Belgian Student Nears Graduation At Dalton State

  • Monday, March 13, 2017
  • Mitch Talley
Lucie Lovinfosse is a Dalton State College student from Belgium, who is serving as an intern for the county’s Finance Department.
Lucie Lovinfosse is a Dalton State College student from Belgium, who is serving as an intern for the county’s Finance Department.
photo by Mitch Talley

Would you be able to pull up roots and travel thousands of miles across the globe just to learn a second language?

At age 18?

Fresh out of high school, Lucie Lovinfosse did just that, temporarily leaving her family and friends behind in Belgium to come to the United States four years ago – with the simple goal of learning to speak English, earning a college degree, and then returning home to find a good job.

Her inspiring journey began in 2013 as a freshman at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Miss., but that school proved not to be the right fit for the then 18-year-old student athlete.

Lucie had learned how to play tennis as a 10-year-old in Belgium, proving to be quite talented at the sport, in fact, and that athletic ability ultimately turned into her ticket to attend college in the U.S.

“At first I wanted to do six months in Costa Rica and six months in the U.S.,” Lucie says, “because I wanted to learn Spanish and English.

But they told me that I wasn’t gonna get to play tennis there for sure which wasn’t acceptable to me because I really wanted to keep on playing.”

Lucie’s high school coach knew an agent that organizes an exchange program that sends athletes to the United States to study for four years, and  that’s how she ended up attending William Carey.

It’s also how she eventually wound up at Dalton State College, where she’ll be graduating with a degree in Finance and Applied Economics on May 13.

“A friend at William Carey was coming to Dalton State,” Lucie said, “so I applied  here as well and they recruited me for tennis so I came to Dalton.”

Dalton has proven to be a perfect fit for the now 21-year-old, who was co-captain of the college’s tennis team last  year and has been named captain of this year’s squad that is currently competing.

Lucie is also in the middle of a 120-hour internship with Whitfield County government, where Alicia Vaughn and Carol Roberts have her busy helping the finance department crunch numbers.

Frightening at first

Lucie admits that at first, it was “scary” coming to the United States by herself.

“At least because when I came here, I didn’t speak English,” she recalls. “I mean, I knew, ‘hi, how are you?’ but I didn’t understand much. So I had to go through the customs when I landed in America and show my papers that I’m legal here. I didn’t speak English so they were asking me all of these questions, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’”

She pauses to giggle, then says, “But then it was OK. I went to pick up my luggage, and at the time I was 18 and that was the first time I had ever gone that far from home, without my parents, without anyone.”

Lucie expected someone from the university to pick her up at the airport in Mississippi, but it turned out there was no one waiting for her.

“But then I heard two people speaking French, two young guys, so I went to see them and said, ‘hey, are you going to William Carey?’ They’re like, ‘yes, we are.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, great’ and I asked them who was going to pick us up, when’s he gonna be here? They told me, oh, he’s gonna be here in three hours because he was waiting for all the students, from all the flights, to come pick us up. But I didn’t know that and he didn’t tell me, so I was just crying at first, I was so scared.”

Since then, though, Lucie has done a lot of growing up.

“I feel like being here made me grow up so fast, just because I have to pay utilities myself, I have to pay my car insurance, pay my rent – it’s not my money but I’m still the one that has to go over there and pay it on time, go get my money order for my rent, do everything. I have to do my own laundry, I have to cook every day, I have to clean my apartment and my room, wash my dishes. I’ve had to do all that for the past three years on my own so when I go home and see my friends just letting their parents do everything, then I’m like, hmmmm…”

She looks at herself as “pretty independent” now. “I guess I had no choice,” she says with a laugh. “I know how to do pretty much everything on my own now. I think in America, people get independent faster, at least students, because most of them when they go to college, they don’t stay in their hometown. They can go to Alabama, New York, anywhere. But at home, we have universities in every major city so students usually stay in their  hometown so they stay at home the whole time through college, and sometimes after that, until they have some money and can move out.”

Learning English

Based on conversations overheard at the Whitfield County Administration Building No. 1, Lucie has picked up the English language well.

At first, though, while she was still in Mississippi, she relied on her French-speaking friends more than she would have liked.

She credits moving to Dalton with helping her English speaking skills “because nobody speaks French.”

“After two months, my teammates and my coach told me that, wow, it’s so much better – just because I had to, I couldn’t do anything else. And if I didn’t know how to say something, I had to explain the word I was trying to say and they would tell me the word that I was looking for. But I had to explain in English first so they could tell me.”

She admits she still has trouble saying exactly what she wants in English, which is particularly troublesome to the jovial student when she’s trying to crack a joke with her friends.

“Sometimes I want to make a joke,” she says, “and it happens to me all the time. My roommates make fun of me all the time because like if she says something and I want to…”

“…make a quick comeback?” suggests co-worker Roberts, who had stopped by during the interview to make observations.

“Yes,” Lucie agrees. “I have my idea to come back, and I’m like uh, uh… And then there’s one word that I don’t know how to say and I’m like (silence).  Then I think about it a while and finally say it and it doesn’t have any effect anymore because it took so long to find my word!”

Or other times when she tries to make a joke, “I’m oh yeah,  this, this, and then that’s not the way you say it in English, it’s not proper English, so then my joke doesn’t make sense and I’m laughing on my own and my roommate is sitting there with a blank look on her face. That happens a lot because I always make jokes, I like to joke.”

As for which is easiest – reading, speaking, or listening to English – Lucie has a quick answer.

“Speaking is the hardest,” Lucie believes. “I had a final presentation last semester for my Business Communication class, and I knew the whole thing. I had been repeating … no…”

“Practicing?” Carol suggests.

“Yes, practicing my speech so many times in my apartment,” Lucie picks up, “just practicing to know it and I got to class and I knew it and I said, ‘Hello,’ and then I went like… and I couldn’t remember. I got really mad because I knew it … I knew it!”

Stage fright or not, Lucie still wound up making a good grade on her speech!

Life in America?

First, a quick geography lesson. Belgium has about the same population as the state of Georgia - 10 million - but those people are compressed into an area about 10 times smaller.

That fact leads to one of many observations by Lucie about America.

“You have a lot of land – everything is more spread out here,” she says. “At home, it’s more like on a street, you have houses, but the walls are stuck to each other. It’s pretty much like that everywhere at home. It’s different here …  like you have ranches. We don’t really have that. You see horses everywhere here – I mean we see that at home but not in the cities. I would say, it’s more like a country style of living here, but over there it’s more like a city.”

Something else she’s noticed here perhaps confirms that difference in lifestyles.

“We don’t have many sidewalks here,” she said. “That’s the first thing I realized when I came here because I love to walk at night.”

She also says people here use their cars a lot more, “for everything, like you have drive-thrus for the bank. We have drive-thrus but only for fast foods. Here there are drive-thrus for a lot of things.”

Lucie noticed that everything seems to be bigger here, too.

“Like your large size drinks,” she says. “We don’t even have that size at  home! Our large cup is like your small, for example. It seems like everything is so much bigger here to me, everything – offices are bigger, schools are bigger … and the highway in Atlanta.”

She also has picked up on the Southern reputation for being friendly, which led her to talk about the food here.

“Here, everything is fried,” she said. “I guess when you talk about the South, everything is fried. You eat a lot of chicken, too, and  you have things that we don’t – like dumplings or baked potatoes. We do have baked potatoes, but we don’t do them the way you do them with the sour cream and butter and bacon and all that.

“We don’t have gravy,” she continues, “and we don’t have grits. There are so many things we don’t have. I would say we eat a little bit of salad, a little bit of meat, and a little bit of rice or potato or pasta. We don’t eat as many frozen food plates – prepared meals. I say that because my roommates, that’s all they eat!”

She says in Belgium, they only eat out once every two or three weeks “because it’s not a big thing to eat out. If we eat out, it’s like, oh, I want something nice today. I’m gonna go eat out, like you want a good steak. If not, we just cook at  home every day, every meal.”

Asked for her favorite restaurant in Dalton, she  says that’s a tough decision.

“I really like Panera,” she said. “I do the Pick 2 – tomato soup or cheddar broccoli soup and the greek salad. I like the bagels, the ones with cinnamon crunch – those are really good.”

She’s also become a fan of a Southern staple.

“Grits? Oh I love it. I love grits, cheese grits.”

With salt or sugar?

“Salt,” she replies.

“And I love biscuits and gravy! At Bojangle’s they have really good ones, and at Crackle…”

“Cracker?” a co-worker suggests.

“Yes, Cracker Barrel.”

In the home stretch

After three years at Dalton State, Lucie is finally in the final months of her stay in America on a student visa.

Luckily, she made it through college before budgetary cuts led to the termination of several sports at DSC, including her beloved women’s tennis.

“They asked us if we wanted to still compete this year,” Lucie said. “We didn’t have to since they are cutting us, but it’s my senior year so I wanted to play, and I’m the captain as well. I asked the other girls if they would do that for me, and we have a freshman that never played tennis in college. I told them maybe she’d like one year of experience at least, so my teammates said they would do it.”

While she’s finishing up tennis and her studies here, she’s getting ready for a big month of May. Her parents, along with her grandmother, her sister and boyfriend, and a cousin, will be coming here on the 9th to help her close down her life in Dalton. Of course, she’ll also be receiving her degree from Dalton State on the 13th, and she and her family will be leaving the next day for a trip to Chicago and then a train ride across the country to Southern California.

Over the past four years, Lucie has been able to make a few trips to Belgium for the Christmas holidays and the summer break, and her parents visited her in the States the summer after her freshman year. But they’ll no doubt be thrilled to see their daughter again.

“My family knew that I really wanted to come to America,” Lucie said, “so they were happy about it. But I guess they were really scared to let me come here on my own, and I know my mom was really, really sad. Still now, she wants me back home. But they’ve been really supportive the whole time, and I think they’re pretty proud.”

Her fellow Whitfield County government employees are proud of the job she’s done, too.

“It’s not only with the language difference am I basically surprised at  how well she does,” Roberts says. “In that regard, we’re talking about very specific words in finance, plus the fact that we’re talking about things like taxes, LOST, and SPLOST, words that don’t have anything to do with Belgium the way our tax system works and the way government works is completely different.

“I’ve found her to be really bright. She catches on,” Roberts says, snapping her fingers twice to show how fast. “I basically am telling her something once, and she’s mature enough to ask questions. She’s not too afraid to ask questions, and then she gets right on it. I don’t have to repeat myself, not that I would mind because she’s young. But you would expect - she’s learning, this is her first job - but instead she’s acting like a 30-year-old who’s already worked before.”

What will she do next?

Speaking of work, Lucie says she isn’t sure what she’ll wind up doing after graduation but has decided to tackle a career with her newfound skills learned in America, back home in Belgium.

“It’s like a big idea with my family that the more languages you speak, the better of a job or the easier you’re gonna find one,” Lucie says.

“It makes you a lot more attractive to a company,” Roberts interjects.

“Exactly,” Lucie says. “Like, for example, if I go home now and I show them I know a little bit of Spanish, I know English, I speak French, and I know a little bit of Dutch but really almost nothing, and I have my bachelor in Finance, I’m probably gonna find a job really easily. Just because I can – if I’m in a company where they have to deal with Spain or Germany or America or the U.K., well, I can probably communicate with all of them, so I’m kind of an asset to them.”

Besides the friends she’s made in America, she says there is something else she’ll miss upon her return to Belgium.

“Here, if I walk in the street or if I’m grocery shopping and someone passes me,” she says, “I’m gonna say hi and people are gonna say hi to me. And even if they don’t know me, they are gonna ask me how I’m doing, you know what I mean? They are really, really friendly. When I’m at home, if you’re walking the street, people just look at the floor and they pass you and they don’t say hi - they don’t say anything. When I go home, I have a dog so I go and walk with him … with it, and I would pass someone and go hi and they would look at me like I was crazy. I’ve always said hi to everyone, I’ve just always done it.”

Now, unfortunately for Whitfield County, Lucie will soon be saying bye.

Lucie Lovinfosse is a member of the Dalton State College women’s tennis team, where she is serving as captain this year. A senior, she came to America to learn English – and play tennis.
Lucie Lovinfosse is a member of the Dalton State College women’s tennis team, where she is serving as captain this year. A senior, she came to America to learn English – and play tennis.
photo by Mitch Talley
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