9/20/2004 - Nine Years Ago in France
My name is Leigh Roberson, and I spent a year in France with AFS almost nine years ago. Nine years already! I can’t believe it – it’s as if I left yesterday for a magnificent and truly magical year. AFS gave me a taste for all things international, and France was my first love. Each time that I arrive in the States after visiting your country, I can’t even put one foot on terra firma without thinking how I’ll manage to go back again. When I returned to France last Christmas, it was like coming home. I had goose bumps before I even made it off the plane!
I stayed with a family in Dijon, but for me it’s not just “a family,” it’s my family. There are no words to explain the power of the bonds we formed so long ago. I talk to my French family at least once a month. There’s Sylvie, my host mom, with whom I spent hours talking and laughing. It was she who showed me the Burgundian countryside, she who was there to help and encourage me each time that I thought I would never learn your incredibly beautiful language, and she who made sure that I tasted real French food, which she cooked so well. And who could forget my two little brothers, Kévin and Quentin? I owe them so much, because it was they who helped me to pronounce words well – I can still hear them say, “Go ahead! Say it – grenouille…” It was they who loved me like their own sister from the very beginning, who were so proud to have an American sister. And it was with them that I played each afternoon in the beginning, when I didn’t yet have any true friends at school. Now they are young men, and I am proud of them! I would never have imagined it would be possible to find a family with whom I’d get along so well.
My AFS experience gave me a marvelous family, and my year in France changed my life. Thanks to such a successful French experience, I want to work and live in a foreign country and learn about other cultures. Most importantly, I want to give to others what I received in France. Here in the western part of South Carolina, there was no AFS, but I have every intention of changing that. I’ve become an AFS-USA volunteer, and I am proud to tell you that my first four AFSers will arrive here in a week’s time. I want them to have an equally wonderful experience, so that nine, twenty, fifty years from now they too will remember their year here as if it were yesterday.
Thank you, AFS France, thank you!
Sincerely,
Leigh Roberson
Coordinator, Upstate SC Chapter
Year Program to France, 1995-1996
In the Photo: Leigh with one of her AFS chapter’s students
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