August 24, 2022
To celebrate our 50th anniversary year during 2018/19, we collected stories and profiles of people and institutions that have helped us build our organization, which first began as one person’s dream in 1968. We will feature one story per week on our blog. Please enjoy these “50 for 50” profiles featuring ASSIST’s dedicated board members, dynamic staff, welcoming host families and enthusiastic ASSIST Scholars.
Cécilie Rohwedder-Horvath ‘85
Germany, Orme School
My ASSIST adventure began thirty-five years ago this fall, when I arrived at the Orme School in Arizona.
Located in the desert, off the interstate between Phoenix and Flagstaff and four miles down an unpaved cattle trail, the place could not have been more different from my teenage life in a leafy suburb on the River Rhine in Duesseldorf, Germany. At Orme, some students wore cowboy hats. Rodeo was a school sport. My U.S. History class was held in an old adobe building, once the schoolhouse for kids from surrounding ranches.
It was a year of adventure. I roomed with a Native American. I joined the varsity Tennis and Basketball teams and travelled across the state because some schools we played were hours away. I camped in the snow, hiked the Grand Canyon, jet-skied at Lake Havasu and spent most vacations in Los Angeles.
It was a year of learning. In a rigorous private school for the first time in my life, I acquired study skills that served me well in future exams and in College. At Orme, academic excellence was celebrated, not a cause for eye-rolling, the way it had been in Germany. I made friends who had grown up with views, religions and family lives very different from my own. Above all, Orme opened my eyes to an entirely new reality, divergent from all I’d known before but equally desirable, if not more.
It was a year that changed everything. After the requisite return to Germany, I came back to the U.S. for college at Georgetown and graduate school at Columbia. I married an American, moved to Washington, and had a long career at The Wall Street Journal. None of it would have happened without ASSIST.
My ASSIST adventure has turned into lifelong affection. Sandy, ASSIST’s visionary founder Paul Sanderson, became a family friend and stayed at our house on trips to Germany. My father, hoping to give back to ASSIST, founded the “Foerderverein” — unwieldy German for a fund-raising initiative to strengthen ASSIST and secure its future. I, too, am hoping to give back, as a sponsor of students from Germany and Hungary, host parent and board member. A highlight each year is meeting ASSIST scholars, just as inspired by their ASSIST adventure and the opportunities it opened as I was that fall 35 years ago.
Cécilie Rohwedder Horvath, an ASSIST board member, is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Before moving to the Washington, DC bureau, she worked for the Journal in London, Berlin and Brussels. Cecilie also serves on the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute Germany and the Board of Visitors of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. A native of Germany, she is a board member of Friends of Atlantikbrücke, a nonprofit organization aimed at fostering transatlantic relations. Cécilie is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was a Knight-Wallace Fellow and Fulbright Scholar.