Megan McSheffery enjoying exchange visits to France
Megan McSheffery, a 2007 SVHS graduate, is still in high school, but not because she needs more credits or courses. Since late last August she has been living in France and going to school there as a Rotary Exchange student and is finding it, well, different. Interviewed recently by speakerphone from the home of her parents John and Kim, she was just getting over a cold and immediately betrayed her Canadian roots by complaining about the weather in northeastern France.
"The weather's really nice right about now," she said, meaning the opposite. "It's been raining for about 24 hours. You can wake up one morning and it could be -10 and another morning it could be 15. Beats me what the temperature is at the moment. They don't believe in putting thermometers outside. Where I am, in my district, it's where it rains the most in France. Ten minutes away in another district, closer to Germany, it's actually the sunniest part of France.
"One snowstorm was about three feet of snow and night before last we got another ten inches of snow and now it's all gone. That's how the temperature changes here. You can wake up one day and freeze your butt off walking to school and then the day after you only go in a T-shirt."
McSheffrey was looking forward to the trip she was about to make with other exchange students, many of whom were sponsored by Rotary as she is. At the conference that would take place in Verdun, she would meet other students ages 18-25.
"We'll discuss our experiences and how we can share it with others. I leave from that and go on our bus trip that starts in Paris. We go through eastern France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Southern France, and then back up to Switzerland and back to Paris."
Megan, who hopes to be home to fight with her brothers Sean and Ryan by early June, lives in the town of Gérardmer with her host parents. The community of about 9,500 permanent residents is located in the Lorraine Region of France near the German border. The German city of Baden is the probably the closest one to Gérardmer which is located in the mountainous French Départment (Province) of Vosges. Gérardmer lies in a picturesque lake district in the High Vosges. Nearby are the lakes of Longemer and Retournemer.
She attends la Haie Griselle, a high school of between 600 and 700 students.
"The length of my school days vary," she explained. "It's not like the school days back home. We don't go to school from 8 till 3 necessarily. Some days I have school from 8 until 5 and then I have volleyball until 7 so on those days I technically have school from 8 am to 7 pm. Other days I might have school until noon and one day out of the week I may have school from 10 till noon."
Her school offers the subjects areas of literature, economics, science and is also a training centre for triathlon skiers.
"I am in the economics section," she said. "I have classes in economics, history, geography, philosophy, math, but not German because I would have been six or seven years behind the rest. Students here either major in German or English and minor in the other one. They have to have two languages to pass to graduation.
"The students here have to decide at about age thirteen what career or what section of schooling they want to take of the three levels in town. The Mexican boy, who is also a Rotary Exchange student, went to the cooking school. The third level one is for learning auto repairs."
In addition to upcoming trips - including a two-week exchange with a school in nearby Germany - she has visited cities Metz and Nancy and the Alps which are about a three-hour drive away from Gérardmer and its Vosges mountain range. Among the Alps she and other Rotary students visited was Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in eastern Europe, 350 metres higher than nearby Mount Matterhorn.
"At Mont Blanc there's a lookout point almost as high as the top of the mountain which we wouldn't be allowed to climb. We were there twice and once hiked all around it - 35 kilometres in two days. I was pretty sore for about a week and a half after. The next time I was there we skied around Mont Blanc.
That was really cool. I did the Valley Blanc where professional skiers go - it's a melting glacier because of global warming. On one side you can see the French mountains and on other side can see Italy and can see Switzerland on another side."
McSheffery hopes to work fulltime at the Perth-Andover pool this summer and continue her education in the fall.
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