What is a Rotary International Youth Exchange? A student's perspective

Exchange is change. Rapid, beautiful,  colourful, amazing, unexpected, overwhelming and most of all, constant change. Change in lifestyle, country, language, friends, parents, houses, and school, simply everything.

Exchange is going from thinking you know who you are, to having no idea who you are anymore, to being someone new, but not entirely new. You are still the person you were before but you jumped into that ice cold lake. You know how it feels like to be on your own, away from home, with no one you really know. And you find out that you can actually do it.

Exchange is learning to trust, trust people, who, at first, are only names on a piece of paper, trust that they want the best for you, that they care. Trust, that you have the strength to endure a year on your own, endure a year of being apart from everything that mattered to you before. Trust that you will have friends. Trust that everything’s going to be alright. And it is seeing this trust being justified.

Exchange is thinking, all the time about everything.

Exchange is about meeting people.

Exchange is about listening to new music.

Exchange is sometimes uncomfortable.

Exchange is great. It’s feeling the connection between you and your host parents grow. It’s knowing in which cupboard the peanut butter is. Its meeting people from all over the world. It’s having a place to stay in almost every country of the world. It’s getting 5 new families. One of them being a huge group of the most awesome teenagers in the world.

It’s cooking food from your home country and not messing up. It’s seeing beautiful landscapes that you never knew existed.

Exchange is exchange students. The most amazing people in the whole wide world. Those people from everywhere who know exactly how you feel and those people who become your absolute best friends even though you only see most of them 3 or 4 times during your year. The people, who take almost an hour to say their final goodbyes to each other. Those people with the jackets full of pins. All over the world.

Exchange is falling in love with this amazing, wild, beautiful country and with your own home country.

Exchange is frustrating. Things you can’t do, things you don’t understand. Things you say, that mean the exact opposite of what you meant to say.

Exchange is about understanding.

Exchange is so unbelievable great.

Exchange is not a year in your life. It’s a life in one year.

Exchange is nothing like you expected it to be, and everything you wanted it to be.

Exchange is the best year of your life so far without a doubt.

Exchange is something you will never forget, something that will always be a part of you. It is something no one back at home will ever truly understand.

Exchange is growing up, realizing that everybody is the same, no matter where they’re from.

 

That there are great people and  it only depends on you, how good or bad your day is going to be or the whole year.
It is realizing that you can be on your own, that you are an independent person and learning how to explain that to your parents.

Exchange is dancing in the rain for no reason, crying without a reason and laughing at the same time. It’s turmoil of every emotion possible.

IYE is everything. And IYE is something you can’t understand unless you’ve part of it and been through it. Jump on board and enjoy the ride.

Notes from an Inbound IYE Exchange Student.2013

The world’s their oyster

Maddie with the Brazilian exchange student, Alexandra Flores,

living in the same town in Germany at the language camp

organised by District 1860 for the exchange students

who arrived in August 2012.

Two International Youth Exchange students sponsored by the Rotary Clubs of Plimmerton and Porirua Sundown in Wellington, NZ have just returned from their year overseas.

 

Madeleine White returned from Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany.  Maddie had a wonderful time enjoying the many sights of Germany and further afield around Europe whilst studying at a German secondary school.  ‘While it is great to be home, I am hoping to get back to Germany soon and travel more abroad in the future’ she says. 

 

Learning to live with other families who speak a different language can be interesting and sometimes testing, but the chance to be immersed in the language helped Maddie to develop her German. She is now fluent in both the spoken and written language, and has grown to love Germany, the culture and people there.

 

Maddie is keen to stay in touch with the new friends she has made, not only those from Germany but also the other exchange students she met from around the world and also her host families.  ‘It was a special feeling to be an ambassador for New Zealand, which is the furthest country from Germany on earth’, said Maddie.

 



Georgina (centre) with Shaylin (Canada) a
nd Renwick (America),

two other Exchange students,

 trying on kimonos at a textile store

Georgina Paskell also just returned from a year in Aichi in Japan. She spent her year living with several different host families in Nagoya, Japan whilst she attended Aichi High School, a private Buddhist school. ‘I really enjoyed making many friends, both at school and through Rotary’, said Georgina. ‘My highlights were my school trip to Hokkaido, taking part in my school festival and attending a popular fireworks festival with the other Rotary exchange students’.

‘It will be hard to find a better experience than this exchange’, she Georgina.  She wants Japan to be a part of her future. Whether she lives in New Zealand or Japan, she expects the Japanese language to be an important part of her career.

 

And one student sponsored by the Rotary Club of Plimmerton just left for her year abroad.

 

Mihi Gardiner-Parata left Wellington to make her way to Doullens (two hours north of Paris) where she’ll spend the next twelve months. The area where Mihi will be living is in the heart of the cemeteries around the Somme where so many battles took place during the First World War.

 




Mihi, centre, being farewelled by her mother,

Hekia and sister, Rakai.

At the airport, Mihi said, ‘I am very excited but haven’t thought much yet past the two days I’ll be spending in Los Angeles with the other exchange students’. Mihi’s sister, Rakai was at the airport to farewell her sister and to give her some last-minute tips. She came back to New Zealand in January 2012 after spending a year in Araraquara in Brazil.

 

-      By Wendy Betteridge, Rotary Club of Plimmerton, Wellington, NZ