Liz Heatherington- Class of 1963

"This school has been my foundation in more ways than one."

Class of 1963

If variety is the spice of life, Elizabeth Heatherington has feasted on exotic dishes. She has done more than travel the world. She has become part of it. As the spouse of a Foreign Service Officer, she has lived, worked and experienced life around the planet in an unusually intimate way.

While the life of a Foreign Service Officer varies from place to place, it is unified by consistency of work and employer for the officer’s spouse, every posting is a new beginning, a new opportunity to become immersed in a foreign culture. The result for Liz Heatherington has been an astonishing diverse portfolio of work.

In 1973, the Heatheringtons arrived at their first posting in the exciting city of Hong Kong, where Liz found work as a librarian. On subsequent postings, she worked in Thai refugee camps, staffed a busy American commercial office in Moscow, worked on nutrition programs in London, and in Germany, managed a not-for-profit business with hundreds of volunteers. In Ottawa today, Liz works for the Canadian Government, providing protocol support for visitors of state.

Liz has wandered the world, but she is far from rootless. No matter where she has landed she has been anchored by her values and sense of place. That stability came, she says, largely from her family and her school, and most especially her English teacher, Patricia Blyth.

"Whether I was walking down Kutovsky Prospect in Moscow, or getting off the bus in Nongkai, Thailand, the stresses of the day were often calmed by the poetry I learned at Elmwood…Yeats, for example, Lake Isle of Innisfree: ‘I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’ This school has been my foundation in more ways than one."