Rotary Exchange Student ~ Lucia

Lucia DeVito's been in Portage la Prairie as a Rotary exchange student from Italy since the start of the school year, and has been enjoying a lot of Western Canada. She's now with her second house family for her stay.

"As part of the program I'm staying with three different families in the year. And so now I'm living with my second house family. We have done so many things. We've been in British Columbia for the Christmas holiday. And then we went to Elkhorn. I tried cross-country skiing for the first time here. I went to the hot springs for the first time. I could lie down on the snow while I was in my swim suit. I saw the cars racing on the ice. A friend's grandparents have a farm, so I visited the farm and saw some baby goats born. It was interesting and disgusting at the same time. Monster Jam trucks were very cool in Winnipeg."

DeVito says she's looking forward to an upcoming ten-day bus trip.

"I'm going with the other exchange students who are staying in this district like me, from all over the world. They're staying in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. In May we're going for ten days on a trip. It's going to be the Western Trip. We're going to be on the bus and we're going to sleep almost every night in different places, and travel together."

She describes her presentation she's preparing for a Rotary luncheon in two weeks.

"I'm going to speak in two weeks. I'm going to do a presentation about my town in Italy, because one day I was in Winnipeg with my counsellor's husband, and we were speaking about how old are the churches here. We searched on the Internet and we figured out what Canadians mean by 'old' is nothing for us, because our buildings are very, very old. So, I thought that would be interesting for a presentation."