What do you want to be when you're older? Dunno, miss...

 

   

Saturday was Job Forum day at school. Some well-intentioned and better-organized-than-the-others teachers had been collecting people for a few months now, people who came from different job horizons and who had agreed to come to our school and talk about their job to the students.

Cue huge organization. The visitors had been attributed rooms, teachers were standing guard in each room and corridor, supervisors were going round with walkie-talkies, and each class had two teachers who would be taking them round the different rooms on a carefully organized circuit, as closely as possible tailored to the jobs that came up the most often when that class was asked what they would like to be when they were older.

When I'd asked my class that, I had plenty of lawyers and judges, quite a few medical staff, one president of the Republic and fifteen English teachers. I swear I didn't pay them to say that. So half of my class went off on one circuit involving tourism and justice, and I took the other half on a jaunt listening to salespeople, teachers, nurses and security agents. The visitors were very good. They explained carefully, and we could tell that some of them were really interested in their job, especially one man who looked after fish for a living. He talked for almost an hour about water temperatures, fish food, micro-algae and the like, and we learnt that if the water is too cold and you feed the fish too much, they will become bloated and float on their backs. When we listened to the security guys, we also learnt that not only can girls do that job but that they are often better-respected than their male counterparts: boys will come up to security guys, brandishing fists, and shout that they're not afraid, come and fight... but they don't do that to the ladies, so the female security agents can often get to the "respect each other and talk instead of thumping" part quicker as they don't have to deal with all the aggression.

   

   

 

   

   

 

   

   

I, meanwhile, didn't have an awful lot to do for a change, so I took photos of all my kids. There are a couple missing: one is currently seven months pregnant and is having a few problems sitting down in a classroom for extended periods of time, and the other somehow managed to avoid the camera lens... which, of course, I realized upon going through the photos at home. He's in the group photo, though. Well, I think he is, I'm not sure now.

This was also the first (and probably last) group photo for my class: they don't have organized class photos in Mayotte in the same way as they do in France or England, as the families don't have the money to pay for the result. So I'll photocopy this picture in black and white for the kids, and stick it up on the wall, that'll have to do.