Alaina Garibal is not an American in Paris, but rather an American in Figeac which is about two-thirds of the way down a straight line south of Paris to Toulouse. She's been there for 18 years during which time her French has improved from non-existent to affecting her English! Alaina was studying mechanical engineering at California State University in Sacramento, when she met a young Frenchman, who was also studying engineering…
She was named for the singer her parents love: Joan Baez. But the normal French version of the name is Jeanne whilst the masculine version is Johan. As her name more closely resembles the latter, when teachers read the name they expected to see a boy. “No, I'm a girl!” she'd say, explaining with a laugh that this might be why she has never considered her gender as an impediment to anything she might want to do. “It's never even crossed my mind to question whether my job is a 'man's job' or a 'woman's job',” she tells me over coffee in my first face-to-face interview since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in March…
Frédérique Nourdin, the first female brigadier in the Garde Républicaine and currently its second-in-command, is a small, friendly woman who admits to having “itchy feet”. But behind the bubbly personality lies a strong will, a formidable organiser and a tough stance vis-à-vis what she considers just…
Graciela quickly understood that her class-mates who travelled to Europe from their high school in northern Colorado, had parents with university degrees. As I virtually walk with this charming, bubbly, expansive woman around her recently developed vegetable plot near San Francisco (“we've had plenty of time with lockdown” she laughs), she recounts how she and her four siblings are children of Mexican immigrants for whom further education was not part of the game-plan. But thanks to a school counsellor who mentored her to a place at the University of California at Berkeley, and the counsellor's U.S. Air Force husband who helped her earn an Air Force scholarship, Graciela did get to travel to Europe... and many other places too…
Like all the interviews I've done since Covid-19 induced lockdown, this one with Christine was done by social media video link. We almost had tea together as at one point a disembodied arm appeared and provided her with a cup of tea. The arm belonged to her husband! So over this cup of tea she told me how she'd progressed from being an undergraduate apprentice with British Aerospace Army Weapons in 1981 to becoming the international Head of Functional Capability and Skills in the Engineering Directorate of MBDA…
It's been 35 years since engineer, rock-climber and musician Helen started working for British Aerospace but she still seems as excited by her job as she was as a young mathematics and physics graduate from Bristol University in 1985…
