Numbers of members attended 29. Guest speaker Sandra Geisler.
Sandra Geisler is a past Rotary Youth Exchange (RYE ) participant. She is from Austria and has lived in Australia for the past 10 years.-in Sydney and now in Melbourne.. Sandra was a RYE participant in 2006 and went from a small village of 3,000 people to Austin, Texas, which is a big city to her. She stated that she has always wanted to travel and particularly to go to the U.S. She lived with a family for 6 months and said that her host family was amazing and treated her like their own daughter. She still maintains contact with them and they have visited her family in Austria.
Sandra believes that participating in RYE has been extremely good for her development due to the fact that she had very little knowledge of English when she left Austria and had to learn a relatively new language and adjust to a different culture and customs. She states that an important aspect of her development is letting go of judgement as what one reads or hear is not necessarily what is actually happening.
Sandra showed some pictures of her time in the US.
A couple of highlights of her time in the US is staying at a ranch in country Texas and spending Thanksgiving with her host mother”s family in Kentucky. Sandra’s experience as a RYE student has instilled in her to be curious and to challenge things. It also gave her the courage to come to Australia as an undergraduate student in Sydney 10 years ago. She moved to Melbourne 5 years ago and are friends with Ian Ballantine and Helen. She has offered to speak to any potential RYE student the club may have in the future.Sandra was thanked for sharing her experiences as a RYE participant with members of the club.
Following Sandra’s talk, Larry Green chaired the club AGM. Neville Kruss, secretary will circulate minutes of the AGM.
Results of the election for positions on the board for 2021-2022 were announced.
President elect Margaret Mason
Board Directors. Peter Nolan and Linda O”Brien.
Tim Lynch had some time to get a few fines in before President Geoff Gledhill spoke then closed the meeting.
A reminder to members that next week's meeting is an evening meeting at 7.30pm, Wednesday on Zoom.
