy briefs. The briefs are then put in the domain so that it is easy for government officials and what not, get the main idea of the suggestions and have access to more in depth solutions. My portion of the project is helping design the poverty eradication domain, and if the contract goes through, creating the policy briefs from the papers and putting them in the domain. Hopefully things will work out. If they do, I am not sure if I will do it from here or Paris. Who knows, I may be back.

Other than that, I am also looking at a number of other opportunities in Vancouver and everywhere. I really hope that I am not going to have to go back to waiting tables, but…it is quick money and I do like the work. We will see.

As for some sight seeing and what not, I did make it to Fontainebleau one Saturday. Fontainebleau is really nice; it is kind of like the less touristy Versailles (which I never did make it too, lol). I went with some friends that I made and the Maison des Etudiantes Canadiennes (MEC) house through Mandy. We ended up having a picnic for three hours on the grass next to a beautiful canal, checked out the Palace, and went for a walk through the woods. It was a really nice enjoyable afternoon and one of the nicest days (weatherwise) we had had in Paris for a while.

A couple of weekends ago, Emilie, Alain and myself decided to go to Normandy for the weekend. Emilie and I looked online and found a great bed and breakfast that was a 600 year old castle with a moat. We thought that would be the perfect place to spend the night. We started out that Saturday morning and drove up to Mont Saint Michel. It is considered to be the most visited site in all of France - even more than the Eiffel tower. It is thought to date back to 708, when Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, had a sanctuary built on Mont Tombe in honor of the Archangel. To me, it looked like something out of Harry Potter and Hogwarts. The castle really reminded me of the Hogwarts castle and the little streets in the village were something from Diagon Alley (Harry Potter). It was really neat. Also, if you went there at the wrong time of the day, you may get stuck there or not able to see it because the tide can come in so far that it turns into its own little island.

After visiting the site, we headed to the castle. It was run by a very nice English couple who have owned it for about 7 years. They were such a sweet and entertaining couple. They ate with us for dinner and breakfast. We has a three course meal - appies, roast pork with prune sauce, and cheeses for dessert, all the wine we could drink, for only 25 euros each! The entire night, all inclusive was 60 euros each, and I got to sleep in a Prince’s bed - no prince joined me, but the duvet was really comfy 😉 It was great, we each had our own room.

The next day was a little overcast, but it seemed fitting for what we were going to see. We were headed to the D-Day beaches of Normandy. We visited Omaha and Juno beaches and the American and Canadian cemeteries. It was a very somber day, but one very worth having.

Thierry and I did go to South Africa for a week, but that is an entire other blog entry.

I will never forget my 6 months in Paris. I feel so fortunate that I was able to have this experience. Sometimes it was really hard, but I will never regret it. Life is short and I intend to make the most of what time I do have. More adventures are yet to come.

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