Hello !

My story

I turned 70 this year—an age Africans call the "age of wisdom," a title I hope applies to me. I converted to Jesus Christ during a ski camp organized by a university Christian group; you can read my conversion story on this site. I have lived my entire life in France, across three different regions: Franche-Comté, the Paris region, and Pays de la Loire. Regarding my education, I studied law and economics at university. I took several competitive civil service exams; due to prolonged university strikes, I took the primary school teacher exam and entered the teacher training college in Versailles. I taught in the Yvelines department for the first seven years of my career. Later, I passed several "Category A" exams—first for a central administration role and then for a senior management position—upon joining the Ministry of Industry. I came close to entering the ENA (National School of Administration) after passing the preparatory exam and completing two years of study at Sciences Po Paris. I also passed the exam to become a hospital director but did not pursue that path, as I felt it wasn't the right fit for me. Returning to the Ministry of Industry, I took on an extraordinary assignment: serving as a rapporteur for a prefect tasked with easing social tensions in the Lorraine region. This experience inspired my first novel—an autobiographical work written with humor and self-deprecation titled *Les aventures extraordinaires de Gilles Coaltar, fonctionnaire ordinaire* (The Extraordinary Adventures of Gilles Coaltar, Ordinary Civil Servant). It was published by Éditions du Panthéon in 2015.

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I went on to finish my career as the financial manager of an engineering school and, for the final fifteen years, as a project manager at the Ministry of Industry. It was a very active professional life.