Lucy van oldenbarneveld biography template

She kept that job until she finished high school. Before deciding what to do after graduation, there was an eclectic rotation of possible vocations—not all of which, Lucy says, were grounded in reality. They included: professional tennis player, professional baseball player, journalist, secretary, lawyer. She was also drawn to current events and politics.

I thought the political process was so fascinating. At 17, she took a solo bus trip to San Francisco. I still think of it so fondly. When she returned home, it was nice—at first. But before long, the question of her lifetime popped up: Now what? Lucy was the first person in her family to attend university. Once she got there, she saw the point.

In the summer before her final year, she blew her savings on a six-week trip to Guatemala. But she still says it was entirely worthwhile. She spent a year bartending and waiting tables in Kingston before deciding she needed to get away. That might sound miserable to some; to Lucy, it was invigorating. It was an incredible time for me to go through the Inside Passage of Alaska.

It is breathtaking, it is so beautiful. There was still snow on the ground, but she pitched her tent anyway.

Lucy van oldenbarneveld biography template

After a few months of camping and the occasional housesitting stint, as well as bartending, she found her own place and moved into the world of policy and speech writing. Lucy left with her friend Michelle Madden, during a break on their two-week canoe trip along Wind River in Yukon. Lucy also revisited her performance roots. She acted in local plays and joined the dinner theatre cast of Rendezvous Comedy Review.

For the school year, Lucy took 10 months away from Yukon to teach English as a Second Language in Beijing—after the friend of a friend tossed the idea out at a wedding in Yellowknife, NWT. So, she went back and rehearsed for a few weeks before taking the show to fringe festivals in Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, San Francisco and, finally, back to Whitehorse.

It immediately became clear that broadcasting was her big passion—and something she was truly great at. She went on to host and produce The Late Edition for two years. Though even in that steady position, she found time for other adventures; case in point, she popped over to Washington to run the Seattle Marathon. Intrigued, she discovered that they often hired CBC journalists as their English-language hosts.

I had planned to go back to Yukon after Germany; I had a house I had bought, stuff in storage. I needed to wrap everything up. As always, she listened; as always, it worked out for her. So, I thought it would be a good place to set up shop. It was also the place where she met her life partner. Within months of arriving, she and Andy Clarke, then a CBC Ottawa coordinating producer, became an item, and have been together ever since.

That wound up being the first of several trips to Africa. While there, they took a trip to Kinihira to deliver funds to the local school. Luke School in Ottawa wanted to help, and they trusted Lucy to get their donation in the right hands. We stood on the edge of a hill he often looked out from when he was dealing with so many demons. Lucy surrounded by students at the local school in Kinihira, Rwanda, In that time, she left radio for television.

Then she caught on at the Yukon Council for the Economy and the Environment, where she helped write some reports. She had other talents, including theatre. Lucy acted in several little theatre productions, plays for children, and in dinner theatre with a Yukon group called the Rendezvous Comedy Review. Later, she auditioned for--and landed--a small speaking role in a American television movie-of-the-week production about a dog-sledding murder mystery.

Instead, she decided to become an actress. A friend had written a one-woman show, and in the two of them performed it at Fringe Festivals in Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, and San Francisco, ending up after two months on the road with a final staging in — where else? He asked her to fill-in for an absent radio newsreader for three weeks, and as soon as she started doing so she knew broadcasting was her thing.

Lucy landed a job as host and producer of the local afternoon radio program, The Late Edition. One thing led to another, and in she persuaded CBC to send her to Yellowknife, NWT, to learn about becoming a television news anchor. European broadcasting beckoned in , and Lucy took a year's leave of absence from CBC to accept a one-year contract as an English-language host, producer, and reporter with Deutsche Welle World Service Radio, based in Cologne, Germany.

Among her assignments were covering the discovery of Al Qaeda cells in Hamburg, the occupation of the Iraqi embassy in Berlin by an Iraqi group calling for the ouster of President Saddam Hussein, and the murder of a prominent Dutch right-wing politician and party leader nine days before the Dutch general election. She accepted two invitations to teach broadcasting skills in Africa in and On returning to Africa, Thomas established a network of radio stations.

Lucy recalls these East African journalists in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya as truly courageous people. Lucy subsequently accepted another invitation from Thomas, this time to spend two weeks in Nigeria, helping Nigerian journalists strengthen their radio skills. One of her most moving experiences in Rwanda was a five-hour trip to the village of Kinihira in northern Rwanda.

Students at St. He told them about visiting the Kinihari school twice, before and after the genocide. The once-thriving school in its beautiful setting, that he saw on his first visit, was just an empty shell on his return. It broke his heart to know that the reopened school now had no basic supplies — no desks, chairs, books, paper, pencils, or even blackboards for teachers to write on.

They also sent personal letters and photos to the Kinihari children. Lucy told the moving story of her Rwandan visit and many others to the Ottawa Overs group, as the guest speaker at a November luncheon meeting. If all goes as planned, Lucy says she may soon return to Nigeria, where she hopes to help more journalists hone their radio skills.