Arrival

We got word this afternoon that we may pick Penny up on Friday.  It’s official.  In less than 5 days, we will be parenting a teen and a toddler. 

We are so excited.  In a way, it’s like adopting all over again.  You don’t know what you’re getting.  You wait and wait and wait and all of a sudden someone hands you a kid and says “Good luck!”  I think we have an advantage—we already know that we can be handed someone else’s child who looks nothing like us and love her like she is our own.  I am excited to have the chance all over again, even knowing it will only last a finite period of time.

I have been having similar symptoms in preparing for Penny’s arrival as I did for Leah’s.  I go to the stores frequently, just in case I’ve forgotten anything.  Penny’s room is now armed with tissues, pens and pencils, erasers, tape, glue, a slew of pennies my dad left for her, a radio, new blanket and sheets, and we’ve moved the furniture again for about the 12th time.  We put risers up under the bed to lift it off the floor and give her storage room for her suitcase underneath and we finished cleaning out her closet.  This week, I washed out the shop vac, cleaned up the yard, and made an appointment for the carpets to be professionally cleaned.  I have a chore list as long as my arm, which fortunately several friends have volunteered to help with.  I am getting my hair cut on Friday morning.  Michael is taking the day off work.  We are putting the finishing touches on a welcome basket for her, and have a crack team of friends brainstorming on signs to welcome her.  Now that we have an itinerary from AFS of her arrival and our arrival, we can plan the trip north to pick her up.

I know all the students must be getting nervous about making the trip for their exchange year, and I’m sure Penny is no different.  We haven’t heard from her in a while now, and I understand that.  I’m sure she is tucked up with her family enjoying her final days with them before setting out on the adventure of a lifetime.  We look forward to welcoming her on Friday!!

One Week

One way or another, this time next week, we will have 2 daughters in this house.  We still don’t have any information about Penny’s arrival from AFS, thanks for asking, but we know if she doesn’t get here Friday, she will get here on Saturday.  I am so excited and nervous and and and!  It will be strange parenting a teen and a toddler at the same time, but I hope that at the very least, Penny will help me corral Leah for a while! haha

I think I have finished getting everything I wanted for her room.  I have most everything I wanted to put in a welcome basket for her.  I just have to make a sign and maybe get her a teddy bear or something she can hug if she gets lonesome and doesn’t want to hug us. :-)  We are having the carpets professionally cleaned on Thursday and I will spend all this week cleaning up the house and hoping Leah doesn’t totally trash the place in the meantime.  There are certain things I’m just not going to bother doing until I absolutely have to—things like washing the fingerprints off the sliding glass door and picking up toys.  Other than that, everything is fair game.

I wonder what Leah will make of the whole situation.  I wonder how our first days and weeks will be.  I wonder, I wonder, and soon I will find out! 

Student in Need of Home

I have some information on a student from the Philippines who has a visual impairment. AFS is urgently seeking a home for him on the East Coast, but not in Virginia. If you are willing to be a welcome family or permanent family for Mark, please email me at s u s a n k (a t) m k o s i o r (d o t) c o m for more information, including a contact person.

Thanks!

Advice from One Who’s Been There

Today I have chatted with my AFS brother, Frank.  He stayed with our family from 1995-1996.  He came to the US from Ecuador and stayed with a welcome family until they found him a placement in Northern New York.  Unfortunately that placement fell through and my sister, being student president of the AFS chapter in our school, was obliged to take Frank home.  What was supposed to be a 3 or 4 day thing has turned into a 15 year relationship.

I asked Frank this morning what advice he has for us hosting a student for the first time and here’s what he said:

Just be yourselves and everything will be fine. Remember that she is going to be worried about 1000 things because everything is new, specially coming from a culture so different from yours. I think she is going to be confused because when I went, although Ecuador is pretty much like the US in the way of living, I was completely lost. So just be understanding, that's it...

I love my brother! :-D 

Me, Frank, and our sister Judy, summer 2005

Orientation

Yesterday we went to host family orientation.  It was a nice mix of volunteers and families.  Some of the families had hosted several times and some of them, like us, had never hosted before. We got a lot of information and handouts about how to successfully welcome the student into our home, what things we might expect, who to call for help, and so forth.

We were also very fortunate to be able to connect with the other family from Fredericksburg who is hosting.  They are actually taking in two students, both girls, one from Finland and one from Norway.  They will both attend the same school as Penny.  We got a lot of information about how the school operates and what to expect at registration and graduation, all kinds of great information and insight.  They live right up the road from us and so we exchanged contact information and they said we can call them any time.  It is great to have a lifeline.

They STILL do not have a date for us.  Apparently it all depends on when the bus gets all the kids loaded up in New York and manages to get to Virginia.  Frustrating, but that’s how the process works.  We are also waiting to get the name of our liaison so we know who to contact if there or problems or if Penny just needs someone to talk to.  We will have contact with our liaison 3 times per month.

We also saw profiles for several other students still needing homes.  There were a couple of boys from Germany and a boy from Russia and I think a couple of girls, but I can’t remember where they are from.  So, there are still students if you want to host!!! :-D

Update on Arrival Day!

We received an email update from our local coordinator about arrival day.  This is the latest:

Probably the most important question we can answer on Aug. 1 is 'when will the students arrive?’ It is changing almost daily but we hope to have a specific answer by then.  The rough description of the process is:

Students come in to  New York ( as well as California, Miami, Chicago and other spots) on charter flights ,  Most Virginia. students come in to NY.  Depending on the time of arrival they may spend a night on a college campus .  They are then sent by charter bus to a central spot for their local orientation. There will be several busses during the period from Aug11-14, bringing students to PA, MD, and DC as well as VA. These buses can arrive any time of the day or night depending on the flights , the weather,the amount of time spent in customs, the number of students involved.  During that 4 day period literally hundreds of AFS students will arrive, be met by staff and volunteers and sent on their way . Once at the destination they receive a required Arrival Orientation .  On the day it is finished they will be available for pick-up by their host families.

Hopefully we will get an official word on August 1 when we have our orientation.

Meanwhile, I have been enjoying the hosting community on Facebook.  I have become “friends” (as sanctioned by Facebook) with a couple of other host moms (including one, Kati, who (is this cool or what?!) is hosting a girl from Thailand and who adopted an AA baby just like us!), and have been reading up on the Virginia section of the community for kids coming to the US this year.  We have one other girl coming to Fredericksburg, which is pretty cool.  I have sent an email to Penny and encouraged her to sign up for a Facebook account.  I think it’ll help her with networking with friends once she gets here as well as connecting with AFS and other students experiencing similar issues.

AFS still needs a few host families in Virginia.  It’s not too late to sign up! :-)

About AFS & Why We’re Hosting

 

We decided to host through AFS since I (Susan) am a 4 time AFS host sister and my own sister went abroad for the summer with AFS.  In 1990, my family hosted our first AFS student, Yuko, from Japan for the summer.  She was followed in 1992 by Cornelia from Germany, 1995 by Sofia from Sweden, and 1996 by Francisco from Ecuador.  In 1993, my sister lived with a family in Spain.  I am still in touch with Francisco, whom we call Franc, and he has been back to visit us several times.  I have dreams of going to Ecuador sometime to see him and his country!  I do searches for Cornelia and Yuko every few months but have yet to find them.  It would be amazing to re-connect after all this time.

AFS is an excellent organization to host students through.  There are certainly many other exchange organizations.  What I know about AFS is that there is excellent local support when issues arise (as they do even in the best placements), they have an extremely dedicated volunteer corps, and a history of service.

The history of AFS as copied from their Host Family Handbook:

AFS was founded in 1915 as the American Field Service Ambulance Corps and later reactivated in World War II. Having witnessed both the devastation and brutality of those wars, Stephen Galatti, the Director General of the American Field Service Ambulance Corps during World War II, challenged his comrades to focus their post-war efforts on peace-building. His vision was to educate a new generation of enlightened world leaders. By bringing high school students from countries formerly at war to the United States to live with families, study in secondary schools, learn about the American tradition of volunteerism, and develop a sense of community, his hope was that we could prevent future wars.

The AFS exchanges were a radical idea at that time. Stephen Galatti actually wanted to bring German high school students to live in U.S. communities that had lost young men fighting Hitler’s forces during the war. Yet in this tremendous
risk was a compelling vision that eventually took root and grew, both in the United States and around the world. Within a few years, returning AFS participants eager to share the new found insights from their AFS program began organizing volunteer committees in their own countries modeled after the AFS chapters in the US. Soon they were able to reciprocate the hospitality they had received.

From 1947 until the early 1970s AFS exchanges were bilateral--between the United States and as many as 80 other countries. Then, mirroring the move towards the unification of Europe and the globalization of trade, AFS volunteers in Europe launched exchanges among the countries of that continent and, shortly thereafter, exchanges with other regions of the world. Multinational exchanges soon flourished and currently make up the majority of total annual AFS
exchanges.

Today, more than 13,000 participants are exchanged every year from more than 50 different nations around the world. AFS offers more programs than any other organization in a range of countries that truly reflects our global mission. We at AFS are proud of our heritage and mission, and believe that we, and now you, are contributing to world peace, one AFS Participant, one family, one friend at a time.

For more information, please visit http://www.afsusa.org/

Michael and I have wanted to be a host family for a long time.  In 2002, when we lived up in Massachusetts, we had the opportunity to host a girl from Japan for a two week stay.  Unfortunately, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan broke out, and consequently the Japanese officials canceled the trip.  After that, we moved to DC and just felt we haven’t had time to devote to a student with each of us working up north and commuting upwards of 50 or 60 miles per day.  Now that I am a stay-at-home mom, we decided that we had time to devote to the needs of a teenager and zipping around to school functions.  We want to devote ourselves 100% to the experience of having an active teen and participating in school functions.  We don’t have a lot of experience with teens, and so our AFS volunteer suggested that teens in Thailand are very respectful to their elders and might be a good way for us to ease into parenting a teen.

We have already passed our first hurdle.  Penny was not sure what to call us.  Because we are so much younger than her natural parents, she did not feel comfortable calling us Mom and Dad.  We were both fine with that—being Mom and Dad in our 30’s to a 17-year-old, while logistically possible, would probably feel a little strange.  We all agreed that she’ll call us by the nicknames that our friends have established for Michael and that he has established for me:  The Chief and Cookies.  All of our emails, even from Penny’s mom, are now address to The Chief and Cookies.  It is so sweet! 

Our preparations for hosting Penny are more or less complete.  I have gone over to the school and registered her there.  When she gets here, we will go back and help her select her classes.  Hopefully we will be able to tour the school and help her to get her bearings before she has to go on her first day and feel overwhelmed by all the students and activity.  I went to the same school for 13 years, being from a very small town, and can’t even imagine going to a new high school in the US, much less in a whole different country, so I hope that we can ease her transition a bit with a tour.

We switched two rooms in our house—our basement room was formerly a guest room, and is now Michael’s office.  His upstairs office is now Penny’s room.  Not only will she now feel more like one of the family instead of being “banished” to the basement, but the basement room did not have a closet, and the upstairs room does.  We felt a closet was most important for our student to have!

We were very fortunate to have friends help us move everything, build some new furniture for Penny (she needed a desk and shelf), and install a corkboard for her.  We have invested in an extra set of bed linens and lighter blanket for her.

We are also very lucky to have the support of our friends and family as we start this new adventure.  Everyone is excited and curious to meet Penny.  One of her main concerns is that she will have a hard time making friends.  We are lucky that the young lady who babysits Leah and cuts our grass has already emailed Penny and they have started a nice correspondence.  Because our daughter Leah is so young, I am active in the toddler set, not the teenager set. 

The next step will be to attend Host Family Orientation on August 1 in Oakton, Virginia.  The orientation will be held at the same place as where we will pick Penny up two weeks later.  We have to decide on making a sign or some other type of greeting for our first meeting with Penny.  Anyone with ideas, please feel free to drop me an email at s u s a n k (a t) m k o s i o r (d o t) c o m Her favorite colors are purple and orange, if that helps!