POOR KIDS ON VACATION
Family placement

Vacation time has come. We're going to leave..., we're leaving... The classes are emptying and the trains are filling up. It was always, at the same time, the same thing.

Well no. The deprived children of big cities have made a capital conquest: they now enjoy the holidays without having anything to envy of the “. rich kids.” We worry about our health. We hear that she takes the air that she needs so much and of which she is deprived for a large part of the year, in housing where everything is measured to her and where only the rent and the price are high. 'floor.

We ended up realizing that the countryside and its vast horizons were suitable for withdrawn children at school and at home, and that it was good to detoxify them in the summer. Help was organized; the works have multiplied, and it is not here, after having said that there are some admirable ones, that I will undertake the nomenclature. It would be difficult for me to ignore those of the Intransigent... and his modesty would not forgive me for giving him first place.. So let's not talk about them.

Thanks to subsidies from the Caisse des Ecoles, the summer camps of the City of Paris can send to the countryside, each year, a large number of children who, without this, would continue to waste away in the suburbs for two months.

Among the most favored districts, we will cite the eighteenth which has, in the person of Mr. Jean Varenne, municipal councilor, a tireless propagandist.

For this, the resources of the Caisse des Ecoles are not enough. How does he go about getting more? It's his secret, and I'm not asking him. I am only interested in the result.

And the success, here it is on August 4, eleven hundred children from Buttes Montmartre will leave, by special train, for Allier, where they are expected. Waited... by whom? By a makeshift communal roof rented for good cash and under which the little Parisians will sleep and take their meals, supervised by their usual masters or substitutes?

No way. The innovation consists of practicing family placement on a large scale. The eleven hundred children of La Butte were entrusted to peasants and distributed among forty-five communes in the district of La Palisse, three hundred and forty kilometers from Paris. That's already enough, isn't it, to pique your curiosity... and also enough to cause you, as it did me at first, some apprehension.…

Looking after eleven hundred kids from Paris, for whom you are responsible, is no small matter, given that the stay will be seven weeks, please. Children left to their own devices or to strangers for almost two months, do you see any disadvantage in that?
If there are any, my God, it's as if they didn't exist, since Mr. Jean Varenne did not hesitate to repeat the experience he has already made with complete success.

For forty days, the peasant's family gains an adopted child. She assumes its maintenance and care, and has not had, until now, to repent of her hospitality. The children, for their part, adapt obediently and happily to rural life. They go on a journey of discovery and, so to speak, their apprenticeship as settlers. Natural history, oh wonder, is alive! They learn the names of insects, plants and species seeing them. They discern birds by their song, by hearing them sing. They go from surprise to surprise. They learn while having fun, and they pay their price by amusing with their chatter the man from the fields who lectures them without ceremony, on the go. The cost price of each child, including travel, is 180 to 200 francs. The family pays 60: one franc fifty per day. It's for nothing!

It's for nothing if we think of the physical and moral benefit that the child derives from his vacation. Jean Varenne told me the other day:
- Do you know what I brought back from Allier last year when the holidays were over?
- No.
- Three thousand five hundred kilos of meat more! We weighed the children at the start, we weighed them on the way back: they had all gained, as many as they were, three thousand five hundred kilos! That's the case, eh? that they had taken advantage!
- And they left a good memory there? I asked.
- Say they won! I witnessed their return... Some came back with live rabbits or chickens, others with potatoes or bread “pies”... Several had a dog on a leash which they had managed to make follow... Yes, family placement is good... I will say another day what confirmed me in this opinion.

LUCIEN DESCAVES