For those of you who are new to this blog, you ought to know that it has long been my dream to move to France – lock, stock & barrel. How long? at least 25 years. We will be full-time residents of Les Terraces relatively soon. I don’t know exactly when, but before we both hit milestone birthdays for sure. Graham has been instrumental in my being able to achieve this goal. A long-suffering supporter of the project – and actively engaged in it too. But it’s surprisingly difficult in this wired-for-everything-world in which we all now live to find GOOD information, especially free stuff (consultants abound, for a fee).
However, today I stumbled across some really useful information on the Internet about moving to France. There’s an entire department of the French Government given over to welcoming foreigners to France and ensuring that they integrate well and, super importantly, are able to communicate effectively in French. They offer free courses in spoken & written French (up to 400 hours of it) and will provide participants with certifications of their proficiency (a diploma, no less), which is absolutely marvellous. Brilliant, in fact. This being 21st century France, the Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration has its own website. In French. Of course!, I hear you say. Yes, there’s an English section, but it’s very small and most of the hyperlinks to documents take the reader to a 404 error page.
Perhaps the intention is that if you’ve managed to glean all the information that you need from the site then you don’t need the free language lessons! Anyhow, I’ve been working my way through the site and I finally found this:
I’m psyched!! I can go to school next year! Apparently, as Sainte-Foy-La-Grande’s in the Gironde, the nearest office is in Bordeaux. I’m hoping that there will be an office in Bergerac for the language classes. But I’ll have to go to Bordeaux to start off with, I think. Although I’ve just had a terrible thought …… maybe, because I’m an EU citizen, there’s no requirement for me to do this and I won’t have access to this valuable information/resource. That would be a serious blow. We will have to try and see what can be done.
I love the fact that there is a proactive endeavour to integrating incomers into French life and society and teaching them (us) about our rights and responsibilities. I wish that more countries were as enlightened. The civilian end of the course appears to cover:
- the laws of the communes of France
- the rights (and responsibilities, I’m sure) of (wo)men and the citizens
- the social rights
- the institutions of the Republic
- citizenship and access to nationality
- the administrative organisation of France.
How useful is all of that??? Super useful as far as I’m concerned.
And then (there’s more!!) you can have a half day’s assessment of your professional capabilities and help you find long-term gainful employment in France. There will be more on this topic – later.
The next question is “Can I get Graham to come (to this integration education) too?” We shall see.
PS: Graham’s just read this and gone “Pshaw!”