Ria Luttkus stood at the front of the room and began her slideshow presentation. It was titled ‘A Year That Changed My Life.’
For her entire life Luttkus has lived in Hamburg, Germany, that was until last August when she boarded a flight and came to Canada. Since then, she’s been living in Cochrane and attending her Grade 10 year at Cochrane High School.
Over the past 11 months Luttkus has lived a truly Canadian experience, attending Flames games and summertime rodeos; skiing and hiking in Banff and Kananaskis, and gone on trips to Medicine Hat, High River, and Stettler, among other quintessential Alberta towns.
Luttkus’s experience is unique to only one select student every year, and it is made possible by the Rotary Club of Cochrane through its Youth Exchange Program. As part of a program that is run by Rotary clubs around the world, students participate in a year-long exchange. Luttkus, who thought that she was originally heading to the United States, said she was almost entirely unprepared for her Canadian stay.
“I was really scared to go to Canada because I’m not from a climate that’s cold, and thinking of Canada–ice hockey, poutine, bears, I didn’t really know what to expect,” Luttkus said. She admitted that she didn’t even have a winter coat at home and needed to buy everything new. When she landed in mid-August she took another shopping trip to buy t-shirts.
Cochrane’s Rotary members housed Luttkus, treating her like a member of their families. At her year-in-review presentation at the Rotary Club on June 3, members lined up to hug her and say 'hi.' They asked her over for barbecues and wanted to know how grad was (she had gone that previous Saturday with a graduating friend), and they sat in rapt attention as she flicked through her presentation.
Accounting for the four families Luttkus had stayed with since August, she considered herself to have had six mom and dad’s, 12 siblings, and well over 30 pets. Exchange students are to stay with more than one family to give them different experiences and to be among varying family dynamics.
“The host parents are to treat the students like their own child,” said Cundy Tester, a Rotarian involved with the exchange program. “It really speaks to just embracing students from different cultures and having them in your family and the importance of fostering good will, peace, and understanding. That’s really what the whole program is about–to experience our Canadian culture and values.”
Every year Rotary Clubs send 7,000 to 8,000 students aged 15 to 18 abroad where they live with host families and attend high school. Applications for Canadian students to attend the program for the 2026-2027 year are open, but they must be sponsored by a Rotary Club member.
Tester said the Rotary Exchange Program has been active for 50 years and the Cochrane chapter has been hosting students from Asia, South America, and Europe for at least 20 years. Every year they also send Cochrane students abroad, oftentimes to a country where they don’t know the language. For those students, the program is a significant commitment, one that appears well worth it, if Luttkus’s experience in Cochrane was any indication.
“You get to experience so many new things through these connections that a regular person can’t, and I think that’s a wonderful thing,” Luttkus said.
For someone who didn’t know what to expect from Canada, Luttkus said it was surprising how fast she made new friends. What else surprised her about Canada? The low cost of gas and the shockingly high number of driving teenagers.
In July, Luttkus will make her return trip home. She said she already has plans to come back to Cochrane next year to see some friends graduate. But until then, she still has some things left she’d like to do.
Among them, go to a Stampeders game, and, of course, a trip to the Calgary Stampede.
