On hosting exchange students

I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog that we host exchange students. We’ve had at least one exchange student per year since 1999, when we hosted our first student, German boy Till Baumgardt.

Fabian, the German boy here now, is the 12^th student we’ve hosted. In addition to Germany, we've hosted students from Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Mexico and Spain

The way it evolved was this: my wife came home from work in West Virginia one day and said one of the receptionists at work had a mother who was looking for people to host exchange students. She asked if we knew anyone who was interested. Hmmm…my wife had been somewhat interested in hosting at some point, as she spent a summer in Germany while she was in high school. However, we were involved in the process of changing houses at the time and thought the upheaval would be too much. In addition, our kids were 6 and 4 years of age, too young we thought to function as host siblings.

Nevertheless, we filled out some basic paperwork the next day. We got a call that night in a German accent – I passed the phone to Melissa because I thought it was one of her German host family members. Wrong! It was Till, and he would be at the Clarksburg, WV airport in two days.

Now calling the Clarksburg landing field an airport is being very charitable. I’ve seen Burger Kings that are bigger than the terminal. Get there an hour ahead? Yeah, right, five minutes is plenty of time since there’s only one gate and the planes coming in and out only seat about 20 people. So, long –story-short, we had an exchange student plus a complete household, kids, horses and dogs to move to our new house.

I think it was a big help to have so much work to do with our new family member. Out of necessity, he was immediately treated as a member of the family: toting moving boxes and painting rooms with the rest of us, experiencing the chaos and frenetic pace that often characterizes our lifestyle. We’ve tried to carry that family feeling over to subsequent exchange students.

We’ve learned a lot though hosting students…things which will hopefully help us as our own children are reaching the teenage years. I think it’s helped our children, too, giving them a wider view of world events by discussions held with the students, typically among the best and brightest from their countries.

They’ve learned to treasure the time spent with others, too, because at the end of the exchange year, the students must go home. Sometimes they come back to visit, and we often chat with ex-students over the internet, but the heartache is always there when we take them to the airport for their ride home. And we always ask ourselves on the way home from the airport why we put ourselves through this yearly anguish.

In a nutshell, I think we do it because we have been fortunate in our lives and want to share our good fortune with others, because we really learn about other people and cultures and because we are fortunate enough to have in our lives, for a school year anyway, some of the most amazing young people in the world. The absence of a student would also leave a glaring void in our family makeup.

So we’ll cry when Fabian leaves for the airport this summer. Another cherished family member will have left the nest. And we’ll ask why we do this to ourselves, yet again. The answer of course, evident since Till first stepped off that plane in Clarksburg, is because we couldn’t imagine it any other way.