INTERVIEW
Insomnia Sunday night, jitters, looking forward to meet his friends ... Most of us keep alive memories of our school year, whether good or bad. Sibeth Ndiaye, spokesman for the government, remembers a back that particularly marked: in 1995, she returned to first class in a Parisian high school, after all his education in Senegal. It was Monday morning the unexpected Guest morning Mathieu Belliard .
"Before returning, there was a mixture of excitement and apprehension, it was a prestigious high school in the Latin Quarter in Paris, I had already been to France several times but [...] I left my parents for the first time, I lived alone, it was a complete disaster!
I arrived in a class of First 'S' where the students were very bright. I had always been an excellent student but here I was last. I fought, but beat. I remember the equations of the second degree and this feeling of not understanding anything, of being completely dropped. It was the first time that it happened to me. I felt deeply that it was not done for me. But my parents who, despite the distance, were very present, forced me to fight. I have a rather combative character and after three months, I went up the slope. But this first math class was a trauma ".
In addition to inciting her to fight, Sibeth Ndiaye's parents conveyed her the taste of school.
"My father had a vision of Jules Ferry school: it transmitted the knowledge of the Republic, a knowledge that made it possible to completely control his life afterwards.For his four daughters, he had this obsession to tell us 'I will not leave you much money after my death, but I will let you know.' He always sacrificed himself to go to school.
School has always been a happiness for me. I had the impression that I was going to point a kind of safe to know things. [...] For me, it's a party. I hope to transmit the same appetite to my children ".
Despite this appetite, Sibeth Ndiaye had trouble finding her marks at the start. And not only because of the equations!
"I discovered that we did not speak the same French, I had a very African French, extremely supported, I did not master slang at all.The first time I was told about 'cantoche ',' bahu ',' tipex '... I was totally dropped!
There was also a lack of knowledge of Africa. I was asked if I lived in a box, if I had water, electricity. There was this image of Kouchner's Africa with a sack of rice on his back in famine-ravaged countries. And not at all the image of an Africa that could be conquering, modern, where people live in buildings ".