The summer I was fifteen I learned to drink moldy tea. At least, this was how my Russian host family translated the name for the sweet-sour drink they served me with dinner. These meals were cheerful affairs, since the fallback position when conversation ran thin was to nod and smile a lot. Crowded around the trestle table in the living room, my parents and siblings would ask me simple questions and heap my plate with food whenever it showed signs of emptying.

From a house on stilts in a Thai rice field to a stone cottage on Ireland’s western shore, I have relived this scene many times in the intervening years since that first summer. Certainly the faces change; the potatoes are replaced with rice, a whirring fan is substituted for the smoky peat fire in the hearth. Yet underneath it all runs a current of sameness: the goodness of strangers, the fragile yet persistent companionship that spans those cultural and linguistic gulfs.

It’s hard sometimes to picture the reverse: that our familiar Madison scenes might conjure up the same mixture of excitement and apprehension in another kind of kid. That our homes, our streets, our gardens and trees might seem as new and yet indelible to someone for whom every fresh scene is a possible memory to be fixed. But it is the enduring sense of how powerful this experience can be that has led me to want to share my own community as others have shared theirs with me.

This August, 1,300 international high school students will arrive in New York through the Council on International Educational Exchange, a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated for the past fifty years to helping young people gain the knowledge and skills to live in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse world. Council Exchange students are between 15 and 18, come from over 30 countries, and have studied at least three years of English. Students have health insurance and bring their own spending money, but otherwise become part of American families for the five to ten months they spend in local high schools. Host families can come from all walks of life, including single- and same-sex parents, as well as couples without children.

As a local representative for Council living here in the Tenney-Lapham area, it is my hope that families in our neighborhood might be interested in sharing all that our community has to offer with some of these kids. If you are interested in hosting a student, please contact Beth Gross at 608-819-0336, or by e-mail at egross@ssc.wisc.edu.

-Beth Gross

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