8/27/2007 - Coming to America

by Alyssa Sunkin
The Citizen

AUBURN - Maggie Hoercher traveled almost 10,000 miles to Australia and still got to celebrate Halloween.

The 18-year-old Auburn woman took a year off from her upstate New York life last year to spend it in Australia, a place where there was no Halloween.

“I arrived at school (on Halloween) and all of my school friends had all of this American candy,” she said, “and they were passing it out like it was Halloween and we were trick-or-treating. And they just told me that they didn’t want me to feel homesick, they wanted to celebrate Halloween with me so I wouldn’t leave.

“That was a big moment for me because that was when I realized that they cared about me as much as I cared about them,” she continued. “They really thought about how I would feel and my reaction to homesickness.”

Hoercher went to Australia with the Rotary International’s Youth Exchange, an 80-year-old program that sends children ages 15 to 19 abroad and hosted by families for as short a time as a few weeks to as long as an academic year. For every student a Rotary chapter sends abroad, a foreign student is sent to the same chapter and hosted by Rotary families. Rotary has relationships with 82 countries and 8,000 students.

“This is a youth exchange to really build relations between America and other countries,” said Jeff Hoffman, youth exchange officer for Rotary and director of the Cayuga Community College foundation. “In a time like this when we are on a war footing and what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is important that we have people coming to the United States and Americans going out into the world.”

According to the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, a nonprofit dedicated to identifying reputable international youth exchange programs, the United States sent 2,359 American students overseas and took in 28,268 foreign students in 2006-2007. New York ranks second in the nation for sending 175 students overseas and 13th for hosting 808 exchange students. It is trailing behind 48 states, however, in terms of the percentage of hosted exchange students in comparison the overall student population, with a meager percentage of 0.091 percent. Montana leads the nation at 0.672 percent.

The number of students the state can host depends on the number of families volunteering to host exchange students.

Ron Butler, of Auburn, a volunteer and mentor for students and families who participate in Youth for Understanding, a youth exchange program founded in 1951 to heal the wounds opened between Germany and the United States after World War II, has had difficulty over the years finding enough volunteers to place foreign students eager to come abroad.

“We need more volunteers that will host or help us find hosting families to support and represent the kids,” he said.

Butler and his wife, Deseret, have been hosting exchange students with YFU since 1982.

Currently Butler is looking for a family to host an exchange student from China who has already been accepted by YFU and Auburn High School, but has no family to live with. And if no one volunteers to host this boy, he will not be able to come here.

“It’s hard to tell a student after his or her family has spent a lot of money for tuition and other coverage, ‘Well, you can’t come. It’s difficult to find you a family.’”

Executive Director of the Cayuga County Chapter of the American Red Cross Susan Marteney just picked up her most recent YFU exchange student, Hoi-Jung Lee from Korea, from the airport. Marteney, who has been involved with youth exchange since 1979 when her parents were hosts, believes that students living with other nations’ families is a way to gain a perspective about cultures that is not easily obtainable through tourism.

“I think travel is wonderful, but living with a family gives you a different taste of what a country is,” she said. “But at the same time, don’t think that my house is the typical house. There is no such thing as a typical American house.”

Despite some difficulty in recruiting volunteers to host foreign students, in the past four years CSIET recorded a steady increase of foreign students traveling to the United States; the number of American students studying abroad has varied only slightly.

John Hishmeh, executive director of CSIET, said it is difficult to identify the root causes for these trends. Neither CSIET nor the United States Department of State have the tools in place to conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis, relying on the some 80 individual study abroad and youth exchange programs to gauge popular attitudes.

However, Hishmeh points to academics as one possible cause for American students to remain in the country during their high school years. Questions about coursework overseas and receiving credit for that work as well as missing out on PSATs and Advanced Placement courses can hold students back from engaging in international travel, he said.

“The high school students here may be too booked up for a year if they do travel abroad,” he said.

“There are some concerns with all of the things American high school students need to do to get into the college of their choice and whether they will be able to do that while traveling abroad for a year,” he said.

But studying abroad can strengthen the college application.

“It can make the college application competitive,” he said. “I’ve been told that traveling abroad is a built-in college essay.”

YFU has informal relationships with the admission offices at over 150 colleges and universities nationwide that “publicly recognize the value and importance of study abroad programs,” said Reid Rago, director of development at YFU.

These colleges and universities, which include many of the nation’s top universities – Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford – as well as local institutions such as Hobart and William Smith and Wells, offer preferred admission, scholarships, grants and financial aid for participants of study abroad programs, not just for YFU alumni.

Through his involvement with YFU, Rago believes that it is not a concern about completing the testing and paperwork requisite for higher education that has made the outbound numbers stagnate while the inbound numbers grow each year. Instead, Rago points to American culture for the answers.

“American students don’t feel they need to speak a second foreign language as much as international students want to speak English,” he said.

“For better or for worse, American culture is very polarizing around the world but it is also very visible and is of high interest to people. Whether their view of American culture is based on reality or not, people around the world want to come to the United States and live. They want to live with American families, speak English fluently and go American high schools even more so than their American counterparts want to go abroad, even to popular destinations such as Spain, France and Japan.”

That is not to say, however, that Americans do not share a curiosity about the world.

Rosie Scheibel, 17, of Fleming packed her backs and left for to spend a year in Uruguay with YFU on Aug. 16.

“You get a whole new outlook on everything in the world, not just America but the world outside,” she said of her year abroad. “I get to learn a new language and a new culture.”

Scheibel was first exposed to youth exchange when her brother, Ronny, spent a month in Australia in 2001 with People to People Student Ambassador Programs. After hearing about his experiences abroad, Scheibel wanted the opportunity to see what it would be like to study abroad herself.

“It’s just an opportunity to see what’s out there,” she said. “In school they tell you about all of the opportunities out there and they give you opportunities, but this is a way to see what is really out there.”

And Europeans, too, want to see what is out there.

Reka Marton, 17, of Hungary and Stephanie Kessler, 18, of Austria traveled from their home countries to the United States earlier this month to stay with American host families in Jordan for a year with AFS-USA, an organization dedicated to creating a more peaceful world by engaging in cultural exchange through a global volunteer partnership.

Marton came to the United States to experience American culture first-hand.

“Living in the United States for a year, I think naturally gives us the right idea,” said Marton. “It’s a lot different than just reading about it. You’re actually living it.”

AFS-USA brings in about 2,800 exchange students to live with American families and sends out about 1,800 American students each year, said Rich Dollery, regional hosting manager for the Eastern region.

“I think it really exposes students to a global economy,” he said. “It helps them gain a better perspective about how other countries see their country. AFS promotes social awareness of the differences between cultures so that (students) can appreciate them and make people more likely to live in harmony, make the world a more peaceful place.”

And that is exactly why Daniel Dienhoffer, 16, of Moravia, went to Denmark earlier this month with Rotary Youth Exchange.

“We need to get out there and see that we can get along,” he said. “We are more alike than we are different. Even though we have different cultures, we are all people.”