A Family Exchange

My son came home from school one October afternoon and sat down at the kitchen table to have a snack  "Mom, remember I told you that I have a friend at school who is an exchange student from Ecuador?"  "Yes."  "Well, the host family she is living with is not treating her right.  There was a whole weekend when the family left her at home and all she had to eat all weekend was cereal.  They make her clean the house all the time and the host mom is always yelling at her.  She has asked her host  parents and the agency representative to talk to her parents, but they refuse to.  She's asking all the girls at our lunch table if she could come and live with their families or else she thinks she has to go home because she can't live like this for the entire school year."

"Then tell her that she can come here."  I responded.  

Later that day I filled out paperwork that the agency representative sent me including the names of four references (none of which were ever checked by the representative).  The next day I met the girl and the representative.  Three days later she moved in to stay with us for the next eight months.  

How could I do this?  How could I not?  What if it was my child in a foreign country being mistreated by their host family who is also refusing to communicate with me?  Okay, so yes, as my husband did inform me, I could have at least asked him first.  But when I go into "mommy mode' there is no time for asking him and I already knew two things, first that if this girl was my son's friend, she was a good person and so I wasn't worried about her being trouble, second, that if my husband had any misgivings, he would come around.  When it comes to a child's safety, everything else is secondary.  It wasn't like I was taking the time to decide to do this and researching which agency to use and which child to open my home to.  This situation already existed and something needed to be done about it.  

In the first days after she came to live with us, I sent a private message on Facebook to her previous Host Mother asking her if there was anything she thought I should know.  Her response was horrific!  She called the girl names and tried to justify how she treated the child by saying that she yelled at everyone and that since she couldn't afford to hire employees to clean the house, she expected her exchange student to do it.

I knew that I would be giving her safety and a good home here in the U.S., what I didn't know at the time was what she would be giving me.  She brought a lot of joy and life into our home and she opened my eyes to see how much we have here in America that we tend to take for granted.  

She had only known the U.S. through movies, so when I took her to New York City, she wanted to see Central Park, The Plaza Hotel, and the toy store from Home Alone 2.  She didn't know Broadway, Times Square, or Rockefeller Center.  Watching her face as she saw Manhattan for the first time was priceless! Christmas at our house is always the event of the year, and although she celebrates Christmas in Ecuador, it is nothing like we do here.  She did not even know what a Christmas Stocking was.  The first time it snowed, she saved a snowball and put it in my freezer.  She wanted to bring it back to Ecuador with her.  I finally had to throw out the snow ball and tell her that it would melt if she tried to bring it back.  (She still reminds me that I threw out her snow ball.)  While she was here we looked into the possibility of her attending college in the U.S., but found that it was a near impossibility because financially, it is extremely expensive.  There is no financial assistance to students who are not U.S. citizens.  And to receive a scholarship, they not only have to perform extraordinarily well on SAT's, they have to do it in English which is not their native language.  It was hard to see her face as we exhausted all possibilities and realized that she would have to return to Ecuador to continue her education.

In the spring we found out that our daughter was going to be going to Ecuador for the summer to learn Kichwa, an indigenous language, in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  Of all places in the world, she was going to the home country of our exchange student! 

In June, a week before her return to her country, her mother came for a visit and to accompany her on her trip back home.  Our daughter had a few days overlap here to meet our exchange student's mother.  We had a wonderful time seeing our families blended together for that week!  Now, our daughter has completed her current studies in the Amazon and is spending a week at the family home of our exchange student in Ecuador.  It is now our daughter who is in a foreign country and she is being taken to see things that she has never seen before.  Fate has brought our two families together and now we are truly a Family Exchange.