First Week

Salut everyone!

I can’t believe we’ve been here for 5 days! It actually seems like so much more than that with how long the days have been!

My morning swimming spot!

Tuesday I started my morning going for a run then a swim for my morning exercise. The quiet little alcove in front of the Hotel Batalière is perfect for exercise swimming so it’s a great way to start the morning. Then the work day started out right away with a change of plans because our guide for the afternoon tour was sick, so we decided to stay on campus and show a movie. While Anna was in town making sure we got our bus passes, I was on campus making sure everyone arrived well and securing and setting up a room for the afternoon, since we hadn’t originally planned to be on campus. Once Anna arrived, we met with the 2 professors who are teaching the higher level courses and showed them how the online system works. We had a quick lunch at the cafeteria, then showed the movie

“Passage du Milieu” (The Middle Passage) for the afternoon session. This haunting film is, as IMDb puts it, is “A realistic look at the horrors of the slave trade, told entirely through the voice of a dead African slave whose spirit haunts the ocean route.”  The goal of showing this film was not only to give students insight into the origins of Martinique’s inhabitants, but also to facilitate discussion about how these origins still affect life today. The discussion that ensued was one of the reasons our students are on this trip: to broaden their horizons and reflect on other cultures as well as their own.

Once class finished it was the first time students were getting home on their own with the bus system. Of course everything had to be made interesting with a bus company strike that had some buses not running at all and others only coming once in a while. One group of students ended up getting a bus all the way into Fort-de-France just to have to turn around and take it back to the university because no buses were running to their neighborhood. It was kind of funny of course, and everyone made it home eventually, myself included!

Wednesday morning I didn’t go out because one of the classes started at 8am, so I wanted to be there to make sure everyone made it okay since it was the first time going to campus on their own. We also had one host family that didn’t work out, so we spent the morning arranging their move to other families. The afternoon had us visiting the Musée régional d’Histoire et d’Ethnographie in downtown Fort-de-France, located in the second oldest house on the island, built in 1885. We learned about some local history and saw an exhibition on the well-known writer and artist Joseph Zobel. On our way home we took the students to a shopping mall so that they would know where to find it if they wanted to come back on their own. I finally got a local SIM card and put it in my smartphone so I could have a local number!

La Presqu’île de la Caravelle

Thursday was our first excursion! We all met at 7am to go to the Presqu’île de la Caravelle (Caravelle Peninsula) for a hike around, a visit to an old sugar plantation and a stop at the beach! Anna hired a guide she knew from her stay on the island who will act as our guide on most of our excursions. We started hiking around the north-eastern peninsula and learned about the different plants and trees found in this part of the island, which is drier than the rest. It’s on the Atlantic side of the island and known for manchineel trees and the white-breasted thrasher, a bird that is endangered and only lives in the Caravelle Peninsula.

We didn’t see any of the birds but we did come across manchineel trees, which have a red band painted on them because every part of the tree is poisonous, from the sweet-smelling fruit to the bark and leaves. Even standing under it when it rains is dangerous: as the water runs over the tree and then touches a person, it will burn their skin! We just stayed clear.

After 3 hours of hiking we visited the “Château DuBuc” which isn’t really a château, but an old sugar plantation. The DuBuc family was extremely powerful in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially because they had one of the largest sugar plantations on the island. The wealth of a plantation was not measured by the size of the land, but by the number of slaves that worked it. A small plantation was less than 100 slaves, a medium plantation from 100+ to 250 and a large plantation such as this one was one that had 300+ slaves.

The family started losing their power in the late 18th because of a mixture of events including the cyclone of 1766, economic downturns and family feuds. That family is actually no longer found in Martinique, but apparently has a pretty good presence in Quebec…

Sugar cane was the main crop in Martinique, filling the coffers of Louis XIV and other kings of France for centuries. It took a nose-dive with the abolition of slavery, for obvious reasons. Now there is only one sugar plantation on the island and Martinique actually has to import sugar! Bananas now have the top spot on the agriculture of Martinique and counts for 54% of Martinique’s agricultural production.

After our visit to the plantation we had lunch and then played on the beach for a while. It was a great day and everyone was sufficiently exhausted by the end of it!

I was on the same bus as one of our students on the way home, so I offered to show her where I swim since she lives close to me. I had told her about it and she wanted to know how to get there from her house, so we hopped off the bus and walked down to the beach. We got there just in time to watch the sun set before walking home: a perfect ending to a great day!

Oh, you know, just walking home...