The AFS Effect

During the spring of the 1965-66 school year, my sister Beth was using her excellent typing and business skills helping in the Wolcott (CT) High School business office with Mr. Pelegano. One of the tasks that he was working on was the application of the high school to host our first ever foreign exchange student. Having typed out an announcement to be sent to parents asking if anyone would like to be a host family, Beth brought home a copy and asked our parents if they would consider it. I was going off to college that fall and so we would have an available bed. After considering it, my parents agreed. They filled out a host family application and sent it to the NYC office of AFS (then still called the American Field Service).

Little did I realize at the time that this would be the first step in something that impacted me for the next half-century!

 

Being a Host Brother

The process was much different in those days. Chapters were school-based, matching of students to families was done in the NY office by the staff working with stacks of the family and student applications, and students from Europe arrived by ship – using the time on the ship for their orientation. Our family was matched with a girl from Norway. Like most people, we incorrectly thought that Norwegian girls would be blond with blue eyes. But when we received a copy of her application, we were surprised that she had brown hair and brown eyes.

[Newspaper Article]

 

Ingrid

As noted in this newspaper article about a week before her arrival, Ingrid was from a town called Hammerfest, Norway. Hammerfest is in the far north of the country and boasts the northernmost ice-free port in Europe even through they are above the Arctic Circle (they catch the tail end of the Gulf Stream). They are also the northernmost incorporated city in Europe.

In preparation for Ingrid’s arrival, I was moved out of my bedroom and relegated to the basement (stone walls, concrete floor, no heat, etc.). It wasn’t too bad for the month of August, but when I came home for our Christmas break, it was pretty cold down there!

As the newspaper article indicates, our family went to the dock in New York City where we met the boat arriving from Europe. (As I recall, my parents left my younger siblings back in CT with relatives, so it was only my parents, myself, and my sister Beth who went along for the ride.)

Ingrid immediately became a valued member of our family. My parents took a number of pictures that year with Ingrid featured in them. I’ve included many of them below with short captions. I’ll let the pictures tell the story of that momentous year.

[Pictures of Ingrid] These include her with her Norwegian family, her graduation from high school in Norway and in the US, the MSU sweatshirt I got her for Christmas, My taking her to the Christmas Cotillion, helping my mother in Girl Scouts (Ingrid was a scout in Norway), her being “mayor for a day” in Wolcott, and taking a swim in February (to show how she was used to cold water! – brr!)

 

We were all sad to see Ingrid return to Norway at the end of the year. But that did not mean that our relationship with her ended – in fact, it is going on to this day. My parents visited her in Norway several years later. My sister also did the same. And Ingrid also visited us – one of the most memorable when we put on a surprise party for my parents’ 50^th anniversary where family members kept walking in on them – including Ingrid! The pictures below are of my father and Ingrid’s father in Norway and a picture of Ingrid and my sister Beth with our mom the year before my mom’s passing. We are still all friends on social media and I am proud to call her my Norwegian sister!

 

Rosita

Six years later, as my younger sister was also approaching the end of her high school years, our family hosted yet again. By then the AFS chapter in town was much more established and the high school actually had two students that year – Rosita from Barbados (who stayed with us), and Betty from Ecuador. By that time my sister Beth and I were both married and my wife and I were living in the next town. So we didn’t have as much interaction as we did with Ingrid. But as you can see from the pictures, she had just as good a time. Being from a warm climate, that school year she experienced her first snowfall (it happened at night, but she got all dressed up and went outside to throw her first snowball), and she learned to ice skate (albeit with a bit of trepidation). For the Christmas Cotillion, my brother Chuck did the honors like I had done with Ingrid. My parents also later visited Rosita in Barbados, although we never established quite the closeness as we had with Ingrid.

Here are some pictures of Rosita from that year…

 

After two experiences of hosting, my mother became a local AFS volunteer, so she continued to interact with the students being hosted in our town for the next several years.

 

Being a Sending Family

When our daughter, Kim, was in high school she thought that she might choose international business as a career.  Having had this exchange student exposure in my past, I suggested that she might want to study abroad for a year in high school.  We checked out the available programs and found that the exchange program that Ingrid and Rosita were part of, the American Field Service, now called AFS Intercultural Programs, was still the premier program in the industry, so Kim applied through them.  She preferred colder climates (and still does), so she listed Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, as her three choices and was selected to go to Norway for her senior year of high school.

While she was in the same country as Ingrid, Ingrid was still in the far northern reaches of the country and Kim was living with a host family on an island not too far from the capital, Oslo. To put that in perspective, the distance from Hammerfest to Oslo (1200 miles or 2000 kilometers) is about the same as from New York City to Miami. And because the roads are often narrow and winding and even include sections where you have to take a ferry across a fiord, the time for the drive is 28+ hours compared to the 22 hours on US interstates. So Kim and Ingrid never got to see each other there.

 

Being a Host Family

That got us on AFS’ mailing list.  A few years later we got a letter saying that AFS was urgently looking for host families for students who were not yet placed for the coming school year.  They were due to arrive in just a few weeks.  We contacted the person listed in the letter and were sent a list of a couple of unplaced girls (from Hong Kong, Venezuela, and Mexico) with just a sentence or two about each one.  Kim was living at home at the time, so we took a vote – my wife voted for the girl from Mexico and Kim and I voted for the one from Hong Kong.  Just a week or so later, Wing Man Ma (known as Christy) entered our home and our lives. (I was serving on the board of directors of Lehigh Valley Christian High School at the time, so was able to work with the school to set up their host school policies and practices.)

We were the only host family in the Lehigh Valley with AFS that year, so when there were a few more families the following year I organized a picnic for the host families and started an AFS chapter.  A few years later we agreed to host Shirley Mensah from Ghana.  A month or so into that year we were made aware of another girl who needed to change host families, so we agreed to host two at the same time and added Jiraporn (Noon) Tabtimdaeng from Thailand to the mix.  By this time I was also the sending coordinator for our team (which covered Delaware, eastern shore Maryland, and eastern Pennsylvania) as well as the chair for our local chapter.

We enjoyed that year and got quite close to both Shirley and Noon. I was able to visit both of them during the years which followed – the below pictures are from those visits. So now in addition to my Norwegian sister, my wife and I have daughters from other countries.

[Pictures of Shirley and Noon]

 

Local Volunteer and Short-term Host

A few years later we also hosted Ben from Switzerland.  He was not able to adapt to our relaxed, not always super clean style of living, so after a few months he moved to the home of another family in Emmaus.  In the in-between years we were also host families for a number of short-term students (ones whose host family was on vacation when they arrived, for students in between host families, and other situations).  So students from Italy, Australia, Canada, Germany, Chile, China, Greenland, and Indonesia, among others, were also passing through our doors. For some of these students, I was the local support coordinator and met with them regularly. I am still in contact with some of them.

One incident that was significant was when we hosted Adi, from Indonesia, for a short time at the end of the year when his host family was taking a mission trip to Mexico. I took him to work with me for the day and showed him the kind of work that I did. At the end of the week he announced that he wanted to have the same kind of career that I had. And he did! Upon his return home he went to university in the same field, is now married with one child, and is using his talents in similar ways. One never knows what kind of impact one will have.

Here are a few pictures of some of these students who were with us for a short time. I am still in touch with some of them!

 

 

Being a National Volunteer

My volunteering was at first just locally – organizing a picnic of the other host families the year after we first hosted and then starting a local Lehigh Valley chapter.  Then the following year I was elected as the sending coordinator for the team when the previous person in that position abruptly resigned.  But my organizational skills enabled me to take over that position and greatly improve it during the next several years.  I served in that role for about 10 years before turning it over to others, but still remained involved in the sending process by interviewing students, etc. Since I was running the Lehigh Valley chapter, I also got involved in hosting, i.e., finding host families, interviewing them, and supporting them during their hosting experience. 

A few years after my involvement began the organization went through a reorganization process and changed the role and election procedure for the National Council, the body that represents their 5000 volunteers to the management.  I thought that my management and organizational skills would be useful, so I submitted my name as a candidate.  I was elected to that body for a three-year term, then in my second year was elected as the chair of the National Council.  That same year they changed the makeup of the Board of Directors and gave the NC chair an ex-officio seat on the Board, so I also served for three years on the Board.

From host brother to sending parent to hosting parent to local volunteer to area team volunteer to national volunteer to serving on the Board of Directors – it is amazing the number of ways that I became involved. But not only did I impact them, they impacted me as well!

 

Advisory Boards and Others

In addition, I was serving on a number of other national committees and advisory groups – the Outreach to Educators Advisory Group (because of my work with LVCHS), the IT Advisory Group (because of my IT background), and then with the International Relations Committee of the Board (because of all my international and cultural experience). 

One of my more interesting involvements was helping to write a series of handbooks for US families hosting students from “country X”.  First, I was on the committee to do one for Germany (involved spending two weeks with corresponding volunteers from Germany – one week in Germany, one week in the US).  Then I adapted that handbook to Austria.  After that I worked with another volunteer to develop one for Ghana.  Finally, I led a team to Thailand to prepare a handbook for families hosting students from Thailand. Thus, of the 11 country-specific host family handbooks, I had a significant role in producing 4 of them (see https://dev.afsusa.org/host-family/resources/#afs-nav-host-family-handbook).

 

 

Future Impact

Recently, one of our grandchildren announced that he thought he would like to become an exchange student. He is currently considering a “gap year” program, possibly in the Netherlands. We have encouraged him to do so. That would be the fourth generation of our family to be involved! “And the beat goes on.”

 

Summary – the AFS Effect

The AFS Effect is real. Not only does this program for exchange students touch the student – and change their life forever – but it also touches the host family, their friends and neighbors, the school they attend and the students in it, and others. Sometimes the immediate impact is short-lived but there are still residual impacts for the rest of the person’s life. In other cases, such as my own, there is significant impact that lasts for a half-century or more.

I have no regrets about any of the above. I am a better person because of all the aspects of this program that I have been able to experience. My understanding of other cultures and my love for people who have experiences far different than my own continues to impact me – even though I am now retired for many years and no longer directly involved in the exchange student field.

If you have the opportunity to do so, take it seriously. You’ll be glad you did!