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Life in the bush brings happiness to Swiss Rotary exchange student Julia

Jason MennellKalgoorlie Miner
Julia Jenzer with David Holle.
Camera IconJulia Jenzer with David Holle. Credit: Kalgoorlie Miner;Jason Mennell/Jason Mennell

Julia Jenzer may only be 18 and more than 13,000km away from her hometown of Baden, but the Rotary exchange student has no problem holding her own.

The bubbly Swiss with a ready smile easily swats aside the barrage of wisecracks that comes from the 20 or so men gathered in the Rotary Club of Boulder meeting room at the Tower Hotel.

The youngest of the Rotarians is probably in their mid-30s.

That does not bother Julia who does not miss a beat with her quick-witted ripostes that put the jovial cohort in their place.

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More familiar with the bright lights of a buzzing Zurich, Julia could have been forgiven for waking in a cold sweat in the knowledge she was stuck in Kalgoorlie-Boulder while the coronavirus pandemic took a global stranglehold.

Instead she took it all in her stride, thinking nothing of being confined to regional WA as travel bans flowed thick and fast and images of mass graves being dug for the victims of COVID-19 were beamed into television screens across the world.

“I wasn’t worried at all, I knew I can get home,” Julia says.

“That sounds now maybe a little bit crazy but I didn’t feel like I didn’t have a family, I had so many families that gave me through my whole exchange year so much strength.

“Switzerland they had huge numbers and huge cases.

“I was just glad that we didn’t have those rules we had in Switzerland.

“We could still go outside.”

Julia last year arrived in Perth on July 24.

After just one night in the Big Smoke she was driven to Kalgoorlie-Boulder by her first host family the next day.

“I sat in a car with two strangers, I had no idea who they are,” she said.

“It’s weird when you think about it, you don’t know those people but you trust them 100 per cent and they have to trust me. I think my brain just didn’t work then, I was too, ‘oh my gosh what’s going on’?”

Julia’s first impressions of Kalgoorlie-Boulder are hazy.

Grappling to keep abreast with an unfamiliar language and adjusting to her new life out in the bush was mentally draining.

Before departing for WA she had seen a picture of the Super Pit and been shown where Kalgoorlie-Boulder was on the map. It was little preparation for the rugged vastness of outback WA.

“The first few months are probably the hardest, it’s really confusing and really overwhelming and you’ve got no idea what you’re supposed to do and you’re questioning yourself all the time,” she said.

“At the beginning I thought what am I going to do here? Zurich you can go shopping, you have so many opportunities.

“But I always realised you can go to cities everywhere in the world; Sydney, Perth, you know I saw them both and it’s not really different.”

Julia soon settled in, struck up friendships and did a little travelling before COVID-19 struck. In the meantime she remembers being upset at the prospect of people toiling on the mines in pursuit of gold.

When she held a gold bar for the first time, her thoughts turned to all of the miners who would have missed out on family time working nights and through the festive season to produce what was in her hands.

“I just felt so bad, I was like ‘how can a human be so fixed on one little gold thingy’?,” she said.

But while there were twinges of upset, there was far more good than bad and Julia said she blossomed in her year away from home.

And she attributes much of that to the fellowship and help extended to her by the Rotarians in the room.

“It’s just so much fun to be around them — to just laugh about stupid things,” she said.

“I personally learned here — and I think that is the most important thing as a human — is just pure happiness.

“I wasn’t sad in Switzerland, but this happiness here is so much ingrained, so another level and I think that’s what I take home.”

With a flight booked to return to her homeland on Thursday, Julia plans to return to WA to tour the State in a campervan before going to university.

If the admiration that stems from the Rotarians is anything to go by, she would be welcomed back with wide-open arms.

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