Sarah Pruys
On Aug. 6, Nathalie Von Niebelschutz, along with her husband, Ken Fedoruk, and children, Peter and Greta, will be relocating to Geneva, Switzerland for a year.
“I’ll be on a deferred leave,” noted Von Niebelschutz, a French teacher at Robert Moore School here.
After earning 75 percent of her salary the past three years, she will earn the remaining 75 percent this coming year while in Switzerland.
“We have Swiss citizenship . . . so I decided three years ago to take a sabbatical in Switzerland because all of my mother’s family is still in Switzerland,” she explained.
“I decided that I would like my children to become bilingual, in English and French.
“My godmother offered to give us her two-bedroom apartment in Geneva,” Von Niebelschutz remarked, noting with a vacancy rate of almost zero, it is very difficult to find a place to live there.
“My daughter, Greta, is going into Grade 4 and my son, Peter, is going into Grade 7, and they’re going to go to school in French,” she added.
“It’s a regular public school, but it’s called a ‘welcome class.’
“It’s a very small class at their grade level, for non-Francophones, mostly ex-pats,” Von Niebelschutz said. “They keep them there for up to a year, to bring them up to a level of French proficiency necessary to go back into a regular classroom.”
Peter will be in the “welcome class” for the entire day while Greta will do half-a-day in the regular stream and the rest in the “welcome class.”
The days in the classroom will be longer than here, with Peter starting at 7:50 a.m. and going until 4:40 p.m. Greta, meanwhile, is in class from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., but the students have two-hour lunches and two extra weeks of holidays—one in October and one in February.
In addition to school, Von Niebelschutz plans on making sure her children continue to stay involved in extra-curricular activities.
“Greta is a figure skater and I have a really awesome figure skating coach lined up for her,” she noted. “He is world-renowned . . . so she’ll be skating with the club in Geneva.
“And my son will be playing minor hockey there.”
The family will be joined by Ken later in the year.
“My husband runs Vickers Lake Camp, so he is coming in October to January, and then February to April,” Von Niebelschutz said.
“I’m going to be busy. I’m still going to be a hockey and figure skating mom like I am here, and then I will probably be doing a lot of day trips to do some shopping in France,” she noted, explaining that Geneva is near the border with France, where many things are cheaper so people often go across for groceries.
“We’re going to be doing a lot of exploring and visiting with family,” she added.
“We have a wedding to go to in September . . . we’ll be visiting a chocolate factory and a castle, and we’ll definitely be doing some skiing, as well.”
And the busy family won’t stop there.
“We are planning an excursion to Germany to visit our German relatives, so we’re going to be making a trip to Berlin,” Von Niebelschutz said.
“My husband would like to do a trip to Holland . . . and we’re planning a trip to Paris and to the south of France.
“And we’re also planning a family excursion on a yacht to Barcelona.”
Von Niebelschutz said her children are “very excited” about the trip.
They may be a little nervous, she admitted, “but I’ve explained to them that the children in their classrooms will all be non-Francophone.”
“They will also be learning German in school because Switzerland is trilingual—it’s German, French, and Italian.”
Von Niebelschutz, herself, is very excited about giving her family this opportunity to see some of the world.
“I think it’s going to be an education in itself,” she reasoned. “And I’m really excited for Greta to skate with Peter Grutter.”
She also said the family will be updating their year away on Facebook and they’re going to be doing a blog, as well.
