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Amoeba - My Blog
Amoeba - My Blog
AFS Intercultural Programs
Related to country: Spain

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Maybe some of you heard about AFS Intercultural Program's recent fiasco. They sent a healthy highschooler to Egypt for a year of foreign exchange, and four months later he was flown home at 97 pounds, and hospitalized for two weeks, where he managed to regain 20 pounds.

Read more about that here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/travel_brief_starving_student

And if you know me, maybe you've heard me gripe about them too. This thoroughly convinces me of how flawed an organization this is. My Junior year in highschool I very much wanted to stay in Spain and become fluent in both language and culture there. I spent many months attending meetings, conferences and interviews, getting letters of recommendation from my counselor, a teacher, my parents, my doctor, assembling transcripts and lists of activities, applying for visas and a passport, writing 4 essays, having my parents write a couple essays and filling out pages upon pages of paperwork. I postmarked my envelope at the start of the year, January 2007, and two days before my birthday I received a call telling me my application had been rejected.

Because I am gay.

On the other hand, I am not short $9,000, and I have not been placed with an incompetent family who would use the money paid by the organization for other uses. I would like to say everyone would use the monetary supplement provided by the organization to help the student grow and learn instead of giving the money to children you already have. Obviously the screening process for families is flawed. AFS also erred in not alerting the exchange student to the fact they placed him with an extremist Coptic Christian family. Does this mean only families who already have enough financial cushion to support an exchange student should volunteer their homes? Does giving money motivate the wrong people to open their houses for monetary gain?

March 14, 2008 | 9:20 AM Comments  1 comments

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bumbuwazed R Kahendi
March 22, 2008 | 5:33 AM

I did read about that, and was angered.

While I support exchange programs, I'm not an advocate for sending high school students on them. You'd have to be dependent on the goodwill of some stranger halfway across the world to look out for the welfare of a minor. That must be a scary prospect for any parent who watches the news. Studying abroad in a country where you don't necessarily speak the language is very disorienting. I've known some to have emotional breakdowns and return home early, simply because the experience was too overwhelming for them. Others fall physically ill because they can't cope with the stress.

Makes more sense for people to volunteer or study abroad as adults. They would have more viable options than minors if a crisis did come up. And at least they would be able to rent an apartment on their own or stay in a motel/ hotel if their living arrangements were too restrictive.
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