MATCHING TALENT WITH OPPORTUNITY SINCE 2009 |
You are reading a Global Native Case Study! |
10 years on.2019:
This is the first of a short series of case studies we published to celebrate our ten-year anniversary. We want to showcase a few families who joined in our very first year and what became of them. |
|
What handicap?
|
Eddie was born in the spring of 1996. He grew up in a small village in Snowdonia National Park, Wales, UK. He is his mum's only child, his dad left before he was born. Eddie suffers from from a mild form of spastic CP due to a lack of oxygen during his birth.
Eddie was never bullied at school. He enjoyed school, was everyone's darling and his teacher called him "sunshine".And yet, he and his mum always took it for granted that life with a handicap would not leave him many options. There was no point in having great ambitions, it seemed. |
|
|
In the summer of 2009 Eddie's auntie Liz invited him to visit London for a couple of weeks. Liz lived in a beautiful old period mansion apartment in Chiswick with a park nearby where Eddie loved to sit and watch the birds.
On his third day in London, a girl who clearly had cerebral palsy too, pushed her walker into the park. She looked very likeable and cheerful, soon they were in the middle of a conversation. Elena came from a National Park too! Her home was the Ordesa National Park in the Spanish Pyrenees, and she had come to London on a language holiday, visiting her Global Natives partner family. |
She wanted to see the capital and speak nothing but English for a few weeks.
It had never occurred to Eddie that he might do something like that. For one thing, his mum was strapped for cash most of the time and although he was a cheerful and optimistic boy he had always assumed that going abroad was not something for someone with a handicap. For the next ten days he met Elena in the park every afternoon and he was fascinated just how good her English was for a thirteen year old.
It had never occurred to Eddie that he might do something like that. For one thing, his mum was strapped for cash most of the time and although he was a cheerful and optimistic boy he had always assumed that going abroad was not something for someone with a handicap. For the next ten days he met Elena in the park every afternoon and he was fascinated just how good her English was for a thirteen year old.
|
When Eddie returned home he asked his mum if he could take Spanish lessons. This proved just a bit too difficult to manage, so Eddie decided to do the most sensible thing instead: He finally started to take his French lessons at school seriously and soon improved noticeably.
At Christmas he asked his mum if they could become Global Natives, because Eddie really wanted to go on a language holiday too. By March 2010 they had joined and started to look for a suitable partner family. |
|
|
What Eddie wanted and eventually found was quite specific:
He insisted on a partner with the same handicap. He argued that he wanted an exchange on equal terms, ideally with another family who was familiar with cerebral palsy. Yves, a fourteen-year-old from Perpignan, turned out to be the perfect exchange partner. Eddie and his mum went to France during the Easter holidays to meet him and his family. Yves turned out to be quiet, gentle, intelligent and very mindful. What he particularly liked about the idea of spending a summer in Wales was the singing. |
|
Eddie's mum had close friends in a male choir who were happy to let the exchange kid join them during his stay in Snowdonia. So the two families agreed to swap their boys during all of August.
On the way home, Eddie and his mum went to pay a visit to Elena and her family in the Pyrenees. By mid-July, Yves' parents hired a camper van and took a slow and enjoyable ten-day trip through France and England to Wales, where they spent another few days hiking in the National Park. On the way back, now with Eddie on board, they let him decide what he wanted to see and visit. |
|
|
So they went to see Brussels and Paris, Chartres and Orléans, Limoges and Toulouse on the way back to Perpignan.
For the next four weeks Eddie would speak French only and gain a lot of new insights into his own handicap from Yves' dad: Antoine was a physiotherapist. And whilst Yves was singing in the choir, learning about the Celtic heritage of Wales, Scotland and Ireland and coming to grips with British humour, Eddie realized what his calling was. He wanted to be a therapist too. Antoine was the most motivating and inspiring person he had ever met and Eddie understood that he had found someone who would become his role model for life.
|
Nine years later, in the spring of 2019: Yves has just finished university. He will teach music and he's very much looking forward to it. And he has already founded his own choir. Eddie had kept in touch with Elena over the years, they now study in Paris at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) together. Both will be physiotherapists and specialize on spastic CP.
Eddie is convinced he may have never had the vision and the guts to aim for wider horizons and ambitious goals, had he not met Elena in the park and started to think across borders because of her.
Eddie is convinced he may have never had the vision and the guts to aim for wider horizons and ambitious goals, had he not met Elena in the park and started to think across borders because of her.