Parisian-Jamaican happy to have Olympics at ‘home’

Paris, France:

THE BUILD-UP to the Olympic Games may have drawn mixed reactions from local Parisiens and French citizens alike, but for Edward Boucher, it was a dream come true for a Jamaican who has made this side of the world his home.

Boucher has been living in France for two decades, the majority of which has been spent in Paris where he is a university teacher and president of the Association of Jamaican Nationals in France.

Boucher’s journey to France from Manchester in Jamaica started at Manchester High School where he developed a love for French.

I studied French at The University of the West Indies. I did a Bachelors in French and International Relations. I started French at Manchester High. We had a very good French teacher at the time, Mademoiselle Dwyer, and she really inspired us to love French. She was very creative. She used multimedia before there was Internet and all that sorts of things,” Boucher told The Sunday Gleaner.

“And it caused a lot of us to learn French and to fall in love with France and want to come to France.”

That opportunity would come as he was accepted into a teaching abroad programme which took him to France. It would be a while before he found his way to Paris. According to Boucher, about a thousand Jamaicans call France home and while the community may not be as large as England or the United States, it is just as vibrant.

“There is a growing community. We have events like the annual Jamaican picnic or the Christmas Gala. We probably have about 1,000 or more Jamaicans living in France. We are different in the sense that we are not a mature diaspora like the UK or US. But there are a number of Jamaicans here who are entrepreneurs. So they do different events and different activities, different ways of promoting the Jamaican culture,” Boucher said.

The reaction to the Olympics in Paris has been mixed among citizens, but for Jamaicans, having the Games in their adopted home is a dream come true.

“There were a lot of questions that were being asked. It didn’t appeal to a lot of people and so we really didn’t know what to expect. But as a Jamaican community, we were really excited about that. My first memory of the Olympics was in 1992 with Merlene Ottey and Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn, waking up at 5, 6 o’clock in the morning to see the heats. As a Jamaican, I was very excited about the Olympics coming here,” Boucher said.

As a community, Boucher explained, Jamaicans in France are committed to the betterment of the island.

“We are passionate about the Jamaican culture. We tend to have different visions colliding. Maybe we are not as united as some diasporas but one thing that is for sure, is that there are Jamaicans here that do things as much as possible to promote brand Jamaica.

Boucher is pulling for national champion and record holder Nickisha Pryce, who will be in action tomorrow morning in the women’s 400-metre heats at 4:55 a.m.

Daniel Wheeler