We have had two foreign exchange students come and stay in our home. One was from Spain. One was from China. The one from Spain was a girl. The one from China was a boy.
Both were interesting experiences that lead to very interesting outcomes in our family. We ended up going and visiting the girl student's family in Spain and spent almost 2 weeks staying with them and touring around Spain. It was amazing!
The parents of the exchange student from China actually came to our house a couple of times toward the end of the school year. He was having challenges concentrating on school and they came to help him focus as well as came to celebrate his graduation from high school.
The exchange student from China was the more challenging experience. He would actually try to hide from me and act like I didn't exist. The funniest part about it was he would walk by my desk upstairs on his way to go and see one of my sons and he would actually hide behind the corner of all and then while I was looking at something that the screen or keyboard he would try to sneak by without me seeing him. It was very funny I finally actually asked him why he hid from me and avoided me and why he did not even talk to me in the mornings when he was preparing for school and eating breakfast and when I came home where he came home and he couldn't avoid seeing. He mumbled a couple of answers four times and while he was doing that he made excuses and would not even look to me. I had explained to him that he was a guest in our home and that the student exchange program was an exchange and not just somebody living in our house.
At that point I felt a little bit froggy so I asked them if he realized that we were not getting any payment for him to stay with us. The look of shock on his face as he shook his head was disappointing. He explained that he thought that we were being paid and that he had no responsibility to talk or deal with us.
I explained to him that he was not renting a room, that he was a guest in our home, and that as a guest in our home he was being disrespectful when he avoided me and hid from me. I told him that we had invited him to be a part of our family in an effort to help them, and that everything else we were doing, from asking him to watch movies with us to taking him places to talking to him was an effort to help him learn and understand English and our culture a little bit better.
I don't know that he ever understood that. When his mother came mid-school year she was very focused on helping their only child pass high school. Which was much less rigorous than Chinese high school.
When both the mother and father came to celebrate his graduation from high school there is still this distance from him but the parents were very open and very appreciative of everything that we had tried to teach him.
I don't know if it's the difference between boys and girls, but he was not very receptive to being part of us and our family. Our exchange student from Spain was very receptive and handled us as best as she could. We're a different kind of family, and there's a lot of different energy running around in our house. She adapted well to it and actually seem to do pretty good.
If you ever have occasion to have an exchange student make sure that they understand if you're being paid to host them or not. That seemed to make a huge difference in our experiences with our exchange students. God bless America for encouraging exchanges like this!
