Naramata Centre as a Place of Transformation
Our Founder, Bob McLaren, late 1940’s
Below is a beautiful letter we received from one of our members, who was generous enough to allow us to share it with all of you:
While Naramata has occupied a place in my life since the first of September 1960, seeing the pictures of BM (with the CLTS Sign along with his Vision & Legacy) and Cottage Court in your July News Letter brought back wider memories of not only my time there, but of the many ways that experience has assisted and support me in the subsequent years.
Those six months at CLTS opened a wider world to me and literally changed my life.
Winter Session Cohort 1975-76
Until then, aside from a couple short holidays outside my isolated rural community in northern Alberta I had not lived more the 50 miles from home. At CLTS I became part of a very diverse community of about 100 persons of all ages and a great diversity of backgrounds. The Year Book says I turned Naramata upside down, for me it was the other way around. As the McLaren doctrine indicates, the things the CLTS staff, my fellow students and the wider community passed on to me changed my life.
It all started when Don Frame, the Minister at the UC Church called me at work one afternoon in the Spring of 1961 and said there was someone in his office he’d like me to meet. I was one of the Church Members who was part of a very active UC Young Peoples Group so perhaps the reason he called me. That person was Roy Stobie, in town to promote CLTS, which he did, and with hindsight must have done it well. I said I would think about it.
I don’t recall the sequence but at about that time I had asked myself if I really wanted to be in this job for life, and that may have been the spur to think, ‘why not’ and a month or so later. I sent in an application and being accepted I resigned and joined the Winter CLTS programme.
When I finished High School I didn’t see the need to go on to University as some of my classmate colleagues did, but while at Naramata I began to see the possibilities such would open, and so I started to attain that objective – further widening my horizons. This led to a lifelong involvement in Rural Development in Canada and abroad, and a very satisfying career – more a way of life than a career.
I don’t have any proof that I have managed to pass anything of value on to anyone, so can’t confirm the forever and ever part of the McLaren doctrine, but I’d like to think that I did something that has made life better for at least one person that I have worked with as I wandered the world. I know that I have been richly blessed to have had the opportunity to get to know people from a wide range of cultures in their environments.
Great to hear you are doing you best to keep up the tradition!
Let Naramata Centre contribute to your transformational experience - you belong here!