Worrying about our kids

As time passes, I find myself invested more and more in foreign news.

That’s because we’ve hosted 13 exchange students…each of whom we’ve made a member of our family and for whom we only want the best. So when we hear about disasters, political upheaval and international confrontation involving their home countries, we get the jitters.

Most recently, we’ve gotten the jitters about Venezuela and, consequently Jesus, the boy we hosted from that country in 2001.

We’ve watched nervously as President Hugo Chavez has launched his country on the path to socialism, which treads delicately on the slippery slope to communism. He’s seized many privately-owned businesses, including utilities, driven away foreign investors and seen his country’s inflation rate shoot past 20 percent. To combat the resulting shortages in his newly price-controlled grocery stores, he’s threatening significant jail time for grocers found to be hoarding food or evading the price controls. He’s seen the rich move their investments out of the country and has imposed controls on those seeking to buy dollars as a hedge against the Bolivar’s slide. In the midst of an unprecedented oil boom, his efforts have put the economy in the crapper.

That bodes poorly for Jesus, a very-bright, talented, principled young man whose natural abilities and drive would be rewarded with unlimited success in any free and open society. With socialism, however, you close the path to entrepreneurship by shutting off the rewards from such efforts. What’s the point of hard work when the government owns and/or controls the major industries? And to make matters worse, Jesus is a tech guy…computers and electrical engineering…and the market for those abilities is weighted internationally, not locally. What international company is going to be interested in doing business with Venezuela when Chavez is doing his best to curtail foreign investment?

National and international news paint the same grim picture and it worries me that all the promise of such a young man, who should be his country’s greatest source of pride and its treasure, is in danger of being wasted.

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We also just found out that our first exchange student, a German boy named Till, spent the last six weeks in a cast after breaking two vertebra in a snowboarding mishap. Doc-wife’s reaction? “Yeah, well, okay…but when’s he going to give us some grandkids?”

Medical people are NOT sympathetic. Especially not when potential grandchildren are involved….

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We’re expecting a late spring/early summer visit from Rachel, the Brazilian student we hosted in 2000. She has now finished college and is trying to decide what to do with her life…knowing Rachel, that will change 27 times between now and Tuesday.

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Jesus and Alla, the Russian girl we hosted in 2004, have been carrying on an online relationship since they met via our computer in late Fall 2004. It’s progressed to the point where the blog-daughter tells us there may be wedding bells in the near future.

I’m not sure how to feel about that…host-son romances host-daughter…isn’t that some kind of electronic/digital host-incest? A question for another time…