Rotary Exchange student at Shorewood

 By Bob Hauck, Youth Exchange Chair for the Rotary Club of Shoreline (Breakfast)

If you attended Shorewood High School’s International Night in March you surely admired Francisca Perez Heredia wearing her traditional Chilean costume: black top and elegant long dress, white blouse and scarlet sash, topped off by a stunning wide-brim black hat. Francisca is an exchange student with Rotary International. When she arrived last August we called her “Francisca”, but now that she has won our hearts we always call her “Pancha,” the less formal Spanish nickname for Francisca. 

Pancha lives with volunteer host families in Shoreline as she spends her senior year at Shorewood with studies, lots of English, swim team in the fall and now tennis, and much more. Her student exchange is jointly sponsored by the Rotary Club of her home town, Talca, Chile, and the Lunch and Breakfast Rotary Clubs of Shoreline.

Pancha is one of over 5000 high school students that exchange all around the globe every year through a program more than 50 years old. Rotary’s International Youth Exchange is one of our oldest and most successful programs. Rotary Clubs around the world have established an intricate network of exchanges involving most of the 160+ countries where its clubs exist. The fifty-five clubs in the Seattle metro area collaborate and annually send out --- and receive --- about 30 students annually to locations selected from a menu of about 20 countries.

Photos courtesy Francisca Perez Heredia and Lee Craig