Message from Miss Céline Valay:
Bonjour,
I’m going to share with you my experience
which is the experience of a seventeen years old frenchie from a little country town in the south of France
who came to spend one year as an exchange student in this amazing city of
Sydney.
I’m sponsored by Rotary Club of Maroubra
and Marmande Rotary Club (near Bordeaux).
The idea of this exchange is to spend one
year in a different country (with a different language) in 3 or 4 host families
to experience a new life far from your home, your family and friends.
It’s a year of adventure and fun, but it
isn’t one year of holidays because you have
to go to school in your new country and be a student and a good
ambassador from your country.
I experience different things every day and
after more than half of the year I don’t want go back to France.
I learnt so much since arriving here and I have
become more independent day after day.
I wanted to be an exchange student because
it will give me a very good experience to discover others cultures, to give
myself the opportunity to explore another part of the world, to learn another
language, meet and make a lot of friends from different nationalities,
different ages, and I could not chose a better place than Australia which is a
cosmopolitan country.
District 9750 sponsored 12 exchanges
students from different countries in the world, such as Japan, Brazil, Italia,
Finland, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland; and even though we
are all different, we all have the same objectives and belong to one international
organization which bonded us.
If every young person in the world is given
the opportunity and the possibility to be an exchange student, we will have a
world with more tolerance love and peace.
To Rotary International
Céline