9/27/2007 - World of experience

Marion Van Dijk
Nelson Mail

In the past 60 years, more than 10,000 Kiwis have spread their wings and done an AFS student exchange. Joy Stephens discovers how the experience has influenced the lives of some Nelsonians.

When Nelson MP Nick Smith was growing up in a family of eight children, he told his parents that he would rather do an overseas exchange than, like other family members, go to a private school.

So he went to Rangiora High School and in 1982-83 did an AFS exchange to Wilmington, Delaware, about 30km out of Philadelphia.

“As a young person I was fixated with the news and decided quite early that I wanted a political career. The US is very much the birthplace of liberal democratic values and I felt that an exchange there would be a valuable experience for my future career,” he says.

Young people who do student exchange programmes such as AFS want to see how others live and to test their own ideas, says Smith. And the experience certainly broadened his horizons.

“I had three host families and the biggest cultural experience for me was not US life but the different religious streams. My first family were very strict Methodists, the second was a Jewish family and the third a Catholic family. And all these families sent their kids to a Quaker school, which was a hotbed of left-wing thinking.

“I gained a healthy appreciation that good people can have different beliefs.”

Then, as now, the issue of Israel and Palestine was high on the agenda and it wasn’t until the young Smith had been staying with his Jewish host family for a few weeks that he realised the painting of a large tree on the wall represented 1000 years of the family’s history:

“About one-third of the branches were broken from family members dying in the Holocaust.

“It didn’t necessarily make me more sympathetic to the Israeli cause as I believe there has to be a route that acknowledges the rights of both Jews and Palestinians, but it gave me an understanding of the level of pain these people have endured.

“It also enabled me to see at a grassroots level the power which the passionate Jewish lobby has on US politics and why US foreign policy will continue to favour Israel.”

Through a Kiwi connection he was able to spend a few weeks during the summer break at the Delaware State Legislature.

“I knew about New Zealand political history and I’d had a view of politics being dominated by the views of National and Labour. But in the States I felt I had more in common with the Democrats than the Republicans, which reflects the general conservatism in the US.”

At the time, Smith was a member of a group called Nuclear Free Nationals. He found his anti-nuclear warfare views were regarded as being “rabidly left-wing” in the US in 1983. In fact, someone wrote in his Yearbook: “Nick, you radical you! Take care of those conservatives in New Zealand – right?”

As well as broadening his political horizons, AFS gave the self-proclaimed nerd (“applied maths was my baby”) a range of useful skills for his future political life.

“My language skills had always been weak. In the first weeks in the US, I wrote a piece for the school magazine which was not particularly literate. I found the maths and sciences at the school rather boring, and the principal wanted me to do a writing course for the whole year.

“Those skills were invaluable when it came to later writing my PhD thesis, and now in politics I’m reading and writing all the time.”

Smith maintains contact with his three host families and is still invited to major family events in the States. His interest in international relations continues through chairmanship of groups such as the New Zealand Japanese Parliament Friendship group and the Parliamentary Friends of Tibet group.

As a 17-year-old, Bruce Fraser travelled by train from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon to meet his AFS host family and wondered what he was getting himself into.

Waiting at the station, the Bowman family was also wondering about the commitment to host a boy from the other side of the world for a whole year.

They needn’t have worried. Thirty-two years later, Bruce continues to visit his American family regularly.

“I still treasure and will treasure until the day I die the fact I gained another family. I was extremely lucky but the bond and closeness that exists between us is irreplaceable.

“The `folks’ regard my children as their grandchildren, and my host brother, Mark, is my closest friend in the world.”

Fraser applied to do AFS in 1974 when he was a boarder at Waitaki Boys High School in Oamaru.

“It was the challenge of living in a new environment and culture – and a desire to get out of New Zealand and learn more about the world,” he says.

With an interest in a law career, he had taken a fairly traditional academic course, but as a senior at Beaverton High School in the US he found a much more liberal curriculum.

“Academically, I gained a wider understanding and appreciation of the arts. And I think my understanding of people was enhanced – at the end of the day people are people no matter what their beliefs or ideas. That’s been important for me as a lawyer because you need to understand a wide range of people.”

The wet-behind-the-ears kid from small-town New Zealand was awestruck when he visited his host father Larry’s workplace. At the time, Tektronix was one of Oregon’s largest employers and a cutting-edge integrated circuits company.

“The company was at the forefront of the electronics wave that hit in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When I saw the labs, honest to God, I thought it was science fiction.”

Fraser is grateful to Larry for teaching him something else: “I learned from my American father how to show emotion and how not to be afraid of it. American men are more willing to show their emotions.

“When I came home, I remember my parents commenting on the remarkable transformation in me. I had to be more confident and you have to do a lot of speaking and engaging with a lot of people.”

On his return from the States, Fraser studied law at Canterbury University.

“I’d been back about three years when the folks rang from the States saying they wanted me to go over for Christmas and they’d pay my airfare. It was a no-brainer – of course I went.”

“After I finished my degree I went every two or three years,” Bruce Fraser says. “It’s a high priority for me. I’m not going to maintain the rapport unless I see them and I love being with them.”

The intercultural exchange experience continues for the Fraser family, with Bruce’s daughter Natalie having recently done a student exchange to Germany.

Lucy Stronach became so immersed in French during her first four months in France earlier this year that on a train trip from her village in the Poitiou Charente region to an AFS camp in the French Pyrenees, she and an American girl were speaking French without realising it.

“We said this is ridiculous, we should be speaking in English – but it took me an hour of speaking in a mixture of English and French to fully get back into English.”

A Year 13 student at Nayland College, Stronach was hosted by the Genard family in a small French village about five hours south-west of Paris. There was only one other exchange student at her lycee (high school), a Norwegian girl whom she discovered after two months.

“For the first two months, my mind was blown at school because I couldn’t understand anything. After about three weeks I made friends and I hung out with people but I couldn’t really understand what they were saying. I was quite lonely sometimes but that’s part of being an exchange student. I just focused so hard on learning French,” she says.

While Stronach is still adjusting back to New Zealand life, she says she learned many things from her AFS exchange.

“The most important thing was learning to speak French but also I am more confident and believe in myself more. Everything was so complicated in France that nothing seems very difficult back in New Zealand.

“I also learnt not to judge people by how they look, who they hang out with or how they talk. In the past I might have thought I wasn’t on the same wavelength with someone, but I met so many different people that now I can talk to all sorts of people. I think that’s a very good skill to take into life.”

She says that she watches international news with interest now because she met AFS students from all over the world and wonders how different events are affecting them.

“Because you know people in different countries, the world becomes a very personal place.”

Joy Stephens is a Nelson Journalist, a member of the Nelson AFS committee and the mother of Lucy Stronach.

Republished with permission.