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Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Here we were, just the four of us, in this unknown land. My sister and I were just children at the time, naïve, clueless; all we knew was that we weren’t at home.

We were in a land in which we were complete strangers. We experienced our first temperature shock as soon as the airport gates opened. The sun was shining brightly in a pale blue sky. The atmosphere felt humid and it didn’t take long for me to start feeling drops of sweat running down my spine. I had never felt such a change of temperature. Ivory Coast is located in the Western part of the African continent and has a population of about twenty five million people.

Generally, we were told that the weather here was often sunny but there were some eventual tropical rainstorms, especially in rainy seasons from May throughout September. The climate was just incredible, nothing that I had experienced before, it was warm all year long.

The city itself was also quite surprising. There were so many things to discover, green and wild flora like we had never seen before, new cultures, new gastronomy. The roads were dirt-roads, there were wild animals all over and some people walked around barefoot. There were local markets and street food all over as well. Everywhere we’d go, locals stared at us as if we came from another world. We stood out in crowds and we lived a life that not many locals could afford to live. We didn’t know which way to turn or look. It was like we were being born again.

We were driven by a taxi to a hotel in town which would be our temporary place until we could move into what we would call “home” for our time being here in Abidjan, in the meantime of our moving container to arrive. We had no idea what to think or to expect, we were just discovering this new world and this new way of life, the expatriate life. Little did we know this was going to be the headline of the story of our lives.

We arrived at the Sofitel hotel, it was smart looking but exotic in this landscape, nothing like the hotels we were used to seeing in Europe. We had two communicating rooms with decent views. My sister and I had a queen size bed and we got Dax to sleep with us at night. We spent Christmas in that same hotel room, it was strange but it was also fun. We were so used to big family gatherings and extravagant Christmas dinners with the foot of the tree filled with presents to survive Europe’s cold winters. This one was less grandiose but we still enjoyed ourselves and we were together as a family, which was all that mattered.

This whole situation was a little unsettling. We were still getting used to the place and people’s stares. It wasn’t easy to settle down at first. It took a while for us to really take in and accept that this wasn’t just a holiday, it was going to be a place we were going to have to adapt to in order to feel in place for the time being. We were uncertain about what was coming but we were too young to think it through anyway. And as long as we had our parents around, we knew we were in a safe zone.

We soon moved to our new house, it was bigger than the one we had back in France but the garden was smaller. We had a swimming pool and a terrace though, it was lovely. We had gatekeepers, our very own house guards and we had a caretaker, they were all locals. Their cultural differences and habits never affected our behaviour or our respect for them. Actually, they taught us a lot about how life worked here, how to cook local dishes, new games to play and all sorts of local sayings. Our caretaker, Marie-Madeleine taught us how to cook several dishes such as ’Aloko’ (fried bananas) and ’Foutou’ (manioc and banana snack balls) which became our favourites. She was very kind to us and to Dax too, we loved her. She always played with us and made sure we were having a good time as mom and dad would go out for dinners or spending time away. We felt safe around her and treated her as good as she treated us.

Time went by and we started to accustom ourselves to this new place, and soon enough it was back to school. We couldn’t wait; or at least I couldn’t, Ali never really liked school all that much. The school in itself was very different to the one we had attended back in La Boisse but it was still a French school. It was big and it had a swimming pool! We had a uniform for physical education classes and we even got music and swimming lessons. Since we weren’t in high school we didn’t get to choose the instrument we wanted to play but we had mandatory music theory classes and had to buy a flute for coursework matters. It was a lovely school with a great atmosphere, we were surrounded by other expat children and fit right in with them. We were all in a home away from home. All spoiled kids when you look at the local average. It was unreal but it was our reality. I remember we all had our own chauffeurs, our caretakers and guards. Some even had servants and cooks. Birthday parties were at one another’s places by the pool and there were some parents who’d go even further by renting a whole restaurant or party venue. Most of them had villas with gorgeous gardens and pools while some even had holiday residences in the surrounding islands of the city. We were blown away by everything at the time. It was crazy to look at what we had compared to the local people.

I met some really nice girls and among them there were equestrian lovers. Soon enough, they got me into joining the local club after school and on weekends. It became one of my favourite places, I loved the horses, dogs and cats, the people and the landscape. My closest friends Uma and Emma remained from there. Uma and her mother had their very own horses which I had always been a little jealous of. But I had been assigned a horse that I loved riding and he had refused to let other people ride him once we had begun our lessons together. His name was Bear and he had taught me a lot about trust and freedom at the time. I got my first jump and my first fall on him too.

There was something special about those big creatures, the mutual trust that one can build is fascinating. That place was special, and there was something about it that made friendships grow fond. Being in nature and away from the ordinary, where time slows down. I instantly fell in love with the equestrian world and haven’t been able to fall out of love ever since. I started daydreaming about getting my own horse, my own best friend. Eventually, I managed to persuade my mother to buy a horse as we were there, it had also been one of her dreams when she was younger. She never had the occasion or support to and she had an accident in which a horse had kicked back right at her knee and broken it which had made her take some time away from horses altogether. But, the day we had finally decided to do so, a tragedy rapidly made my parents change their mind. We had been to a breeder and whilst my parents were talking with the owner, I was looking at all the horses he had on show to sell. And you know, how there is always something that pulls you towards a certain person or pet, something that you can’t explain but you feel. I looked and caressed a few horses here and there until I saw him. He was a gorgeous chestnut quarter horse who was just big enough for me to ride and with a great allure. He was poking me gently with his muzzle and wouldn’t let me go, it was like he had chosen me. I played around with him and I knew instantly that he was the one. Just the way a total stranger picks a friend. The thing is, just when I was calling my parents to come see him, I was so excited I had gotten distracted and all it took was a split minute for him to powerfully swing his strong head right on my left eye leaving me blind for a few days. It was such a bummer. I was sad more than anything, with a dark eye. I had been so close to reaching one of my biggest dreams but it had slipped away in an instant and I had ended up straight in a doctor’s cabinet instead. It had been tragic, really.

Ivory Coast was definitely a good place to baptise ourselves into the expatriate lifestyle. We had lived like kings in a place that wasn’t the most developed. We did still try to fit in with the locals as best as we could although we mostly participated in events organised by the expatriate community. We had also participated in several HHH’s. Those were cross country like races or walks in which locals and expats would run for a good cause and donate money to local charities. My mother often took Ali and I on walks in Cocody, the Botanical garden of the city. It was a lively sanctuary full of varieties of vegetation ranging from immense centenary trees to little cottage plants. We would hire a guide or go with some of my mother’s friends after school or on weekends whilst my father was working or working abroad. The guides were fascinating as they knew every single plants scientific name, their growth needs and they could answer any question we would ask. I also recall my mother being a volunteer in an orphanage to go and entertain the children as a caretaker and animator, my mother had a big heart and she always did what she could to help those in need. She even thought of adopting a girl once but the procedures were long and complicated.

We had taken advantage of the location and travelled around in some other parts of the continent (in Ghana and South Africa) too. My parents’ closest friends lived in South Africa and we went to visit them and were brought to a national park for a Safari into the wild. Sadly Ali and I were too young to be brought on the safari RV-4 but we had seen the pictures and gotten the experience of the safari-friendly hotel in which we had the chance to see elephants come drink the water of the swimming pool, there were warthogs and monkeys all over the place too. I remember seeing my first snake, it had scared my mother as it came out of the hotel room’s door as she was trying to open it. We were submerged into the wilderness. It was blissful.

I also recall visiting historical ruins and seaports in Ghana where slaves had been held in captivity and deported from. I remember being touched by the history about it all, especially having a black guide telling it to us, and as I studied it in school. It was inhuman. I was too young to really understand the notions of power and supremacy between the countries but it still bothered me. It touched me deeply, to even imagine that some people were capable of such cruelty.

All in all, living here had been a memorable experience, it certainly hadn’t been easy but we had lived a nice life. We had a few inconveniences such as corrupted policemen scaring my parents and asking them for money. We had come across some trouble with our guards, they had been three or four who had alternating shifts as the house had to be looked after at all times and one of them had stolen a few things that had caused a scandal. Both my mother and Ali had caught the life-threatening disease called malaria which is transmitted by parasites that mosquitoes carry. They had been hospitalised for a few weeks and I had never felt so worried. Ali being only four and being severely infected by the disease had lost a lot of weight and gotten very high fevers and with the medical assistance of the hospital not being the best, the disease could have been the end of her. My father and I would visit them on the weekends but on the weekdays I had been sent to sleepover at my best friend’s house and worrying each night. But they both recovered and made it out safe and sound.

Eventually, I realise that we only lived there for a year or so as we soon had to move away due to my father getting fired from CFAO, where he worked as a technical director who decided to end his expatriate contract as PPR the owner was about to sell it.Funny to think that soon after we left, political tensions had started to take a considerable significance. There had been presidential elections in 2010 (the first election in the country in 10 years) which had caused a violent military intervention in which many companies had been burnt down or vandalised, even the UN had intervened and set military offensives to protect itself and some civilians. It lasted about four months and was brought to an end as a corrupted political candidate who had manipulated the votes was arrested by the UN and backed by French military forces for human right violations.

And that was the end of our first adventure, a wild one it had been. We were repatriated back to France and moved back to our house in La Boisse. Ali and I went back to school for about 6 months where we were surrounded by our childhood friends, it was funny to see how much we had grown in only a year. It was a strange phase in which we had gone back to our comfort zone but we knew it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

In that period, I must have been about six and a half years old and my grandmother had picked me to accompany her on a religious pilgrimage organised by the parish of St. Therese in Chatou which she is always still loyal to. It had been open specifically to parents and grandparents as well as their children up to the age of seven to discover the spiritual sanctuaries in the city of Rome in Italy. Once my parents’ agreement, my grandmother submitted a derogation as I was not seven yet by explaining that I was a mature little girl; it had been accepted.

So, for the first time ever, I was going on a fifteen day pilgrimage without my parents. Once arrived, it had been fifteen days of visiting the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the innumerable churches and numerous conferences and encounters with associations, we were a group of about fifty people. My grandmother tells me that she had been astonished by my behaviour whether in my autonomy and my social approach with the others as I was the youngest. She remembers that I would regularly go into the others’ rooms to play and talk with all the other kids. She also recalls that one time in which I had left her speechless at a conference on poverty and the homeless. She has kept a visual memory of my unusual attention and calmness throughout the speaker’s talk until there was the questions time; a silence had reigned in the room but she says I had raised my hand up confidently and asked “what do you do for the poor?”. She says it sparked something in her as she had understood the same as I had, they had talked a lot but none of the things they had said were concrete enough. She insisted also in mentioning that although I was a hyperactive child, at each serious event I had managed to remain grounded. She says that ever since I was a child I had

Our friends and our parents’ friends all marvelled at our stories and it was strange to be back home. At the time, it had been tough to say goodbye to the new friends we had made and to our house already. It was so easy to get attached. Coming back was strange as we had developed a new way of life and a mindset that people here had no clue about. I don’t remember much from that year other than the fact that it had been intense with all the ongoing changes. And I guess it was just the start as it only took a summer long of holidays for my dad to get a new offer abroad. This time it was for the same company he had worked in here in Lyon (Texen) but, he was going to be the quality manager of one of their affiliated factories in Toluca, Mexico. They had left us with our French aunts and uncles for a week as they had to go on their “voyage de reconnaissance” [1] as they call it in French. My sister and I were separately sent to our French uncles and aunts for the first time. When they returned, my parents were enchanted from what they had seen and we were definitely considering to move again. My father moved before us all as he needed to start working but my mother had decided it was best for Ali and I to finish our school year in France. We didn’t see him for three months. He had quit the automobile industry after he had left the North of France to move to Lyon in our house, he had felt that the industry was a very stressful atmosphere and not certainly in phase with his values as it was a domain where economic profit and exponential production was the main goal. However, he had instantly fallen in love with the team building and the management of Valeo as soon as he started working for them. He had felt like he belonged in this work culture and his passion for cars and motorbikes helped him to be really good in what he was doing. He became a true leader and was always there when one needed him.

Next Chapter: Mexico City, Mexico