The first time Simon Curson was asked to help put out a fire in a training course, the problem was not the heat, the equipment, or the danger. It was the language.

Wearing full firefighting gear in the August heat, crouched within a meter and a half of burning crates, he listened through a mask as instructions were shouted in French. Sweat poured down his face. He thought he understood.

“I thought he said, ‘spray the corner.’ So I sprayed the corner. It was clearly the wrong thing to do and I got chastised.”

The moment stayed with him for what it revealed. “It was a very good example for me of what my non-English speaking students go through, and how at the beginning just they are just hearing ‘blah blah blah.’” 

All he could manage during the training was, “I don't know. I'm sorry.”

Simon is a chemistry teacher at Leysin American School and a pompier volontaire trainee with the local volunteer fire department. 

He grew up in Tavistock in the southwest of England. He studied chemistry and biochemistry at university, following what he was good at, even though he quickly realized he hated lab work. He finished his degree because, as he puts it, his dad told him “you have to finish what you started.”

After university, he spent nearly a decade working outdoors, guiding teenagers in the mountains on climbing and developmental courses. Then a knee injury ended that abruptly. At thirty, he found himself in London, injured, unsure, and searching for a way forward.

Teaching was meant to be temporary. A way to fund winter adventures and a return to the mountains once his body allowed it. Instead, he fell in love with the classroom. After years teaching in London, and spending every holiday in the Alps, a friend suggested something he had never considered: international teaching.

“I had never heard of international teaching. It was an alien concept to me.” He made a map of schools close to climbing and skiing and cold-emailed them. Leysin American School needed a science teacher. Ten years later, he is still there.

He met his wife in town. She is French, from Marseille, with deep roots in the mountains. They have started to speak mostly French at home, although not when things get heated. “As soon as we start to talk about emotions, my French falls apart. I can't use French to function in a relationship.” Everyday life is manageable. Emotional conversations are not.

Language is at the center of his experience in Leysin, particularly with the fire department. As a trainee, he attends monthly trainings and has attempted one social gathering afterward. “It is a very social club. It's three generations of families around one table.” He remembers the evening clearly. “I had two beers and I said zero words.”

The issue was primarily language but also being the ‘new guy.’ “Their references are so niche and so intertwined. It's challenging. But fun.” 

Much of the time, he listens. “I basically spend all the time in total silence because I can't communicate with them.” The accents are strong, the slang local. “Their accents are very, very challenging.”

Slowly he had begun to make connections. “Individually, they're very welcoming and trying to make things as easy as possible, trying to translate and slow things down.” But there is a question he feels beneath the surface. “They're very much wondering, ‘Are you really going to be here and how long are you gonna be here for?’”

Simon understands the doubt. International teachers come and go. He himself once said he would either leave in six months or stay ten years. He still feels, he admits, “very much on the periphery of a town.”

Joining the fire department was not primarily about integration. “The pompiers is something that I've wanted to do my whole life.” He once dreamed of being a paramedic. This felt close enough. “I'm doing the pompiers for selfish reasons,” he says. “It's got the added benefit that I am meeting a whole bunch of people.”

Belonging, for Simon, comes more naturally through adventure. In winter, he helps organize weekly ski touring nights up Le Temeley, a traditional alpine chalet that serves as both a restaurant and a cheese dairy between Leysin and La Berneuse. The events are open to anyone, locals included, but the motivation is simple. “It's actually just for me. And my mates in school.”

He is also involved with Refuge de Solycyre, a small commune-run mountain restaurant above Leysin, where his wife volunteers and he helps occasionally. It is hard work, physical and time consuming. It is another thread tying him, slowly, to the community.

For Simon, integration has come through teaching, mountains, volunteering, and the slow, imperfect work of learning the language. It is not something he believes can be forced. “Find what you like to do and hope. It comes out of that.”