Joey Sherven, a senior at Mount Horeb Area High School, returned to school this fall after spending a year in Brazil as a Rotary Exchange Student.
From left, former Rotary Youth Chair Judy Steinhauer, Janice Sherven, Joey Sherven and Chad Sherven.
Joey Sherven tells Rotary about his year in Brazil
Joey Sherven, a senior at Mount Horeb Area High School, returned to school this fall after spending a year in Brazil as a Rotary Exchange Student.
Joey, the son of Chad and Janice Sherven, spent a year in Carmo do Rio Claro, a city of about 25,000 in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. Sherven, who grew up on a farm near Daleyville, saw some similarities because it’s an agricultural community, with lots of beef and dairy farms.
Sherven said that two of his host families owned farms, but farmers there tend to live in town and go to the farms to work. He said his hosts were amused by the fact that he grew up on a farm and had never ridden a horse. Rodeo is big in the area, and Sherven came home with a new pair of cowboy boots.
Minas Gerais is also known as the home of the world’s greatest soccer player, Pele, and for producing much of the world’s coffee crop. Starbucks sources much of its coffee from the area’s coffee growing co-ops and Sherven showed the Rotary Club photos of a huge coffee operation and a dairy farm that milks 550 cows, three times a day, using automatic milking machines.
Although Sherven did not speak Portuguese when he arrived, he got along fine in school, saying the kids and teachers were really great. He also learned to play soccer, but said he was “pretty bad at it.”
Sherven also had opportunities to travel, visiting the area’s waterfalls and Manaus, founded in 1669, and the gateway to the Amazon. He went to markets and on a boat trip where he saw the muddy waters of the Rio Negro and the blue water of the Amazon River intersect.
He also visited the city of Rio de Janeiro, and saw and swam in the ocean for the first time at the famous beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.