My Sunday began with breakfast and church at Sacre Coeur, after that I was left on my own as Sunday is a free day for me. I am on my own today and the pressure of being alone is great. To be alone when surrounded by people is difficult to imagine, let alone experience, but it is the experience of being a volunteer on a mission. Sunday, I felt terribly, utterly alone as I realize I don’t have any friends here, not as yet anyways; I don’t have my boyfriend, my best friend, my Ma or any of my friends to visit or chat with.
On Sunday night, I chilled with the young girls at the school where I am at. In the two weeks I have been here I have learned the names of 51 people and got to know quite a few of them. I am sitting with five of the girls. We have danced, they showed me some moves and I showed a few as
well. We talked in French and English. One of the girls I have become quite fond of remarked that she was going away on vacation ‘vacances’. The last exams were last week and the jury or judging for practical knowledge was last Friday and Saturday, so it is vacation time for many. I asked in my broken French if she was going to visit her parents.
On a side note, I had asked Soeur Yolande about the girls’ situations, because I wanted to be careful how I approached the topic of family around what I was informed were at-risk young women. Soeur Yolande advised me that yes they were at-risk young women, they come from poverty or poor families, some had families, some had none. I didn’t understand any specifics
but enough generalities to get the picture. I work with at-risk youth in Toronto, youth who have been in or are in the child welfare system in Ontario and I am sensitive to their situations as much as I can be.
We had been having a fun time, dancing and laughing, communicating through funny gestures and broken French and English and some Lingala. To answer my question about her parents, the young girl gave me definitive hand gestures: the universal sign for ‘dead’. She laughed and giggled at my look of astonishment. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I should have been more prepared. She gave me another gesture, the universal gesture for baby, meaning her parents had died when she was a baby. The girl at my side told me the same was true for her. Her English is
better and she told me that her mother and father died when she was 6 years old. She has a sister in Congo but she is very far away. The first young girl has a sister and a niece in Canada, but she doesn’t know where.
I should have asked who she was going to visit for her vacation, an open-ended question, but then I might have to infer some things and it is better I know things more clearly. I did ask the question more correctly, “Qui est-ce que tu vas visiter?” She had to explain with more signs because I didn’t remember that marraine means God-mother.
Some of the girls will go away for the vacation time, some to visit family, some to visit friends or boyfriends. Some will stay here the whole summer because they do not have anyone to visit. For a moment on Sunday morning, I started to feel self-pity, I think it is normal to feel that way being so far from home, but it is the thing that binds us. I always try to remember that this, my situation, is temporary, for these girls, this is their reality. They are more alone than I, even if I don’t speak the language.
This is what I am here for. To dance for them, to translate American pop songs for them, to teach them conversational English, to entertain them and make them laugh. They laugh often at my French when I add an extra accent or word or mispronounce something. Funny, they don’t always tell me what I need to correct, but they laugh and that is good. The sound of young people
laughing is reward enough for my petite suffering of moments of loneliness.
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