Want to do a bit for world peace? Or, just help one child?
Share Your Life—Host an AFS Exchange Student
Each year, AFS exchanges close to 13,000 students, young adults and teachers from around the world who want to experience what it’s like to live and study in another country.
In the U.S. we host more than 2,800 international high school students. The experience of studying abroad in the U.S. is unparalleled.
Why Host an AFS Exchange Participant?
* Enrich your family’s daily life simply by sharing it with a young person from another culture and country
* Introduce a new culture and customs to your children
* See the U.S. and our culture through new eyes
* Develop a lifelong connection with your hosted participant and his or her family
* Help an outstanding young person grow into a more confident and knowledgeable adult
You can have a greater impact on international relations than you ever imagined. Host an AFS high school exchange student and help a young person learn about your America.
Read what the Miss Tennky Area Team AFS Hosting Volunteer, Jackie Smiley, had to share about her own family's hosting experiences.....
"Hosting an exchange student makes a difference in the lives of all those involved and it makes the world a little smaller.
For me the interest in hosting exchange students started when I was in high school when I came home with a flyer from my Spanish teacher. We hosted two girls from Argentina, one my Junior year and the other my Senior year. It was an amazing experience and one that I look back on with fond memories. Even years later, now that I am married and have a family of my own, I still thought about those memories and how it changed the way I looked at the world. I still keep in touch with the second student we hosted, and eagerly await the next photos of her children, of whom I think of as my niece and nephew.
Last year I saw another flyer. Now the tables are turned and I am the mother of a high school student as well as a very young son. I was the one who started the conversation about hosting, and I was actually surprised at how easily my family decided that this would be a great opportunity. I honestly thought I would have to do more talking and persuading.
The Hosting Coordinator started sending bios of the students coming, and I believe it was the third bio, the first boy we saw, that we decided was 'the one'. On paper, he looked to fit our family, with common interests with our own teenage son, so we took a chance. We got into the hosting process late in the season, and by the time we had all the paperwork completed, we only had a couple of weeks until Emil's arrival. Our youngest son was excited to have a new big brother, and our oldest son was looking forward to another trumpet player in the house.
It started out awkward and unsure. It was hard to know how much he understood and how much of a shock coming to live in our home for a year was to him. We got him involved with the Marching Band at school as soon as he got here, and the very next day he was at a practice. We all spoke slowly and made sure that we were being understood, but we honestly did not know what we had gotten ourselves into.
Looking back, those first few weeks seem strange, especially knowing how it all turned out. None of us, Emil included, knew what to expect and a year seemed like an eternity. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, it was like Emil had always been a part of our family. There were days when I had to remind myself he was an exchange student, because it became so easy to call him my son. The entire family had begun to have a comfort, unexplainable unless you have experienced it first hand. This teenager, who was a complete stranger, was now a family member and loved as all other family members. I don't know exactly when it happened, there was no one day that it all clicked, we just woke up and had a new family member.
As the months faded away, and the end of stay approached, it seemed like we had not known a time before Emil. We also started to realize the true impact of our experience. We now not only had a son, we also had extended family living in Austria. His mother and father became more than acquaintances, they became family. Invitations came for us to visit in the future and we extended our own to them. The biggest impact, I do believe, was on our then 5 year old son. He not only had another big brother for life, he had been introduced to a world he knew nothing about. His world had been forever expanded beyond his back yard.
When the time came to say goodbye, the tears came in floods. It was only after days of empty feelings that I realized it was not goodbye at all. As long as I am here on earth, I will always have an Austrian son, who took a piece of me with him and left behind a piece of himself for all of us."
Cluster Students - CB, FSA/FLEX, and YES
About AFS Sponsored (Scholarship) Student Programs:
AFS currently works with three sponsored student programs: CB, FSA/FLEX and YES. CB (Congress-Bundestag) students come from Germany. FSA/FLEX students are from Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (former Soviet Union republics). YES students are from Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Turkey, India, and Saudi Arabia (primarily Muslim countries).
The Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Initiative (CBYX) was created in 1983 by legislation passed by the U.S. Congress and the German Bundestag. In Germany the program is known as the Parlamentarisches Patenschafts-Programm (PPP). At the outset, the CB program was part of the President's International Youth Exchange Initiative and celebrated the 300th anniversary of German settlements in the U.S. The goal was to continue to foster what was seen as a valuable "Transatlantic Bridge" between the U.S. and Germany. AFS was selected to implement the program in its inaugural year, in part due to the long-standing partnership between AFS-USA and AFS Interkulturelle Begegnungen (AFS-Germany). Many remember that in 1947 AFS hosted its first group of German students in the United States only three years after the end of the Second World War.
The Freedom Support Act/Future Leaders Exchange Program (FSA/FLEX) has empowered students to build lasting bridges of friendship and understanding in their U.S. host communities. Many have already returned to put their experience in the U.S. to work to help build the futures of their home countries and communities.
The Partners for Learning Youth Exchange Study (YES) Program began with the 2003-2004 year. The September 11th terrorist attacks of 2001 and the negative view of Americans held in some regions, as well as the anti-Islamic or anti-Arab sentiment held by many in the United States, brought renewed focus to the need for improved understanding across our cultures. Having long known that the benefits of high school exchange programs extend beyond the student into the community at large, the international education community responded to this call with an initiative to increase exchanges between the United States and countries with significant Muslim populations.
While these three scholarship programs were created with their own aims at different points in history, they are all similar in that they originated as bills passed by the U.S. Congress, representing the will of the public to support intercultural learning as an important aspect of U.S. public diplomacy. Many communities that have hosted exchange students or sent their own children on exchanges overseas know that the benefits of exchange programs spread far beyond the individual participants. Families who host, teachers and friends in schools, and volunteers and others in the community who interact with the student all benefit from getting to know a young person from a different culture. Belief in the goodwill and personal skills fostered through exchange programs is what fuels the continued commitment of resources to programs like CB and FSA/FLEX and creates the impetus for new ones like the Partnerships for Learning YES Initiative.
At the community level, the sponsored students' experiences are much like that of other AFS students. The goals of their programs are primarily met by living with their host family and attending school. They participate in local orientations, meet with their liaisons once a month, and their support issues go through the same local channels.
However, sponsored students are also responsible for participating in a number of educational activities designed to enhance their insights into how the U.S. functions, provide impetus for a broader view of the U.S. than they might find in their immediate surroundings, and assist them in gaining an understanding of how positive leadership can be exercised. For this reason, our sponsored students are placed in groups or "clusters" within Area Teams within geographically close enough proximity that they can gather six or eight times a year, guided by volunteers who help them to fulfill these learning objectives.
The name and contact information for the Miss Tennky Cluster Coordinator are found in the Area Team portion of the Volunteers link.
Sponsor Student Cluster orientations, community service events, and other required and voluntary activities are found on the Activities page.
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