Words from Celine

I was born and raised in Victoriaville, Quebec, located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, about an hour from Quebec City. Victoriaville produced numerous hardwood products, including furniture, caskets and hockey sticks. For many years, Victoriaville hockey sticks were famous in the NHL when hockey sticks were made of wood. The manufacturer producing them was located on my street.

Victoriaville was not very big when I was young, it had a population of about 15,000 people, all French-speaking. I never heard anybody speak English, except for my father. He was manager of Cercueils Victoriaville (Victoriaville Caskets) and was speaking English to the salesmen who came from Ontario. I remember my siblings and I laughing like crazy when we heard my father speak English, it was so foreign to us.

I had very little exposure to English but of course I learned English at school. We had English books to learn it. The books had about 20 chapters and each chapter showed a picture and a description below. It seems each chapter was about Mary and John at different places. For example, one was a garden with vegetables and the description of what they were doing. In other words, I couldn’t say much in English at the end of my school years except if by some chance I had met people named John and Mary then I could have named the vegetables in their garden.

I went to the University of Sherbrooke to obtain my teaching certificate. After four years of study, I was ready to pass along all my knowledge to the children. My first posting was in Mattawa, Ontario. I spent two years teaching grade 5 and 7 students in a French elementary school. I started to use English with friends I made in the town. I moved quickly from talking about the vegetables in their gardens to more interesting subjects. Mattawa was small, lots of gossiping. I was quite happy to move to Ottawa when I got a chance in 1973. I started to teach core French and experimental French in two elementary schools. My English knowledge needed improvement, I could speak with the other French teachers but I was very silent when among the English teachers in the staff room. By the time I could figure out what they had said, the conversation had moved to a different subject. It took me four months before my brain started to tune in to English and my progress then picked up quickly.

In 1976, I participated in a project being led by the Quebec and Louisiana governments. I was hired through them to teach French in an elementary school in Lafayette, Louisiana, for a year. The aim of the project was to revive the French language in Louisiana. Some Cajun descendants’ grandparents would only speak French in a few parishes, but not their children or grandchildren. By the end of that wonderful year I was able to speak a better English language with a French accent leaning toward a southern drawl.

Teaching children was definitely not my calling, so when I found out that there was such a thing as a travelling museum that went all around Canada, I was determined to join them. Guess what? My educational experience combined with being bilingual quickly landed me a position as a tour guide for the Mobile Exhibit Program and later I progressed to the role of Tour Manager. The museum was made up of three tractor trailers, a powerful generator and two vehicles for the staff. We travelled from one small town to another, trying to bring a museum where there was none.

I was popular because I could function easily in both languages and the eight years I spent with them were among the most fun and interesting of my life. Travelling wears on you and after a few years, I had enough of living out of a suitcase and had to look for a more stable position. It is very hard to hold a relationship together when you travel for six weeks and then spend three weeks at home. I learned a lot from this program, I met great people, I learned to drive a tractor trailer and I discovered beautiful parts of our country.

Then I became a Public Program Coordinator at the Currency Museum of the Bank of Canada. Being bilingual was essential for that position. I stayed with the Currency Museum for about 10 years and moved on to become a French teacher and then a Language Coordinator for the Bank of Canada employees. After a restructuring of the staff in 2001, language training was mostly outsourced and French teachers had to look elsewhere. I moved on to Cité collégiale and taught French to public servants. That is the institution that contracted my teaching services to what was at that time the CFPSA, now the CFMWS. Things worked out well and I stayed for seven years. I love the people there, my colleagues, my co-workers and students.

One wonderful memory I have of working at CFMWS was the opportunity to bring my mother Germaine, who was 92 years old at the time, to visit with my colleagues and finally meet Santa Claus. She was very impressed by my workplace and everybody was impressed by her, they all treated her like a celebrity.

That’s where I met Dean McCuaig, a CHAMPION! I remember the first time he came to talk to me and wanted to join my classes, trying to explain to me that he was serious about learning French. He looked very sincere but I knew by experience that people often have very good intentions to learn French but give up when they realize it is such a long journey. Well, Dean never gave up, he is still on that long journey to learn French as I am on my long journey to learn English. Dean just doesn’t learn the language but he tries to feel the language, the people, the culture. Dean is so much French in his heart and I am extremely proud to have played a little role in his progress.

I was so happy to finish my career with CFMWS. It was a beautiful way to wrap it up when I retired in 2012.

Since then I have joined the workforce in a part-time capacity as a page at the Ottawa Public Library, Beaverbrook branch. I love it. I work mostly in English but I often act as a resource person when a French question comes up. Maybe my boss summed it up the best when I asked her if we had a French-English dictionary in our workspace at the back of the library and she answered me: “Yes, we do, and her name is Céline!”

So now I am a four-foot-ten mobile dictionary. My English partner has probably participated the most in my progress, her career with major newspapers made her a great copy editor and a great resource for me and all my questions. Love can do miracles!