Letter from Yolande “Lynn” Hoogendyke Henry, AIS class of 1972

Can it really be over 30 years since I was in high school in India?! The years have truly flown but the memories of those years linger and it would be such fun to see so many of you who walked many of the same paths.

To summarize the thirty plus years since I graduated from AIS in New Delhi, my life went like this…

I attended the Canadian Junior College in Neuchâtel, Switzerland at the foot of the Jura Mountains. No longer Lynn, but my birth name, Yolande, I spent a great year in which I lived with a French Swiss family and another Canadian student and made periodic trips home to Delhi to see the family. Upon graduation I returned to India and then on to Greece and finally Jamaica where my father had been cross-posted.

In the fall of 1973 I returned to Canada to attend Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario where my brother Guy followed two years later. Fantastic university years. Finished with a degree in French and English literature not to mention a boyfriend, Steve Henry, who I would one day, marry. Did the proverbial back-packing around Europe and came home needing to make money. Had a fantastic job working in Toronto as Operations Manager for a travel wholesaler, Adventure Tours and traveled frequently to the Caribbean. In 1980 the birth of my first son Shaun kept me home and I stayed there for 15 years and the births of two other children, Scott and Saskia.

In 1985 my husband’s job took us to the nation’s capital. Life in Ottawa was never dull with community and school involvement and environmental activism working to create a Canadian chapter of the Women’s Environmental Network and sitting on various government review boards looking at amending legislation and promoting green initiatives. I wrote a children’s book and was a columnist and freelance reporter for two community newspapers as well as writing for several environmental journals.

In 1995 I went back to work and helped open a new bookstore, the Ottawa flagship store, Chapters. I worked heading up the social science department and later as marketing manager. Great jobs. I loved working with the many university students working to put themselves through school and also being surrounded by books, literary types and authors.

Management of the company changed and personal plans to move to the country and build a log home were underfoot in 2000. I left Chapters in the first year of the new millennium. In 2001 I began working for an association of superior court judges and in the fall of last year I managed to convince them I could manage Association business from home and happily there I am in the Gatineau Hills watching snow falling on cedars.

My husband is an IT expert though his vocation is organic growing and market gardening. He is hoping to do more of the latter but two kids in university, one in BC and one in Quebec, precludes early retirement. Middle child working with a stonemason in one of Ontario’s beautiful lake districts. Hoping to entice him home to help with our own Easter resurrection, the stone fireplace in the log house.

Brother Guy (class of ’76) is working as a financial planner in Toronto. Guy has traveled extensively in his private and business life and had countless adventures too numerous to recount. He remains an avid reader, humorist and raconteur.

To all our good friends from Delhi days we send our best wishes and hope we can look forwarding to crossing paths again.

Yolande

Ottawa, February 2005

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