0
0
As mountains zipped by through the car windows, her jaw fell open. She knew it would be different, a reality that was only experienced before through phone screens and her mothers stories. Life in the U.S was foreign to Mila Richters, every part of it. Everything from cheers at the football game, the deer crossing the road, and the random hellos in the halls. But for her and three other exchange students at NS, they stepped off planes with burning excitement for the new world that lay ahead.
Becoming a foreign exchange student is an opportunity that many teens dream of, and at NS there are four new students from different parts of the globe.
The process of getting here involved a mix between paperwork and convincing unsure parents.
“My mom, of course she was crying and stuff, but she was supporting me though,” Piet Henze from Germany said.
Despite the hardship of missing loved ones, the chance to experience the U.S culture has been fun, rewarding, and new. Some parts of daily life for students at NS are different to them, including sports being available as a part of school. Mila Richters from Germany, and Martina Cerezuela from Spain have been playing on the NS girls soccer team. For Richters, soccer is a replacement for handball, a similar sport she played at home for the past six years.
“I wanted to play soccer since I was like ten, but there was just no club near me for girls,” Richters said. “I’m happy I can do it here.”
One common struggle among all the foreign exchange students is immersion in a new language. Most of their schools had English programs in place since early elementary, but a big reason most of them came was to develop English more fluently.
“The language at first is so hard, because I don’t know how to express myself.” Cerezuela said.
Even with the difficulties of learning a language, the exchange students have been pleasantly surprised at the patience and how normal being polite is in the U.S. For many of their home countries, people are generally more forward and direct.
“Everything is big, everyone is friendly, and that’s really cool,” Faustine Girardin from France said. “I’m really happy to be here.”
The classes at NS have been an adjustment for the exchange students. The consensus between them is that they have previously learned a lot of the material they are going over now. Some classes that are harder here are Language Arts and Math, because it is difficult to understand the way it is taught in English, not necessarily the subjects themselves.
It has been exciting for them to try elective classes, an opportunity that in their home countries would not be as readily available.
“You just have the basic classes in Germany, so I have woods class here, you don’t have woods class in Germany,” Henze said. “ Or like conditioning, you don’t have that. There’s a lot of classes here that you can’t pick in Germany. In Germany if you actually want to do something like woods, you will stop in tenth grade and go to a specialized school for that.”
The exchange students have big plans for the year that lies ahead. With upcoming sport seasons, dances to attend, and classes to experience, new memories will be made that are bound to last, even after they have left the U.S.
“ My mom went to the U.S herself, she was in Missouri when she was 16 for a year, and she used to tell me it was one of the best experiences of her life,” Richters said. “ My dad didn’t go abroad in general, and he always told me it’s one of the few things in this life he regrets, that he didn’t take the opportunity to go. So I just wanted to go because it sounded cool.”
