El Dorado graduate Eli Landes traveled from El Dorado to the University of Mississippi to Angers, France. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the trip home was a lot more harrowing than the trip over.
Landes graduated from El Dorado in 2017 and went on to attend Mississippi’s Croft Institute. He is currently a double major in International Studies and French with a minor in History.
The Croft Institute is the International Studies program at Ole Miss. It’s a closed major, meaning he had to apply to the Institute to study. Typically, most classes are only 15 to 20 people.
“It’s a very intense program that requires I take a foreign language class every semester and study abroad,” said Landes. “I love being a ‘Croftie.’ It’s a very tight knit community.”
So, what’s the deal with International Studies?
“The first question I get when I say what I study is, ‘Well what are you going to do with that?’ I chose International studies because I truly believe that if we can study our world and how it has and does operate, we can accomplish so much more. I’ve always enjoyed studying politics and culture, so having an entire major dedicated to that really spoke to me.”
The program only required one semester abroad. But Landes said he decided — to the nervousness of his parents — to spend his entire junior year in France.
“It was an incredible time. I mainly took intensive French language classes. My school, the Catholic University of the West, had a strict no English rule in class. It was also very different being one of the only Americans, as most of my friends were from China, Japan, Mexico and beyond. I arrived in October, as the semesters there go October to January and February to June. I would say most of my time there was like the calm before the storm. Angers is such a beautiful city in the west of France near Nantes. It’s mainly a university town, so a lot of young people, but not many English speakers.”
His “calm before the storm” description was apt. The COVID-19 pandemic was about to hit, and France was an early target.
“Starting in February, Europe was hit earlier than the U.S. with COVID, and France seemed to be having a large number of cases. Each department had differing success rates, but Angers was actually handling the pandemic quite well,” Landes said. “I’d go into the local grocery store and see all the bread and wine cleared out, which I assume is the go-to panic buy for the French. France depends so much on its tourist industry, I would think that by downplaying the severity of the situation, they were hoping to save face. But then the president announced travel restrictions on Europe, and almost immediately after I received a notice from Ole Miss telling me to get home ASAP. I would say most French people in Angers were honestly pretty calm about the whole situation. They only thought it was dangerous for my school to make me leave such a safe area of the country and go through Paris which was and still is the major hotspot.
“I had my own room at a student residence ran by a local church, and I essentially had to pack up my entire life into two luggage bags. I left school on Friday thinking it was a normal day, and by Saturday I had packed up my entire room in a frantic hurry to catch my train that day into Paris. It was incredibly hard for me to leave all the friends I had made in Angers, because for the most part, I didn’t get a real chance to even say goodbye in person as I had to zip out of France so fast. I knew I had to leave eventually, but I didn’t even have time to think about being upset.”
Landes said, at that point, he was calm and only focused on getting home.
“I left only one day before the full travel ban went into effect, but the airport was swamped with Americans trying to get home. Most people were not wearing masks, and I was probably not as stressed as my mom was about getting me home,” he said. “I remember having to argue in French about my bag being overweight, which of course it would, it had an entire bedroom packed into it. I was nervous on the plane ride back as not even the flight attendants really knew what to do with the new travel guidelines. They openly admitted they didn’t know what the plan was when we landed in Dallas. We had to fill out health declaration forms and leave the plane in groups of 15. Right upon exiting, there was a horde of CDC officials wearing masks, gloves and protective suits taking the forms. All they asked me was if I had any flu-like symptoms. They never took my temperature and let me go through after that. The customs agent asked why the passengers off my plane were taking so long, and I said they’re only letting 15 off at a time, which seemed to surprise him. It did not seem like anyone was on the same page, which isn’t too reassuring.”
Landes would make it home, which was the most important thing. But not being able to finish out the semester overseas was disappointing.
“I’ve learned that it’s not as easy to learn French in south Arkansas as in France. My courses continued online and at a distance, but it’s certainly not the same as being immersed in the language,” he said. “It’s disappointing because this experience abroad isn’t one that came easy and it can only be described as once in a lifetime. I am so grateful that I was able to even go in the first place, but there’s still so much I could’ve done had my time not been cut short. It’s like you finally get settled in a new place, even if you aren’t fluent, and are then forced to forget all that and come back to Arkansas.”
Landes hasn’t ruled out returning to France in the future. He has one year left at Mississippi but is weighing his options after that.
“I hope to finish my senior year and thesis without as much of a bang as this year was,” he said. “One option that I am really looking forward to is working as an English teaching assistant in France after I graduate through a program run by the French government. I believe learning a second language opens one’s mind in such a different way than any other subject, and I want to improve my French and be able to say it was worth it.
“This pandemic only shows how important it is to work together. Understanding others and their language only motivates me further to want to work towards that perhaps in the UN or the Foreign service.”