Hosting a Youth Exchange student from another country can be a wonderful experience.

It allows a host family to become familiar with another culture and provides the opportunity

to share a young student’s hopes and ambitions. Youth Exchange promises to enrich the lives of the student and every member of your family.

Host Family Responsibilities

While exchange students tend to be academic achievers with

more developed coping skills than many teenagers, they are

vulnerable, living in an unfamiliar country, and often function-

ing in a nonnative language.

You as a host have the most important responsibilities to

make the exchange a success. Host families are to provide a

safe, nonthreatening, respectful, and appropriate environment

in which trust and friendship between you and the student

can develop.

The responsibility of hosting an exchange student can be sum-

marized as follows:

• Meet your exchange student on arrival in your country, and make him or her feel at home as part of the family.

• Treat the student as you would wish a member of your family to be treated while living abroad.

• Ensure that the student is in a safe, respectful, and appropriate environment at all times.

• Involve the student in chores, responsibilities, and activities similar to those of your own family members.

• Monitor the student’s performance at school.

• Help the student master your language.

• Encourage the student to meet other young people.

• Guard the student from outside demands to allow him or her time to accept Rotary obligations.

• Be tolerant of differences and willing to change your own ideas.

The responsibility of hosting an exchange student is not complicated, but does require understanding, compassion, and patience. The rewards of hosting a student through Rotary Youth Exchange program are great. They include expanded views, international understanding, and the development of long-term friendships, to name a few.

Does anyone have any interest in hosting an exchange student for the 2009/20010 school year?

Or do you know someone that may have an interest in hosting an exchange student?