It all happened so fast but we are now host to a foreign exchange student from South Korea. We were approached last Wednesday by a lady looking for families in the area who are willing to host foreign exchange students. One particular student was due to arrive on Monday from South Korea but his original host family was struck by a sudden emergency and could not take him. By Friday, my father-in-law had agreed to host him and signed the papers. The 16-year-old student will be going to the high school a block away from the house. Today, he arrived with the program coordinator who picked him and another student up from the airport. She briefed us on the hosting experience, had my father-in-law sign some more papers, and went on her way.
The tired lad is resting right now. We scrambled to empty and clean a room previously occupied by my wife’s nephew and gave the room to him. At such short notice, the emptied contents of the room are sitting in the middle of the house in several boxes. The next few days will be busy as we do some more cleaning and rearranging of stuff. We’re a little anxious but surely excited about the prospect of being a host family for a year to a student from a far-away land.
A year huh! Now you won’t have any excuse for not blogging more often
. Good luck! Kwento ka.
hey cool! I’m sure your Korean guest is as anxious and excited as you. On the upside he might one of those tech crazy Koreans teens I’ve been reading about. ^-^ kekeke!
Ernie: I’m hoping this’ll be fodder for things to blog about for the year ahead.
Mark: Funny you’d say that. When we asked what time it was in Korea, he busted out with this cool Pocket PC-type thingimajig and looked it up for us (of course, looking at his watch would’ve sufficed).
This will be fun for you guys! Guest, too, of course. When we lived in Manila, we had the priveledge of hosting 4 different highschoolers from the US and Canada. Lots of fun and learning on both sides. One of the guys taught us how to play mahjong! That was backwards
Four?! You guys are pros at this! Gimme some pointers, Phisch.
Pros? Hardly, eh. Considering the language at home and the native language of our guests were the same, it wasn’t that hard. Plus, we had them for 8 weeks only I think. They came through a Rotary Club program so they stayed with other Rotary member families. We were the same age, so we just took them to places like Greenhills, shopping in Makati, stuff like that. The other stuff they wanted to do like inuman was bawal for us so they had to go meet up with other people to do that
One thing we did learn, though, was when they were new in the Pinas to make them aware of the “bad” words. One guy we hosted didn’t know any, and some of his classmates got him to cuss at his teacher without him knowing. He wasn’t too happy.