When my son’s high school asked for volunteers to host an exchange student from Colombia or Spain for a week, I knew we’d want to do it. The only question was, which country?
My first thought was Spain. This way, I figured, if my son was traveling in Europe some time, he’d be able to stay with that family. It never crossed my mind that someday my son might want to visit Colombia.
But my son had a different idea. Colombia – to him, the unknown, on a continent he knew very little about – was much more intriguing than Spain.
I thought about it and realized he was right. If the point of this was cultural exchange, it was better to pick a place we knew very little about. So we signed up to host the Colombian.
A week later I got a phone call. The parents of the Colombian children were worried about them staying in certain neighborhoods, especially outside of Manhattan. How safe is the place I live in Brooklyn, the coordinator wanted to know.
I had to suppress my laughter at the irony of the question. This student lives in Medellin. Wasn’t that for years one of the cocaine capitals of the world, plagued with drug-related violence? I was offering this boy a room in a quiet, leafy neighborhood where the biggest problem is making sure you drive slowly enough to look out for kids playing ball in the street. My third-grader walks to school by himself, it’s so safe, and I told the coordinator as much. I also assured her that we would pick up and deliver the student wherever he needed to go so that he wouldn’t have to ride the subway or even walk around unescorted. But I couldn’t help but think that the exchange program was already working – the mutual stereotypes of dangerous New York and dangerous Colombia had been pierced on both sides of the equator.
I can’t say that we sat around with our guest, Sebastian, picking his brain about whether New York or Medellin is a safer place to live. But he and the other Colombian students who stayed with families from my son’s school alluded to the fact that there, like here, there are neighborhoods where you would never go, and neighborhoods that are perfectly safe.
A couple of the Colombian boys bought skateboards at a store in Times Square to take home, and I took that as a sign that wherever they live, it’s probably fine. Parents don’t let their kids skateboard outside if they’re worried about shootings and kidnappings.
But I was struck even more by how well the Colombians fit in here. They play the same video games as my son; they dress like him, have their own iPods, sent e-mails home. About the biggest difference – my son is a hip-hop fan, and while I had set our guest’s radio to the local Latin pop station, he asked if he could change it to rock. And on the one free day our guest had in his itinerary, when I offered to take him anywhere he wanted to go, he chose shopping at the mall and seeing a movie with my son over museums and Broadway.
Was all this the result of the Americanization of the world, or is there a global metro youth culture that all hip city kids now belong to? It’s hard to say, but I do know that when I took my teenage cousins from Vermont on the subway, they found it quite freaky. These Colombian boys, in comparison, were utterly blase, even though they don’t have a subway in Colombia. They had the see-no-evil attitude down to a T.
One small thing I learned from our Colombian friend was that Juan Valdez is not just a symbol of Colombian coffee for American audiences. There is a chain of Juan Valdez cafes in Colombia – like their Starbucks – and to my surprise, there are even a couple of Juan Valdez cafes in New York, including one in Times Square where the Colombian students had their pictures taken.
Our guest fit so well into our family that I felt like he could have stayed with us indefinitely and it would have been fine. But after a week, he was due to fly home. I told him to tell his mother for me what a good boy he’d been, and how well she’d raised him.
A few days later, I got an e-mail from her thanking me for my kindness in hosting her son. She also extended a warm invitation for me and my family to visit their “beautiful city of Medellin” some time soon. I must admit, until now, Medellin is not a place I ever imagined I would go. But my son is already dreaming of the day he can make the trip, and who knows – I might just have to go with him.
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This week’s advice: Find a way to host an international guest. Ask at local colleges if there are international students who might need a friendly place to have Thanksgiving dinner, or who might enjoy coming over for Sunday brunch some time. Find out if your child’s school might be able to take part in a short-term exchange program with a youth group somewhere around the globe. Or initiate an informal exchange of your own. I work for an international company, and got to know a family in France after they sent a message to our New York office asking to meet others interested in a mutual exchange. They have visited us here, and we have visited them there. One organization that sponsors international students who need homes in the United States while they study here for a year is . However, hosting a student for a year is a major commitment and is not always trouble-free; some families who’ve had bad experiences have aired their gripes at .
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