Hearing the call of AFS

I just got an e-mail that knocked me into a thoughtful mood, as e-mails sometimes do. It was from AFS Intercultural Programs, and started off like a typical fund-raising spiel, until I reached the second paragraph, where it dropped this little bombshell in my lap:

As an AFSer, you have the necessary knowledge to offer one of these students an opportunity of a lifetime. … Please consider welcoming a student for 6-8 weeks starting in mid-January. If you are interested, or to learn more about this opportunity, reply to this email and a Hosting Staff member will be in touch.

“Hot buttered Moses on a pogo stick — me, an AFS host parent?” is more or less an accurate approximation of my initial reaction, but that first wave of shock was quickly pushed aside by the salient observation that, you know, there are worse things I could do with a year of my life, if we had the space to accommodate a high school student in our home. We don’t, this year; but I’m willing to consider it for the future, if  we eventually move to a bigger house.

I lived in New Zealand for a year during high school, from January 1987 through January 1988, courtesy of AFS. During that year, I attended school at Edmund Rice College in Rotorua, New Zealand (renamed after the second trimester as John Paul College, following its merger with Mary McKillop College next door), and made friends with other students like David Baines, Keith Wisniewski, and Mark Warihana; and with other AFS students from Germany, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Japan, Costa Rice, Spain and other parts of the United States.

On the wall near my computer are my patu and kotiate, two of the ceremonial Maori weapons I bought as souvenirs, along with the taiahas that were given to me as replacements for the one that some SOB stole at the high school football game where my younger brother had been using it for part of the pre-game show.

To say that my AFS year was formative would be an understatement. It was in New Zealand that I got a glimpse of how my homeland looks from the outside, and had my first real contact with cultures widely different from my own. It was there that I had my first encounter with the evangelical sort of Christian faith that I embraced for several years.

It’s quite possible that without my year in New Zealand, I wouldn’t have gone to the college I did. I certainly would never have gone to Haiti, and without Haiti, I never would have welcomed a foster son into my home. My AFS experience made me who I am today. My only regrets are that I went somewhere so culturally similar to the United States, and that AFS lacked a reorientation program for families of returning students.

I haven’t got the room in my house to house a teenager, and we haven’t got the money to add one to our family, but I can’t recommend the program highly enough to anyone who’s willing to try it, either as a student or as a host family. AFS and other exchange programs like it, are programs that our world increasingly needs.

With the rise of nationalism in Europe and the United States, and the increased suspicion of people who are different from us, brought on by the rapid changes of globalization, programs like AFS offer a necessary counterweight, by building human connections between different cultures, and giving us a broader human perspective than we will ever get without leaving our own countries.