28 Mars

Amy here: The Team’s access to Internet/wi-fi (pronounced wee-fee here) is sketchy, so we are trying to post blog updates whenever we can.  Please excuse our rather unorganized approach, but we hope it provides you with a taste of the wonder that we’re experiencing.  Before I begin, it’s hard to describe how gracious, generous, enthusiastic, and accommodating our hosts are.  This trip is the experience of a lifetime.  Vraiment.

Backing up to Monday….we slept in and tried to shake off jet lag.  We met for breakfast at the hotel buffet, where I fell in love with the automatic coffee machine.   We practiced our PowerPoint presentation until Jacques and Philip picked us up at 11 in the GSE van (EGE in France, for Echange de Groupe d’Etude) and we headed south toward Mont Sainte-Odile, a former monastery turned tourist born blind but gained her eyesight upon her baptism.  We enjoyed a delicious lunch in a cavernous, slightly monastic dining room.   Here we are with Philip Sargent, the coordinator of our exchange, and a source of much laughter during our day.

On the way down, we visited the Pagan Wall, a 6-mile long wall encircling Mont Sainte- Odile.  It has more than 300,000 stones, and there’s much debate about when and why it was built.

Then it was off to the Struthof concentration camp.  As you may know, Alsace has fluctuated between France and Germany four times in the last century, and during World War II, it was annexed by Germany,which built Struthof in 1941, the only concentration camp on French soil.  It operated until 1944, when the Germans sent the prisoners on a “death march” to Dachau.  Later that year, the Americans liberated the camp…the first concentration camp to be discovered.  The camp held many resistance prisoners, and “medical” experiments occurred there, along with many thousands of deaths from the gas chamber, hangings, shootings, malnutrition, typhoid, and maltreatment.  I encourage you to read more at http://www.struthof.fr/en/the-kl-natzweiler/ The mortality rate was more than 40%.  It was a very powerful afternoon for the Team.  Here we are, with amazing Jacques Grimm (former District Governor of 1680) in front of the Deportation Memorial, dedicated in 1964.

We then returned to Strasbourg to meet our first host families, who welcomed our tired crew with great kindness and hospitality.

2011

03/30

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Strasbourg

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