Wrightsville Beach student returns from year abroad in Italy 

By Katie Dickens

Intern

A Wrightsville Beach student returned last month from a one-year study abroad program in Italy, where he served as a Rotary Youth Ambassador and picked up foreign language-speaking skills along the way.

Cameron Chaney, a 16-year-old whose family moved to Wrightsville Beach in 2015 from Colorado, spent the academic year in the small town of Pordenone, just north of Venice. He immersed himself in the culture by spending time with three different host families and attending a local high school, where all classes were taught in Italian.

Before studying abroad, Chaney said he had no knowledge of Italian. His first host mother spoke fluent English so he would feel comfortable with his surroundings, but she soon switched back to speaking only Italian.

“Before going, I knew sì, no, and grazie and that was about it,” Chaney said. “It wasn’t until Christmastime that I started to feel pretty fluent because I started dreaming and thinking in Italian.”

Chaney credits his learning of the language to the cultural immersion but also to an app called Duolingo that he practiced on his phone every day. The language-learning app is free, and functions like a game with points and challenges.

Chaney studied in Italy through the Rotary Youth Exchange program, which hosts more than 8,000 students a year, the organization’s website states. Chaney first heard about the opportunity through friends in Colorado. He contacted the local Rotary club and began the interview process. The program assigned him to Italy out of his list of preferred countries, where he lived 30 minutes from both the mountains and the sea.

“Rotary knew I loved snowboarding,” Chaney said. “I snowboarded every weekend during the wintertime.”

Chaney also loves to surf and skateboard. He helped to design and build a skate park in Colorado, and said he is very excited for the opening of the new skate park in Ogden that is currently under construction.

Chaney said his favorite part of his year abroad was a final tour of Europe with his new friends.

“For the last two weeks all the 100 exchange students in Italy took a tour that started in Milan then went to Innsbruck, Vienna, Prague, then Strasbourg, Munich, Paris, León and Toreno,” Chaney said. “It was the most amazing experience. I loved traveling at every opportunity I could.”

Chaney plans to take classes at Cape Fear Community College while in school at John T. Hoggard High School this school year. He then hopes to study engineering in college.

“I would totally recommend studying abroad to anyone who is my age right now, around their junior or sophomore year,” Chaney said. “It’s such a great opportunity learn about the world and yourself. I learned to live outside my comfort zone.”