By Taylor Morgan,Auburn Middle School

Foreign exchange students are really fun to have live in your home because they are like a part of your family. I know this because my family has had a couple of foreign exchange students come and live at our house. The first one was from Indonesia and the last one was from Germany. We have a program through our church that looks for homes for these students and every year we think about having another student live with us. So far it has been fun and interesting to have them come to visit our country.

Our family is called a “Host Family.” The program enables high school students from around the world the opportunity to live with an American host family and learn firsthand about the American way of life. The students live as a member of your family, attending the local high school for one academic school year or one semester. Host families are of varied economic, religious and racial backgrounds, and include working parents, childless couples, parents and couples whose children have grown. I enjoyed having a foreign exchange student live in my home because it gives me the opportunity to learn a lot from the student about their culture and customs. Hosting a foreign exchange student is a great way to share your culture and to learn about another. Their language is different and it gives us an opportunity to learn another language.

By living with our family for about a year, we become very close. We enjoyed having our Germany exchange student live with us. We still keep in touch and one summer she came back to visit us for a couple of weeks. She says she is still waiting for us to come and visit her and her family in Germany. I think that would be really interesting and it would be a new adventure for me to visit Germany. We also keep in touch by e-mail and she fills us in with what is going on with her all the time. She is very nice and she hasn’t missed any of my family’s birthdays. One of my dad’s favorite things to receive from her is her grandmother’s famous cookies that she only makes once a year at Christmas time. Every Christmas we send her and her parents gifts and she sends us gifts from Germany. I enjoy doing this because most of the items we send her such as food, makeup, candies, clothes, etc., she may not have in Germany. One thing she didn’t have in Germany that we sent was a lot of Macaroni and Cheese because she liked it when she was here. They now have it in Germany so we no longer have to send it to her.

I wonder if I could move away from my family for a year and live with another family in a different country!

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