They dream of icebergs, musk oxen, penguins.
Twelve children from Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines) flew on Saturday for a trip to Greenland organized by teachers from their college in Val-Fourré.
For nine days, supervised by three of their teachers, they are going to discover this exotic continent of ice, inevitably, witness in spite of itself to the ravages of global warming.
There will be no cell phone on site, no console, no cozy bed and breakfast cereal, nothing that populates a Western teenager's world.
“And we will even have the right to dry toilets”, fears a little Djieri, 15 years old.
“I will miss my food, my dishes” says 15-year-old Shatena.
“I imagine ice everywhere, skates, penguins”, dreams Amadou, well aware that “not everyone goes to Greenland”.
Sleeping bag on the back, a last kiss to the happy parents and they took off Saturday morning from Copenhagen (Denmark), far from their city and their neighborhood, led by a teacher with incredible determination.
Technology teacher Yvan Dromard had a slightly crazy idea three years ago: take his students to a discovery class among the Inuit.
They will make a documentary about their trip
It was he who carried the project, found sponsors, imagined the course.
Driven by his incredible enthusiasm, he had planned everything.
Except Covid.
Travel bans were then brutally grafted onto administrative red tape.
Then the new confinements almost buried the project.
But "Yvan Dromard didn't let go" recalls Carole Claudeon, his colleague from EPS who is part of the trip.
Some students were unable to board, for having refused the anti-Covid vaccine.
And until these last days, Djieri was not sure to come, because of a visa problem.
Whatever, the tenacity of this judo coach, supported by the principal of his establishment, ended up paying off.
"In addition, we also chose to keep the kids who were with us from the start of the project," he adds.
With these three years of postponement, some entered high school.
Yet we did not let them go.
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On site, where the temperature barely exceeds 0°C at the moment, they will walk for hours in the continuous daylight, paddle in a kayak, make a documentary on their trip and treat themselves to a trip to a "big city" of 6,000 inhabitants, located on the west coast of the ice island, opposite Canada, after having bivouaced in villages of 20 inhabitants.
An incredible change of scenery and the discovery of an unknown culture for these travellers... and their hosts, who are probably unaccustomed to meeting children of African or Sri Lankan origin in their streets...
