The Portuguese ambassador in France, Jorge Torres Pereira, finished his mission in Gallic lands and guarantees that the wait to obtain documents at the consulates will decrease and that the French Government is committed to teaching Portuguese.
“There was an effort to place new employees [nos consulados] and when the waiting time begins to decrease, it will begin to decrease faster than people imagine, but expectations must be managed and not hope that we are already in an ideal situation”, said Jorge Torres Pereira in an interview with Lusa.
The Portuguese diplomat, who has been stationed in France since 2017, considers that the consulate general in Paris, where the waiting time to obtain the citizen card is now about three months, makes “a very substantial omelette with the eggs they have available.” Covid-19 and the consequent closure of the consulate for several months created “a bottleneck” that coincided with the retirement of several employees, according to the ambassador, with a decreasing waiting time curve in the coming months.
This is the last post of Jorge Torres Pereira’s career, after having passed through London, Moscow or Beijing and the Portuguese community he found in France positively surprised him.
“I have a lot of admiration and respect for our community, for not giving up, on the combative side. I was really surprised to realize that the memory of the difficult life of the generation of parents and grandparents had been overcome and my general recognition is that we do not lose the positive characteristics of affection and do not have a defeatist attitude. which is sometimes found in Portugal,” she indicated.
The ambassador said, however, that he would like to see more demands regarding the expectations of Portuguese families regarding the future of Franco-Portuguese youth, arguing that this also includes learning Portuguese in France. A few weeks ago, the Portuguese diplomat was received by the French Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, with different points of view between French national education, which guarantees French from basic education, and Portuguese parents who complain that there is little Portuguese offer. .
“I had the opportunity to convey to them what we have been doing. The point is that the Portuguese side sees things through the prism of supply, that is, we are always asking for more vacancies for teacher offers. The French side sees that if there are 100 children who want Portuguese and a teacher is needed and the minister himself agreed with me that we need to adjust these two ideas. Our starting point is different”, lamented the ambassador.
However, Jorge Torres Pereira assured that the French government “is committed to multilingualism and there is no doubt that it recognizes the importance of languages”, but that there should also be a greater number of records of Portuguese-speaking families.
The important thing for this diplomat is that the Portuguese language is always learned in a school context and that the associations do not continue to be used to make up for the lack of Portuguese teaching in various schools on French territory. Asked about the role of Portuguese associations in France, the diplomat believes that they must adapt to the 21st century.
“Just as the third or fourth generation of the Portuguese community is not the same as the first, the associations in France, in the 21st century, cannot be the same as the associations that existed in the past. The associations will be in much smaller numbers, because they were mutual aid centers that were created, and to the extent that there is greater integration, that need will decrease, ”he said.
Jorge Torres Pereira will be replaced in the coming days by José Augusto de Jesus Duarte, until now Portugal’s ambassador to China.
Source: Observadora
