American!

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American!

Paris, March 6th, 2005, a sunny day after a foogy morning and nearly zero degrees.

You gave me my Life

In the first year of this millennium, Jean-Marie Colombani, the Highest most respect journalist of « Le Monde » (ww.lemonde.fr) wrote

<< Nous sommes tous Américains >>

Of course you remember that one of the most beloved memories of the French President Jacques Chirac is his years in the U.S.A.

I was born in 40, which means that all my formative years came after the Marshall Plan. To simplify, without the USA Marshall Plan my life would not have started.

But this is money. there is much more.

I have been born in a century similar to the years 200 B.C; when the highest aspiration of any barbarian was to be a Roman.

During my formative years, to be “like an American” was a dream that could never be reached, but it was niece to have a dream.

My father, a Swede, migrated to France in his twenties. You are entitled to your opinion about France, but my family will always be grateful to France as it allowed us to come and settle in France, no questions asked, we were treated as if we were French. My father

http://farfar.jagminns.com

gave us a rule : << we have been welcomed in this country, we may have an opinion, but we are never to voice that opinion, we are guests in the House of France>>

I was brought up in France, the way a young Frenchman would have been brought up.

I went through the French schooling system and considered it with dread and boredom.

We were taught what writer we were to like, why we were to like that writer, what philosophy to like and why and all has something strange in common, they were all French.

I was bored.

But life is smarter than systems; In some way my schooling time was not a total waste of time, suddenly in my life exploded Hemingway, Steinbeck, Chandler, the Science Fiction writers, and suddenly I realized that literature did not automatically meant boredom, that literature, American literature was speaking to me!!!

What would my life have been had I not grown up with Charly Brown and Lucy?

You are most likely not to have heard of an American writer named Louis Bromfield. He started his career with soapy well written books about life in India; Something happened in Louis Bromfield's life (get on to Goggle and use (Bromfield+Malabar) and he wrote about his farming experience in a farm he called “Malabar”. Today, his family is still maintaining Malabar and we are numerous in the World to love Malabar and Bromfield.

Louis Bromfield himself always made reference to Faulkner, not the writer but the agronomist and both of them referred to King "Farmers of 40 centuries".

The story is in the net location where I share with you my life of innocent young Swedish Agronomist in Africa

http://mpr.jag-minns.com/id68.htm

As a result, anywhere I live, I start a compost. Nothing decomposable leaves my house.

http://mpr.jag-minns.com/id64.htm

except the drawings, the text is in French.

There was nothing in my life to indicate that the “Malabar” experience would touch me. After reading it, I knew that I wanted to use my lifetime to love and tender Mother Earth. It took a long long time, but finally I ended up as an agronomist in Africa. I do admit that I have been one of the worst agronomists.

But the message is that without America, without Louis Bromfield, I would have been a ghost erring on the surface of Trade and Commerce. instead i became an agronomist, not because I wanted to be agronomist, but because their was no occer access to Soil Science (Pedology).

Receiving monthly the proceedings of theSoil Science Society of America was like receiving each month a new chapter of the Bible.

http://soil.scijournals.org/

Don't read it if you have note been trained, you won't understand a word.

I owe my very limited knowledge of Soil Science to the Americans who create the Soil taxonomy system, in my days called the 7th Approximation. It may not sound very exiting to you, it was more exiting than being both Sherlock Holmes and Dr Schweitzer at the same time.

So little by little, I became a Specialist. It was really a joke.

When I joined FAO, the organization was so poorly funded that it could not afford American experts, yet we managed to get their expertise in a second hand way.

Basically anything of value learned thanks to FAO was of American origin. Anything learned about management was American.

The Extension system we were to use in Africa was a kind of adaptation of the Training and Visit System devised by American specialist. I loved that gift even if I disagree with its content.

All our non-verbal communication system was based on what we had learned from the American specialists.

Just as an anecdote, while at the Uppsala University in Sweden, we had the visit of an American Associate Professor in Physics on Sabbatical year. During one hour he demonstrated how with a few dollars worth of equipment you could approach some of the most interesting mysteries. My life had been changed that day.

Life was kind to me, my Boss, M. Michel Mathieu, Director of the Fertilizers unit at FAO, sent me for 3 months to IFDC in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

http://www.ifdc.org/

International Fertilizer Development Centre

A non-Proft Top Knowledge Centre.

I can claim, sincerely, that I have spent 3 months of my life in Paradise. My luck had no limit, I had enough money left to rent a car and drive back with Annie, from Florence to Washington in a rented car, driving through the colours of Fall in September, then taking a plane from Washington to Cornell, crossing over to Canada and getting five million dollars from the Canadian Assistance organization (which my Organization failed to finalize, but this is the way greed works).

When we traveled back from Alabama to Washington, it was the time of the World Series. Therefore as from 3 p.m. we had only one thought in mind, trying to find a Motel with an acceptable TV (they were awful!!!!) to follow the World Series. While I can claim without boasting that I am a respected specialist of Baseball, it still remains a bit of a mystery for me why suddenly all the players get exited and leave the field, and someone says that a new inning is to start. I believe it must be linked to some religious dogma, but which one?

In those days, I was rather good at explaining the game to Annie, sometimes I even remembered whether the pitcher, the batter and the catcher belonged to the same team or opposite teams. She considered it rather stupid that the player should be praised and given a Tout of Honor each time he had batted the ball in such a stupid way that it got lost in the public.

My father was eighty and he had never been in the States, his birthday present was a visit; From Zambia, using the Services of the American Library, Annie made up a trip from California to Las Vegas (Grand Canyon) to Tucson to Niagara Falls,

to New York.

Mother and father and Annie and I, travelled with UTA, business class, the most fabulous trip you could dream of.

My father's life had been a life of hard work, but these weeks in a country of polite, friendly, easy-going people must have been one of his best memories.

When my grand father, the sailor, was docked in New-York, he would get off New-York and start walking and he stated that his problem was that he could never walk for more than half an hour before somebody stopped, offered him a lift and if he was in the mood, a drink and a pie.

When working in Zambia, I had as colleagues an neighbours American specialists; These were the kind of specialist who could park two hundred yards away from a field of maize on a rainy day and recognize the variety and sub-variety and disease while I was still trying to guess whether it was maize of potato.

When nearing the age of 60, to avoid oiling the gun in the dark hours of the night of mother's Alzheimer, I started writing, for myself. I had no readers in France, then, I posted it on an American link and within a year, we were more than one hundred readers, one hundred American readers, joining every day. None made fun of me, none mocked me.

Today, from my viewpoint, I can see in the fog of life a signpost which I believe tells me that the road is ending;

It is OK, I thank life that

<< Nous sommes tous Américains>>

You may be contemplating a visit to France; If you are not a fool, things are not as expensive as stated in the tourist books.

But France is France. Saturday and Sunday the railway traffic to Paris on my line was interrupted, why?

France could be the only country were Industrial action (strike) is proclaimed to warn the Employers that if the demands (to be formulated later if they have time left-over from the organization of the protest), to warn the Employer that if their demands are not met, then strike will be envisaged!!!

There is some logic but never try to understand if you are not french.