Exchange Students

A Year in America

“No one looks back on their life and remembers the nights they had plenty of sleep.”

Jamal Mughal- Exchange Student

“Exchange isn’t a year in your life, it is life in a year.”

Norma Latini

I have always wanted to travel around the world. It is very exciting to see and learn about other cultures and traditions. Also I wondered what people in other countries think of my country. That is why I applied for an Exchange Student Program. I was excited to show people about my country’s culture and traditions when I got selected to be an exchange student and spend a whole year in America. It was also terrifying. I have never spent a whole week without my family. How could I spend a whole year without them? Becoming an exchange student was a big commitment and responsibility for me to take, so that I can satisfy my curiosity of learning.

I heard about America a lot from the movies, songs, news, and politics. This country was mysterious to me. What do these people eat? What do they think of my country? How am I going to show them the cultures and traditions of my country? Do they really have Spiderman? Are they afraid of Arabs? These were some of the questions that I was thinking about before coming to America. I realized that most of the other exchange student ask themselves the same questions.

Before coming to America, I thought about a lot of stereotypes about America that I heard from T.V. For example: Americans are fat, Americans are rich, Americans are ignorant of the world, and America’s gun crime is out of control. These stereotypes made me more curious to know if they are real or fake. Surely, Americans have a lot of stereotypes about my country.

America can be considered one of the biggest countries that has many cultures from many countries around the world. In America you can meet people from all around the continents of the world. It is a great advantage of America. One of the reasons why America has many cultures and people from around the world is foreign exchange programs.

Foreign exchange programs exist to provide the intercultural learning opportunities to help people develop the knowledge, skill, and understanding needed to create a more just and peaceful world, as the foreign exchange programs provide the sharing of history, culture, and traditions of the participants’ home country. To be selected for the exchange program, the applicant has to pass some qualifications. The exchange program has standard of people that can travel and spend a year in America. The applicant has to do an interview, and they look for the applicants that have cultural honesty. After the interview, There at least four camps for the students who have passed the interview; so that the specialists in the program study the students’ behaviors in different situations and analyze which student can be best to show people about their country and can stand homesickness and taking responsibility. Once the applicant passes, he/she get informed of the information about the host family and the state that he/she is going to.(Ayusa)

Norma S. Latini is an American mom who works for Ayusa International Global Exchange. “I have been there for ten years; I put international students with host families. I placed over a hundred student; I had at least two students every year,” said Norma. Norma is a host mom and her job is also to put students with their host families. She claimed to be a hundred and four years old, but when I disagreed with her, she replied, “Old enough to know better, young enough to care.”

The purpose of Ayusa is that exchange students learn about our great country, and we learn about their cultures and their food so we can have more understanding about countries and provide peace to countries that we have never heard about before. (Latini). Norma described her job; “I worked for Ayusa because I have been a teacher for years, and after my husband being killed in a terrible highway accident. It was in 1989; and I started working for Ayusa in 2004. ”

Ayusa is one of the big organizations for exchange students programs. One of Ayusa’s organizations is AFS. It is an international, voluntary, non-profit organization that began in 1915, after World