Going to a Swiss International School, Part 6

 

[This is the sixth and final installment of my memoir about being a student in Switzerland at two international schools, the Collège du Léman and the International School of Geneva.  If you’ve been reading along as I’ve published each section, you know that I’ve just come back to Geneva from spring break and that most of that vacation was occupied by a school trip to the USSR (to which I’ve devoted Part 5 of this account). 

[Now I’ll be wrapping up my final year of high school with the end of the spring term 1965, and concluding my chronicle of this stage of life.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this voyage back to the middle of the last century; if you’re just joining me on Rick On Theater, I strongly suggest that you go back to Parts 1 through 5 and read the whole narrative from the inception.  You’ll find Part 1 on 29 April and the subsequent installments on 2, 5, 8, and 11 May.]

The spring semester at Ecolint was winding down when we resumed classes.  Aside from the end of classes and my final final exams for high school, there was one more major extracurricular event in the offing. 

Ecolint participated in the Student United Nations and I had signed up to take part.  The SUN was a multi-school event in which many other schools took part.  I don’t know if the catchment went beyond the Geneva area or, perhaps, Switzerland, but there were a much larger number of student delegates than Ecolint could have supplied.

The idea of a Student United Nations has become very popular around the world, starting with England and the United States in the days of the League of Nations, and growing, especially after the founding of the United Nations in 1945.  The worldwide popularity of the conferences (called Model United Nations in most instances) has apparently caused Ecolint to drop the program, which seems a shame to me.

Ecolint’s SUN was a reasonably true-to-life re-enactment of the actual U.N. General Assembly, with speeches, heckling, negotiating and, unsurprisingly, demonstrations.  Unlike the real U.N., though, ours was only bilingual: French and English.

I drew the delegate representing the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville)—the former French colony in central Africa.  The country had just become independent in 1960.

(The former Belgian Congo, which was better known, was designated the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) to distinguish it from its former French neighbor.  The two countries were differentiated by their capitals; Leopoldville was renamed Kinshasa in 1966.  The one-time Belgian colony went through several name changes over the years, including Zaire, until it was finally called the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997.) 

I did research on the Brazzaville Congo, learning as much as I could about the country and its issues and positions.  (Today, the notion of a white American “representing” a black African nation wouldn’t be politically correct, but in 1965, there were far from enough black students in Swiss international schools to serve as delegates for all the newly emerged nations of Africa and the handful of other countries with black populations, such as former Caribbean colonies, that had gained their sovereignty.)

I remember an incident that occurred when I was home before the trip to Russia.  My parents had become acquainted with another American couple in Koblenz, there in some private capacity which I no longer remember.  Their name was Welch and Mr. Welch was something of a right-winger politically, a true-blue “my country, right or wrong, but my country” advocate.  (Think Archie Bunker with an education.)

I had already been appointed delegate to the SUN for Brazzaville Congo and had been doing some homework.  I was very enthusiastic about this exercise and had committed to it viscerally.  One evening, I accompanied my parents to dinner with the Welches, and I verbalized my enthusiasm for the SUN and the coming General Assembly meeting.

I kept calling Brazzaville Congo “my country.”  Mr. Welch absolutely went off on me.  He gave me a top-of-his-voice lecture at the dinner table in the restaurant about my duty to be loyal only to the U.S. and that my country was only the United States of America and that my flag was only the Stars and Stripes. 

I was flabbergasted.  I pointed out that I was only referring to the SUN role-play—but Mr. Welch wouldn’t have any of it.  In my mind, he essentially accused me of treason—and I suspect he felt that way.  I never liked Welch very much—he was a little too John-Birch for my taste, even at 17 or 18—but now I wrote him off as irredeemable. 

(Despite the coincidence of their names and the similarity of their politics, Mr. Welch—whose first name I can’t recall—was unrelated to Robert W. Welch, Jr. [1899-1985], who founded the John Birch Society, the ultra-rightist political organization prominent in the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s.)

The culmination of the SUN was the two- or three-day General Assembly meeting with speeches and caucusing which took place at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN (for the French name Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). 

CERN, located in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, is about six miles northwest of Ecolint, less than a half hour’s drive away.  The big deal was that we were not only meeting in CERN’s large Main Auditorium (seating capacity: 350), but we got the services of the CERN English-to-French/French-to-English simultaneous translators! 

If you’ve ever had the out-of-body experience of speaking to an audience in English while your own words are coming back at you in French, you have an idea what divided consciousness is like.  Man, that’s freaky—at least to a language geek like me!

(And yes, I did see the irony in having my English-language speech translated into French, when I was representing a French-speaking country.  C’est la vie!)

It was a perfect way to end my two-year experience as an international-school student.  My year at Ecolint concluded in June with the leaving ceremony I wrote about earlier.  It took place in the Greek Theater and my parents were there along with my brother (who, you’ll recall, had gone back to the States after the year at CDL) and my maternal grandmother, Nana Val.

As I said before, there were no caps and gowns; no fancy, Latin-inscribed diplomas; no valedictorian; no awards; no speeches; no honored guest.  We didn’t have yearbooks, as I told you, so there was no running around to get schoolmates and teachers to sign them.  We said goodbye to each other, of course, but the familiar senior-year rituals of an American high school graduation just weren’t part of my experience.

I can’t say I missed it since I’d never had that experience anyway.  (We didn’t have graduations from fourth or eighth grade at my Washington school, so my first formal commencement was my university graduation.  Coincidentally, my grandmother was there again and she and my mother pinned my lieutenant’s bars on my uniform after my commissioning earlier that morning.)

But I had really enjoyed my time at Ecolint—despite the muck-up of the end of my trip to Eastern Europe.  I even had some good times at CDL—enough to overcome the bad stuff in my mind.  The proof of this is that I really wanted to put off going back to the States for college—the term “gap year” didn’t exist yet—and stay at Ecolint for a post-grad year but study on the French side.  I figured I’d really improve my French after a year of immersion in the language.  I’d still take German, but I’d be studying it in French.  (Now there’s a trippy thought!)

My parents wouldn’t buy it, though.  Instead, the four of us took off after the ceremony and flew to France on 7 June and toured the Loir Valley, visiting the castles and eating in the two- and three-star country restaurants.  We ended up in Paris where my parents, my now-16-year-old brother, and I were treated by Nana Val to a gourmet dinner at the three-star Lasserre.  Douglas was most impressed with the gold flatware (plate, I’m sure) and chargers.  It was, to be sure, a fitting conclusion to a mini-adventure nestled in a much bigger one.

At the end of the summer, my family and I sailed on the SS Independence out of Cannes, France, for New York City (with stops at Algeciras, Spain, and Madiera, Portugal – Have some Madeira, m’dear! / It’s very much nicer than Beer—that was my dad while we were on the island) in August 1965.

Dad took home leave so Douglas could start his junior year at his prep school and my folks could deliver me to my university to start my freshman year as a college student.  I went back to Germany for the next two Christmases and summers. 

(I said that we took multiple trips to Zermatt for skiing at Christmastime—which included my birthday.  My first Christmas at college was one of those ski trips.  A funny thing happened on that visit.

(I was just about to schuss down the mountain on one run.  I was alone at that time, and I thought I heard someone calling my last name.  As it happened, I was wearing the ushanka I had exported from Moscow earlier that year [see Part 5], so my ears were covered with fur flaps.  Besides, no one in Zermatt with me—my 14-year-old cousin had come over from the States for the vacation and she and my parents and brother were around somewhere—would call me by my family name.

(I started to look around and standing a few yards away from me on the edge of the slope was a guy waving at me.  I had no idea who he was, but I skied over to him—or he to me—and it turned out he was a schoolmate from university and was in the same French class.

(Now, here’s the situation with that: first, I got two year’s advanced placement in both French and German, so as a freshman, all my classmates in those courses were juniors and seniors.  I didn’t know any upperclassmen yet. 

(Second, the class I had before French was PE, which was across the campus, and I was always a few minutes late because of changing clothes and showering at the gym.  So I snuck in quietly and took a seat in the back of the classroom—and then joined the class in progress.  This, and one other thing, made me stand out a little, and that’s why my new schoolmate recognized me, but I didn’t recognize him.  I spent the class looking at the backs of everyone’s heads!

(That other thing, by the way, was that I actually spoke French.  That wasn’t so astonishing where I’d just spent two years—but at a small liberal arts college in the middle of Virginia in 1965, it made me a curiosity.

(So I went three thousand miles and up a mountain to meet a classmate for the first time.  I’d like to report that he and I became fast friends . . . but we didn’t.  He was gone in a year or two and I don’t think we ever had another class together.  I’m afraid I don’t even remember who he was.)

That ended my great adventure.  To say that it was life-changing is being timid.  I went back to Europe on my own—which is to say, without my family—several times after Mother and Dad left Germany in October 1967.  Dad resigned from the Foreign Service in January 1968 and declared himself retired soon afterwards.  (He had business cards made up that said “Investor-Sportsman.”) 

(Dad worked that year on the press advance team of Vice President Humphrey’s presidential campaign.  Election Day, 5 November, was Dad’s birthday and he turned 50.  Despite a very close popular vote, former Vice President Richard Nixon became the 37th president of the United States.)

I found myself back in Germany after college when I was posted to West Berlin as a military intelligence officer in the army almost exactly a decade after arriving in Koblenz for the first time.  (My experiences in Berlin are recounted in my eight-part “Berlin Memoir,” 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017.)  I didn’t get back to Geneva, but I did get to Koblenz when I was assigned to a German military intelligence school in Bad Ems, across the Rhine from Koblenz.

[I promised at the end of Part 5 that I’d post my travel journals in some form once I’d transcribed them.  I haven’t decided when I’ll do that, but I will in the coming months.  ROTters who’ve followed the entire “International School” memoir will have had a tiny taste of the journal for the trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, so I think I’ll post the other two first and save the Russia account for last.

[I hope this glimpse at what for most of you was probably an unknown phenomenon, life at an international school, has been interesting, if not informative.  It was certainly a trip down memory lane for me.  We’ll see how the journals turn out.

[Thank you for reading “Going to a Swiss International School.”]