Love found in Chicoutimi
By Brunelle Lewis, Youth Speak News
For the past week or so, I’ve been living in an alternate reality — one common to many but foreign to me. I find myself writing now in a different room, a different house, a different city, a different province.
To expand my understanding of the world’s many cultures, I decided to start at home and learn French. I have chosen to spend my summer in the small town of Chicoutimi, Que., in a French immersion program, where English is completely off limits. I am to speak (and write) only in French for the five weeks that I am here, while meeting new people, visiting new places and residing with a new family.
To expand my understanding of the world’s many cultures, I decided to start at home and learn French. I have chosen to spend my summer in the small town of Chicoutimi, Que., in a French immersion program, where English is completely off limits. I am to speak (and write) only in French for the five weeks that I am here, while meeting new people, visiting new places and residing with a new family.
My connections to home are minimal. I have hardly talked to my family and friends back home as the tight schedule and French-only policy allow for little interaction. Nevertheless, I would not trade this experience for the world.
In the short time here, I have learned something very important — something that no school or textbook could teach me. While I may have travelled more than 1,000 kilometres to be here, I have never before received such a great lesson in love.
The lesson is twofold: distance makes the heart grow fonder, and distance from loved ones has allowed me to encounter different types of love everyday.
With my family, our love is unconditional. I miss them and I know they miss me, and through that we share something. The same can be said with my friends.
But the real lesson doesn’t come from those I left behind. The lesson comes from those I met along the journey. Those like the wonderful lady I am living with now — my new “Chicoutimère.” While her English may be limited, and my knowledge of French small, there’s something to be admired in what I have come to experience with her.
In a century that started with war, I began to lose faith in the compassion of humankind — I began to lose faith in something I held so close to my heart.
I began to think there were few to no good Samaritans left in this world.
And then I met this wonderful person — this kind and thoughtful stranger. Someone willing to take me into her home to not only provide me with food and shelter, but to also teach me along the way.
But it’s not just this one woman filling the role of temporary parent — there are hundreds of men and women doing this within the program — and I’m sure hundreds more elsewhere.
The love of strangers, while it may be rare to find, is something to be admired.
The people who lend their homes to newcomers or their smiles to passerbys — those who choose to live with such compassion each day — are those who understand the compassion of God’s love and the call to love one’s neighbour. These are the people we as youth should look up to and aspire to be like — the people who go out of their way to make our lives a little brighter. These are the people who can teach us to understand the greatest gift of all: love.
(Lewis, 18, is a journalism student at Carleton University.)
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