Waterdown Welcomes Former YE Student and New Member

Local Rotarians took a stroll down memory lane this week with former Youth Exchange student Cathy Sanders.

Now a retired family doctor in Adelaide, Australia, Sanders was hosted by the Rotary Club of Waterdown (RCW) in 1975. To mark the 50th anniversary of her exchange year, she attended a meeting of the club on Oct. 6, where she spoke about her experiences and presented mementos from the Unley Rotary Club.

“It was in 1974, I was 16 and in my last year in high school and I was curious about the world,” Sanders told Waterdown club members. “I wanted to experience life in a community, and I think my parents thought that a community like Rotary provided a safety net that they would be comfortable with, as opposed to just saying goodbye at the airport and having no idea of quite where I was going to be.” Sanders’s journey started with orientation with other South Australian students going on exchanges, where they were prepared to represent their local Rotary club, their district and country.

“The key messages that I remember from this pre-training were that it’s an absolute honour to travel the world but, more importantly, it’s actually an opportunity to learn from others, to be immersed in another community, in other cultures,” she noted.

Sanders recalled taking off from Adelaide in balmy summer weather and arriving in a winter wonderland, after stops in Sydney, Nadi, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh.

“I arrived (in Hamilton) at 10 p.m., in the dark, completely snow-covered. And boy, was I pleased to see Pat McNally, my counsellor, at the airport, because there was virtually no one else there. It was like a tin shed.”

Several local families hosted Sanders during her year in Waterdown, which ran from January to December (unlike the program today, which runs from August to July), including the Jarvises, the Vances, the McLeans, the Wilkinsons and the Hornings. She was happy to renew some of those connections during her current visit: she met Jonathan Vance for lunch, and Fran Lloyd (nee Horning) offered up the same room where Sanders stayed in 1975, and accompanied Sanders and her husband to Monday’s meeting.

“It’s been incredibly special to come back to the same house,” said Sanders.

Her recollections of her year in Waterdown - which was then a rural village of about 5,000 residents - included attending classes and participating in extracurricular activities at  WDHS, organized outings with other Rotary exchange students in the district, trips to family cottages, ski trips, apple-picking and even a little ice boating on the Burlington Bay with Peter Vance.

“It’s basically like a catamaran with skates, isn’t it? And it's terrifying,” she said. “Slightly exhilarating but mainly terrifying.”

Sanders embraced it all and says she came to an epiphany by the end of her stay.

“I did come to realize over the year that your ordinary was actually my extraordinary,” she told club members. “I took home those messages and those memories.”

Sanders wound up her presentation with a heartfelt thank you to Rotary for the youth exchange program.

“I was obviously incredibly lucky to experience the heartwarming generosity of your community and Rotary, who created the youth exchange program. And I recognize now more clearly how much effort and risk, cost and investment of time and money so many people give to make that program actually work really well.

“I learned to be curious, I learned to be kind, to be generous, to offer service, to embrace opportunity and expect the unexpected,” she added. “And I learned that giving is so much more rewarding than receiving. I learned to take risks, and my Rotary experience always inspired me to have a go.”

Sanders presented RCW president Kevin Smoke with a banner and a miniature peace pole from the Unley Rotary Club before posing for a photo with the club’s current Youth Exchange student, Giogio Pezzotti of Italy.