#ProvenceExpat Life Stories: Nicole Ziemnicki
Moved to Manosque in July 2020
A quick background about me and my family. I was born in Vancouver, Canada, and so were our three boys. My husband was born in Warsaw, Poland, and his family immigrated to Vancouver when he was 13 years old.
We had a fairly typical North American lifestyle; we had a little house in the suburbs, my husband had a really great job and we had family within a 15 minutes-drive. My husband and I have always loved to travel, especially to Europe, where he could go back and visit family and we got to explore new cultures, cuisines, languages and so many different things than what our lives back in Vancouver.
Our three boys are: Jacob (11), Ronald and Patrick (7-year old twins). We wanted our children to experience different cultures and learn a second language (and maybe even third!). I think many people in North America talk about moving to another country, especially Europe, and I think we could have been one of those families that only ever talked about it if Jacob had never gotten sick. Jacob was only 18 months old when we realised something wasn't right, but it took almost another year before he was diagnosed.
During that time, he was in and out of the children’s hospital 4 times, and he went critical twice. We had some long stays in the PICU (Paediatric Intensive Care Unit). Eventually he was diagnosed with a Neurological Autoimmune disorder called Myasthenia Gravis, which affected his eating, breathing, and swallowing muscles. But we were very lucky. His disorder was treatable! So at the age of 2.5 years old he was going to the hospital every 4-6 weeks for a two day IVIG infusion. Eventually we were able to spread those treatments out and he was able to go 14 weeks between infusions, and not too long after his 7th birthday he was officially in remission. He was able to stop all the treatments and be a normal boy. Is there a possibility that this could come back? Absolutely. Was this difficult on our marriage and our family? 100%! I feel this experience made my husband and I very strong as a couple and as a family unit. It also made us want to go adventuring as a family and before the kids got any older.
So fast forward to July 2019. We had friends house-sitting for a year, my husband had a year leave of absence from his great job and we moved our family to Montpellier in the South of France for a year. It was our year where the kids and parents were learning French and going adventuring until very abruptly it all stopped in March 2020 when France went into lockdown. It was a worldwide pandemic and we only had travel insurance not local healthcare.
So we made the scary decision to return back to Vancouver at the end of March 2020. We had to find our own place to do our 14-day quarantine. Luckily we were able to stay in a cousin's downtown one-bedroom apartment, but with 3 very active boys. Let’s just say I never want to do a 14-day quarantine again. We survived, yay! My husband went back to his job and we moved in with my in-laws and I became the French teacher for 2 CPs and a CM1 student. I don't think my French was even at the level of a CP, I used Google Translate a lot and it was not much fun for any of us. But we hadn't given up on our dream to live in France, so my husband kept looking for work in the South of France while we were in Vancouver. I remember him getting up at 3 am for a phone interview. It worked, he was hired by an Engineering Procurement Construction Management (EPCM) company and got a position on the ITER Project.
However, working for the contractor of a contractor for the project gets you no special help. My husband's work didn't pay for us to fly back to France, move our things from Montpellier to Manosque, nor with the visa applications. We were able to apply to the French government to get an agent to help us find a place to move to, and my husband's boss on site was great at giving him extra-long lunches or breaks so he could go look at properties and go to the Marie to get our kids registered for the local school. Another thing to note, because my husband is just a contractor to the contractor for the project my children do not have a class A or B certificate to get into the International School, this was not explained to us before we arrived either. The school was also one of our main reasons of moving to Manosque.
Finding housing in Manosque and surrounding villages is difficult. First you need French income, they prefer at least 3-months’ worth. We worked with a French agent who was able to get my husband to view more properties. Although the agent only spoke French, she was great and slowed down when speaking to us. We also looked on Leboncoin and Seloger, and eventually found a house in the old town centre with a small back garden. We packed all of our things into a moving truck and Moved from Montpellier to Manosque all in one day! (I would not recommend doing this)
Unfortunately, we did not get the keys to our new house here until August 21st, which gave the kids and I just over a week to unpack and find a few things in our new town before they started at the local school here in Manosque.
We have been living in Manosque since the end of August 2020.
Meeting new people during a pandemic hasn’t been easy. My French isn't strong enough to talk to all the parents at my kids’ local school, but some have been kind enough to reach out and try to talk with me. As the school year has gone on, my kids have made a few friends. It helps because their parents are usually willing to talk. We haven't really been able to have the new friends visit us because of COVID, but we have tried to meet friends outside, and at the local parks. My boys all have scooters, and they like to scooter down to the skateboard park, but I'd recommend a morning visit as now afternoons can be very busy there. The skateboard park is located just off Rue de Prêche.
Now in Manosque, we are still exploring the area here as well as the towns nearby, and like to go do indoor and outdoor activities with the boys.
My husband has been taking photos and recently started making short videos of our adventures. On the side, he posts them on our family blog every few weeks or so, so that our family and friends back home can see the fun parts of our life here in France. You can check them out at https://wojtek.altervista.org.
We have also been lucky; our neighbors here have been very kind to us from the day we moved in (we had to block the whole street to empty our moving truck). No one complained, and one of our neighbors has a daughter who has become my twins’ best friend. They take us out for local walks and the mom speaks slowly with me and has been a great help at improving my French.
We're now looking forward to settling down here for the time being and continue our French adventure!
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