Nobody warns you that coming back is the hard part.
You land, everyone asks how it was, and you have about eleven seconds before their attention moves on. ROTEX is the room where you do not have to compress the whole year into a sentence.
What ROTEX is
ROTEX is what Rotary calls students who have completed an exchange and come home. In District 7430 it is also an actual working group: returnees who stay involved and help run the programme for the students coming behind them.
Rotarians run Youth Exchange. Host families open their homes. The district committee handles applications, placements and safety. ROTEX does the part none of them can do: we are the ones who were sitting in that orientation eighteen months ago, terrified, and we can say so out loud.
The thing we are actually for
Reverse culture shock is real and almost nobody prepares you for it. You come back fluent in a language nobody around you speaks. Your friends have had a whole year you were not in. The house is smaller. The food is wrong. You are, quietly, a bit of a different person, and the people who love you most want the old one back.
It passes. It passes faster when you are around people it also happened to. That is most of what ROTEX is, plus a standing excuse to see each other.
What we do
The "been there" committee
- Outbound orientations. We run sessions alongside the district where future exchange students ask the questions they are too embarrassed to ask an adult.
- Inbound welcome. We meet this year's inbounds early, so they know a face before they need one.
- Mentoring. One returnee paired with one current student, across the whole year.
- District events. Turning a scattered group of teenagers from five counties into a class that stays in touch afterwards.
- Telling the truth. Including the parts that make the programme sound hard, because students who go in prepared do better.
Join us
If you went, you're already one of us
There is no application. Completing an exchange from District 7430 makes you ROTEX. What varies is how involved you want to be.
Show up occasionally
Come to a reunion. Turn up to one outbound orientation and answer questions for an hour. Reply when a nervous future exchange student messages you. This is genuinely enough and it genuinely helps.
Mentor a student
Take on one current inbound or outbound for the year. Check in on them, especially in the hard months. You will remember exactly which months those are.
Help run it
Organise events, keep this site alive, work directly with the district committee. ROTEX only exists in a given year because a few returnees decided to do the work.
How to actually join
Tell us you exist: DM @rotex7430 on Instagram or email [email protected] with your name, your exchange country and year, and roughly how involved you want to be. That is the whole process.
Just got back?
Tell us you exist. The next round of students needs someone who remembers what the first month felt like. Right now, that is you.