Tomas Profant was a Rotary Youth exchange student with the Trail Rotary club for the year 1999/2000. He is from Slovakia and lives in Bratislava now. He talked to Waneta Sunshine Rotary via zoom on February 12th 2021.
Viktor and Elizabeth Cytra were one of his host families and had kept in touch with him and he was happy to come talk to us when Viktor asked.
Tomas loved the family experience with the exchange, and enjoyed each of the three that he stayed with.
His first family was the Cytras. At first he enjoyed being driven to the old JL Crowe High school each morning by Elizabeth. He got a rude awakening when Viktor found out and put a stop to it. He realizes that this was the right decision to make him ride the bus instead.
The other two host families were Lana and Dan Rodlie in Trail and Ian and Susan Reed in Rossland. They all had slightly different cultures. Other families he remembers fondly are Sharon and Thorpe Watson and Peter Morganthaler who was his counsellor.
At JL Crowe he was very popular and was cheered when he gave a speech. He was also bullied by some students. Some conflicts were cultural. He found that there was a mild “cheating culture” very similar to his home. He had heard that at American schools everyone cheated so he didn’t know what to expect in Canada. The school system in his home was very elitist with university schools and trade schools. He enjoyed the Canadian system as a force for equality and equalization. The teachers were more personal and less distant and formal than in Slovakia. He found Canadians more extrovert although less so than Americans.
He enjoyed dissecting a frog which was something totally new to him and English classes where he read All the pretty horses by Cormac McCarthy. His favourite class was social studies which was new to him. He got to go to the prom a novel experience for him.
What did he gain from the exchange by spending a year in a foreign country? Firstly he assimilated the language. He went from a more formal grasp of English to really appreciating it. This enabled him to get his current work published in foreign journals.
The second thing he acquired, although more subtle, was ability to make small talk comfortably. Meeting new people over and over again, in new situations taught him how to ask questions and he lost a lot of his shyness he arrived with. This is a great skill and something he really appreciates. It helps him in his field of social science.
Tomas thanked Rotary for making his stay so good, he grew tremendously and it eventually brought him to his career as a teacher of social science. “Exchanges build character” he said. Thomas gained a different perspective on the world through his year in Canada.
He ended his talk with a brief description of the book he has written “New donors on the post colonial crossroads; eastern Europe and Western Aid.”
This is about how East European democracies (Slovakia and Romania) are now seen as inferior donors compared with old donors such as Austria.
Waneta Sunshine Rotary 