Discovering ourselves

The world has changed a lot since the first AFS student exchanges in 1947. It’s changed a lot since I spent a year in Sucre, Bolivia, in 1994. The internet and technology has fundamentally changed how we connect and communicate; how we learn and how we share our knowledge.

But despite the many changes, I believe the fundamental experiences of being an exchange student remain the same. 

For those of us lucky enough to have travelled or lived overseas as an adult, we get a first-hand view into ways of life that are often very different from our own. Sometimes I think of this as a view through a window. We’re sampling the culture, but we’re doing it from the outside. We’re eating in restaurants. We’re going back to our hotels or hostels at night. We’re probably speaking our native language with our travel companions. 

As an exchange student, you’re no longer looking through that window. You’re opening the door and going inside - literally. 

Living with a host family as an exchange student means getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. It means being ok with uncertainty and ambiguity. As a teenager living with another family, we’re very quickly thrown into situations where almost everything is different. House rules - shoes off or on? who does laundry and when? Who cooks? Who cleans? - are often ingrained and unspoken, and now need to be navigated. 

In Bolivia, kissing everyone on the cheek felt like an invasion of personal space at first. It was awkward and I was always unsure if i was doing it right. 

I finished school at 1pm and would come home and eat a three course meal. Nothing was familiar about the food, but I did learn to love some of it. 

Something I hear from former exchange students, no matter which country they’ve been to, is “I learned so much about myself”. 

It’s natural to expect that we will learn about the place we are going to. It’s less expected that we will learn so much about ourselves and our own culture. After all, we know ourselves already, right?

But we don’t really know ourselves, and we don’t really know our culture, until we are exposed to something it is not. 

We don’t know how open and accepting we are, until we are suddenly in an environment where other ways of doing things, or other beliefs are the norm. We’re suddenly forced to examine ourselves. Is this something I truely believe, or is this something i’ve never really thought about, because this is the only way i’ve ever known?

This is the philosophical concept of duality — that something can only be known in contrast to its opposite. I can only known what day is, if I also experience night. I can only know warmth if I’ve felt cold, or I can only know silence if I’ve heard noise.

We don’t know how adaptive we are, or how strong, or how easy going we are, until you are in an environment for hours on end where you don’t know what’s going on, what’s being said. As a teen exchange student, you’re often in environments - school, family life - where others are making decisions and choices for you. 

The experience of difference still exists even when you do understand the language. Students heading to the US often report more culture shock than they expected, sometimes because of a  pre conceived idea of what things are going to be like - as portrayed on TVs and movies. 

Spending a year living with a Bolivian family was a transformative experience for me. Every AFS student i’ve met has described their time as some variety of life changing or transformative. Not always fun, and usually a lot of time outside our comfort zones, but always, in hindsight, an incredible time of self discovery and personal growth. 

I’ve gone on to live overseas again - the UK for a few years, and later Chile for 10 years - but living as a adult in another country is a very diferent experience to being a teenager living with a family.