Heery Engineering recently hosted two foreign exchange students from France, Shune and Karim, as part of our continued partnership with Atlanta Public Schools, through their CTAE Foreign Exchange Program. The two young men spent a week at Heery learning about engineering design and CAD. Unfortunately, my French vocabular is more in the “pardon my French” area and is lacking quite a bit in the technical lexicon of engineering systems. When I spent a week in rural Honduras in 2016, I was able to stumble my way around the Spanish words for shovel, sand, block and water… you can’t fake your way through air-handling units, electrical transfer switches and precast concrete!

During an educational site visit to the 3400 Overton Office Building in Atlanta, GA, I was aided (thankfully) by Omar Sacko, an ARC Documents Solutions employee stationed in Heery’s office. Being fluent in French, Omar did a fantastic job translating some of the more technical terms and phrase from the site visit for Shune and Karim and I know they go a lot more out of the visit than if Omar had not been there. Maybe the most educational/ entertaining part of the site visit occurred at the BBQ joint we went to afterwards for lunch when the students turned away sides of baked beans as quickly as you would expect an American teenager to turn away escargot.

Special thanks to George Harkness, Heery Program Management, for setting up and coordinating this educational venture.