World travels are not foreign to exchange student
Sponholz has lived in Germany, South Africa, Singapore, Switzerland, Slovakia and plans to move to AustraliaBy Kevin Sweeney Journal Editor
Article Photos
NEW ULM - When Rhoda Sponholz meets someone new, at a business meeting in Singapore, for instance, or somewhere else in the world, people will ask her where she's from.
"From America - New Ulm, Minnesota," she tells them.
"New Ulm?" they ask. "How did you get here?"
It all began with a clipping from The Journal that her mother, Nancy Sponholz, handed her one day when she was a student at Minnesota Valley Lutheran High School. The New Ulm Rotary Club was looking for students interested in being a Rotary Youth Exchange student to Ulm and Neu Ulm in Germany.
It was the first step in a life journey that has taken her around the world, she said.
Sponholz, who has worked for Daimler Financial Services in Singapore for the past four years, spoke to the New Ulm Rotarians Tuesday about the difference the exchange experience made in her life.
Sponholz, the daughter of Martin and Nancy Sponholz of New Ulm, said she had a lot of questions and misgivings when her mother first suggested applying for the exchange.
"When you're that young, not knowing the language, not knowing what's out there, you wonder about it," she said in an interview after the Rotary meeting. "We lacked a lot of access to other countries."
But she jumped at the chance, spending her senior year in high school (1991-92) in Ulm, Germany, where the Rotary clubs of Ulm and Neu Ulm had an exclusive exchange program for many years.
Sponholz said she learned a lot about intercultural relationships, and about what being an American meant.
In Germany at the time, there was some social discord among Turkish immigrants who had moved into Germany after World War II. Discussing that with her German hosts led to discussions of the American experience with minorities. Germans, who keenly felt the guilt associated with Nazi Germany during the war, asked about how she felt about the treatment of Native Americans.
Her interest in intercultural relationships led Sponholz to take up German studies when she returned to the U.S. She studied at Concordia College in Moorhead, taking its German immersion course, and finished her degree in German at the University of Minnesota. After a couple of years working in international communications in Minneapolis, Sponholz wanted to get back overseas.
She joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Slovakia. Sponholz used her German skills for a while "until my Slovakian got better than their German," she said.
After the Peace Corps Sponholz studied with the Thunderbird School of International Management, based in Phoenix, Ariz., and spent one trimester at their campus in Geneva, Switzerland.
She earned her MBA degree and was recruited to work by Daimler. She worked at the Daimler-Chrysler offices in Michigan for a while, then worked in South Africa for several months before settling in Singapore. She is Senior Manager for the Regional Business Process Management in the African and Asian and Pacific areas.
It all started with the exchange experience, she said.
"It's like when my Dad would take us down to the river here in New Ulm and we'd skip stones across the water, seeing where they'd end up," she said.
Among the experience she would have missed without the Rotary Exchange was meeting her fianc, Corn Kriek, a native of Tzaneen, South Africa. He was a Rotary exchange student in northern Germany at the same time Sponholz was in Ulm farther to the south. They met on an exchange student ski trip in the Black Forest, and communicated for several years afterwards. A couple of years ago they resumed correspondence.
Kriek also took an international turn in his career. He went to medical school in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has been practicing in New Zealand for the past eight years.
Next year, the two plan on moving together to Australia.
"My mother complains that I don't come home enough, but I tell her it's her fault. She's the one who gave me the article," Sponholz laughs.
To anyone interested in an exchange experience, Sponholz offers this advice - to tough it out over the challenging times when you will bump up against language differences and cultural differences. Find the happiness in the experience and "put it in your pocket."
