A look at Marcellus Rotary Foreign Student Exchange program
Submitted by Bob Shields
Marcellus Rotary
An important need for our modern world is that persons of different countries and cultures learn about each other to promote peace and understanding. Rotary has one such program called the Rotary Youth Exchange and the Marcellus Rotary has been participating for many years. A student from Marcellus is chosen to go abroad (outbound) and Marcellus hosts a person from another country (inbound).
This year our inbound student is Salome Renard from Liege, Belgium. Salome was speaker at a recent meeting and informed the group about her country which has about 11 million people many of whom are multilingual (Dutch, French, some German and about one-third know English). Belgium is bordered by Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, France and the North Sea and is about the size of the state of Maryland. Belgium is famous for chocolate, beer and waffles. Major cities include the major seaport, Antwerp, and the capitol, Brussels, which is the also the home of NATO and Bruges, the Venice of northern Europe.
Salome is sponsored by the Rotary Club de Flemalle in Liege, which unlike most U.S. clubs is still all male. One of the major endeavors of that club is to devlop aids for blind people.
When an exchange student comes to Marcellus, he/she stays with three different host families over the year and forms lasting friendships from that experience. Salome’s first host family is the Markham’s whose daughter Diana is a good pal.
Our outbound student from Marcellus is Rachel Tanguay who is now in Thailand. Rachel reports that she is loving her experience there. We’ll hear more about that later.
If you have interest in being an Exchange Student or in hosting a student, please contact Youth Exchange Officer Charlie Smith at 315-673-2476.
Marcellus Rotary meets every Tuesday morning from 2 to 8 a.m. at Finally Ours Restaurant. If you are interested in joining the world’s largest service organization and having a lot of fun, feel free to come to any meeting. Besides good food and company, there is always an interesting program.
