Now offering a new series on where life as a French-speaker and an interpreter might take you. One of my friends joked it could be named "Call the Interpreter" as one of my beloved t.v. series is entitled, just with "Midwife" instead. Only with less blood and gore and screaming, except during labor and childbirth, of which there was quite a lot for the first nine years.
And truthfully, it all began spontaneously. I was a former translator and interpreter, but currently a mom at home. The first phone call was to request I report for duty... at the western wall of the in-patient psych ward one wintry day. "Yes," came out of my mouth, it does sometimes. I have kept much of it tucked away as this used to be a homeschooling blog. But the hard, real, hilarious at times, truth of being a semi-working mom and wife and homeschooling five children will be interwoven in the fabric of these stories.
The plan
Share the juiciest, most exciting, lively, and tender moments of this 20-some-year adventure in every type of interpreting encounter you might imagine, but entirely fictionalized. No real stories will be shared, would-and-might-have-beens only.
My short-list
of people, places, memories and scars, as noted on my Ipad. Please do excuse the formatting, as I have only one hand and I'm relying on a write to text app to produce this.
People from:
France 🇫🇷 Congo RDC 🇨🇬
la Belgique 🇧🇪 Congo RC 🇨🇩 la Cote d' Ivoire 🇨🇮
Benin 🇧🇯 Haiti ðŸ‡ðŸ‡¹ Togo 🇹🇬
le Liban 🇱🇧 Cameroun 🇨🇲
le Quebec 🇨🇦 la Suisse 🇨ðŸ‡
le Maroc 🇲🇦 l'Algerie 🇩🇿 Burundi 🇧🇮
Rwanda 🇷🇼 Niger 🇳🇪 le Burkina Faso 🇧🇫
le Mali 🇲🇱 Senegal 🇸🇳
The Central African Republic 🇨🇫
Gabon 🇬🇦 Tunisia 🇹🇳 Roumanie 🇷🇴
.
Places
les Landes Springfield Las Vegas
Iceland Nashville Muscatine
Paris Cedar Rapids
San Francisco Racine
Waterloo
…and hidden FLW masterpiece gems like Cedar Rock and its boathouse
Des Moines... my own capital (but hardly known)
Chicago... my own city of proximity (scarcely visited)
Dublin Salt Lake City Rock Island
London La Salle Adel
Scars:
relatively few
- one or two from biking the Golden Gate bridge...
-psychological ones from high-winded, icy, bleak highway travel in winter
Memories made:
the best and the worst and everything in-between
Names and any other identifying factors shall be disguised beyond all recognition and stories will just be stories, based on treasures of all sorts I’ve seen and heard. Weird treasures. Beautiful treasures. Terrifying treasures.
