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Baud is Quincy's French connection

From staff reports
June 17, 2010

Marie Baud designed two murals that are on display at Quincy High School.

After Marie Baud graduated from her high school in Peillonnex, France, last year, she wanted to come to the United States and become a nanny.

She wasn’t able to find a family to work for, however, and thought that her hopes of seeing the States had been dashed.

But then she caught a break. Baud spent last summer in Belgium with her mother. There she met a man involved with the Rotary Youth Exchange program who offered her a spot in the program that had been recently vacated.

Baud took the offer, but didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for her journey.

“I decided to go only one month before I left,” she said. “It was pretty crazy.”

She didn’t even have enough time to figure out exactly where she was being sent. About a week before her departure, she was told she was going to Washington. She assumed that she’d be going to Washington, D.C.

Instead, she was coming to Quincy.

“I had no idea about Quincy (before I got here),” Baud said.

Baud’s hometown, Peillonnex, a commune in the Haute-Savoie department in the Rhone-Aples region in southeastern France close to the border of Switzerland, is actually smaller than Quincy.

“But the difference is (Peillonnex) is closer to bigger cities,” she said. “You don’t have to drive 30 miles away to do something.”

When she first arrived in Quincy, she was given a dose of Americana, courtesy of the first of her three host families.

“The first place I went was Costco,” she said. “It was huge. I was like, ‘This is where American people shop.’ ”

At first, Baud struggled with the relative lack of things to do in Quincy, but soon she found her niche. As a senior at Quincy High School, she made friends and participated in several school activities, such as basketball and track and field.

“I did the pole vault, which I had never done before,” she said.

She also did well in school.

“They let me choose my classes,” she said. “I hate math and science, so they let me do other things. Class here is a lot shorter than in France; there, we went to school from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Here, it’s more relaxed. You can become friends with teachers, and that’s impossible in France. It was like a one-year vacation.”

She especially excelled in her arts classes. She painted a mural of what she called a “judge jackrabbit” for the criminal justice class that is erected in front of Levi Hyen’s classroom.

Baud will leave Quincy this weekend and participate in a two-week East Coast tour with other exchange students. After that, she’ll fly back to France and stay there for the summer, then head to Belgium and apply to art schools.

“I’ve always been interested in art, mostly comics and funny stuff,” she said.

Baud is interested in coming back to the United States at some point, though.

“I liked it here,” she said. “I liked it for the people. It was so easy and relaxing. Everybody was really nice to me on the first day and smiling and talking to me. I was expecting (the transition) to be hard, but it wasn’t. I’m excited to be going home, but I’m sad at the same time.”