AFS Study Abroad Made a World of Difference

by Craig Wilson of USA Today

To thousands of youths, being an exchange student in high school is a life-altering experience. They leave the comfort of their homes and families and venture out to live in strange lands with strangers speaking strange languages. Their lives are changed forever. The American Field Service, AFS, turns 50 this year, and in that half-century, more than 258,000 students worldwide have participated in the AFS experience, one of the largest high school foreign exchange programs in existence. Fifty-one students from 10 coutnries participated in 1948. Nearly 10,000 students from 56 countries will participate this year. USA TODAY'S Craig Wilson, an AFSer to the United Kingdom in 1966, asked a number of AFS returnees a simple question: How did the AFS experience change the course of your life? Here are their responses.

Bettina Gregory, ABC News (USA to South Africa, 1963): "I became a foreign correspondent during the year I spent living with a family just outside Johannesburg, South Africa, and attending the English Girl's School. As part of my scholarship, my high school in Port Washington, N.Y., required me to write about my experiences visiting the African townships in Soweto, a gold mine or the wild animal preserves, and send pictures I had taken for the school paper. I did this. My skills as an emerging writer also got a boost when I won an essay contest for students in South Africa. Little did I know then that these experiences as an AFS exchange student would lead to a career as a correspondent for ABC News. But they did. I am so grateful AFS gave me the chance to live in South Africa, radically different and highly controversial under apartheid, and thus the chance to write about it. It formed the bedrock of my career as a journalist."

Linda Wells, editor in chief, Allure magazine (USA to Turkey, 1975): "I was plucked from a comfortable likfe -- St. Louis suburbs, girls school, close, happy family, no surprises -- and air dropped into Turkey. I thought AFS was going to send me someplace sweet -- a beach in the south of France or a hillside in Switzerland with a Toblerone in my hand. But no, I was going to Turkey. There would be no Toblerones for me.

"I lived with a family in the middle of teeming, chaotic, overcrowded Istanbul. And I loved it. It wasn't a glamorous trip. I never got to see Ephesus or Ankara or swim in the Black Sea. Yet nothing I've ever done has taught me more. I discovered there's more to learning about a culture than visiting historic monuments or reading guide books. Sometimes, life is revealed in the ordinary act of living. I ate what Turks ate, dnaced at their weddings, cheered their football team, sat at their cafes, and eventually, spoke a bit of their language without a trace of an accent. (Crowds would gather to hear the blond American talk.) AFS was total immersion -- and it was addictive.

"AFS taught me to learn in ways that books couldn't touch. That one summer made me entirely unafraid of new, foreign experiences. It taught me that extraordinary things happen when you plunge into the unknown, when you do the unpredictable, the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar.

"When I started Allure magazine 16 years later, I never worried about enduring criticism or failure. I'd been to Turkey. I lived with a family all by myself. I was an AFS student. Everything else was easy."

Jim Cooney, assistant dean for International Programs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (USA to Austria, 1964): "AFS changed my life dramatically in ways that I see every day 34 years after I was an exchange student. Through AFS ... I developed my love of international affairs.... Career-wise, everything I have done has stemmed from my AFS experience. On a daily basis I get to work with international students from nearly 70 countries, and family-wise, I married an AFSer who went to Japan, and our two children have participated in AFS programs to Ecuador and Switzerland. We also are hosting an AFS 'son' from Argentina this year. In short, AFS has shaped my career and my family for over 30 years -- a good return on my family's $600 investment in 1964."

Randall Davis, professor of computer science and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT (USA to Finland, 1965): "It changed me. I began the trip as a suburban American teen-ager, inclined to be quite a bit too intense for my own good. I learned a lot that summer. I learned a lot that summer. I learned to be semifearless -- it's an unavoidable, wonderful consequence of being taken halfway around the world and dropped into a new family. I learned the truth of the 11th commandment (Thou shalt not take thyself too seriously) and learned that a healthy dose of irreverence is, well, very healthy. I learned that reality can't be conned.

"Here's an example. One of the key concepts repeated during our pre-trip orientation was flexibility. We were going to encounter all sorts of unfamiliar situations (we were told) and the key thing was to be flexible, to adapt to whatever odd circumstance, lifestyle or custom came our way. Then we were off, and I ended up on a farm outside a very small town in northern Finland (very small town: The phone number of the general store was 7). One of the first things I notices was that the tap water tasted truly terrible. Drinking it was difficult; tooth-brushing an exercise in, well, flexibility. I did my best, gritted my teeth, grinned and bore it, trying not to let on what I though lest I offend my Finnish family and friends with my parochial inflexibility.

"But one day I slipped up and blurted out to my Finnish brother, 'Do you think the water tastes, uh, strange?' He looked at me with great surprise in his eyes and said in a disbelieving tone, 'Strange?' I could see my walls of carefully assembled pretense collapsing around me, my naked parocialism (and inflexibility) exposed to the world. 'Strange?' he repeated. 'It tastes terrible. Haven't you noticed?' Whew. International incident avoided. Reality can't be conned. I've tried to keep that in mind ever since."

Janet Rasmussen, president, Hollins College, Roanoke, Va. (USA to Denmark, 1966): "My AFS year abroad was one of the great life-changing experiences. It not only cemented my interest in Scandinavian studies, but also made me a staunch advocate of international study and travel. I want to see Hollins College planted firmly in the Roanoke Valley, very much alert to our local conditions and appreciative of those, but equally appreciative of the fact that our local community is tied into the world at large; everything that affects the world affects us, and we in turn have an opportunity to impact the world."

Cesar Gaviria, secretary general, Organization of American States, and former president of Colombia (Colombia to USA, 1963): "AFS gave me a precious gift, a new pair of lenses by which to view the world, and with these it contributed to my personal and professional growth and armed me well for the positions I would everntually take.... As young men and women learn to respect other cultures, they also develop a perspective that is both international and humanitarian, a necessary quality for tomorrow's leaders. As a result, we see in these young students individuals who will be committed to encouraging international understanding as adults and as parents of the next generation. AFS is to me a necessary steppingstone toward becoming and creating repsonsible global citizens."

Mike Sherman, senior consumer marketing consultant, McKinsey & Company (USA to Turkey, 1974): "While I probably would have traveled abroad at some point, the desire for extended and more meaningful international experiences was clearly heightened by AFS. Since AFS I have traveled to almost 60 countries.... I now live in Hon Kong and refularly work with clients and McKinsey teams throughout Asia. A usual week finds me with teams in two or three countries, working on a host of marketing issues. Needless to say, I thrive on the challenges and opportunity that an international career provides.... Because of AFS, I have developed friendships around the world. Whenever I wear an AFS T-shirt as I travel, it serves as a beacon for attracting attention. Once, when I walked out of the train station in Venice, I spied someone unfamiliar wearing an AFS T-shirt. I approached him and said 'Nice T-shirt!' He looked up and said 'Mike Sherman!' I did not remember him, but he remembered me: I was his AFS orientation group leader when he first came to the United States."

Bill Irwin, Broadway and TV actor (USA to Ireland, 1967): "My year as an AFS student began my adulthood. My own different schools in my life, but stepping outside middle-class American culture was something I had never done. (I though I had, but I had not.) Seeing my life from a distance, reading of my world froma different perspective shook me and, I think, helped develop a sense of analysis and analogy that's important for working in the theater. (I'll never forget that to do a school play in Belfast in 1968, I 'put on' an accent, but was congratulated for 'losing' one. There was a lesson in theatrical perspective there that I have often thought about.) I saw the events of 1968 from a foreign perspective, which has in the end, I think, made me love my country more than had I not been away."

Christopher Nelson, president, St. John's College, Annapolis, Md. (USA to Netherlands, 1965): "My experience as a high school student in Holland was an intese one. I lived with a new family (an extremely close one), spoke a new language, attended new schools, followed new rules, learned new customs and studied new courses. I became a Hollander as much as one could in a single year.

"After a few months I discovered that I was not an observer. I had to become part of both my worlds in both my countries. This meant making huge changes, requiring me to break down my individuality to accommodate a broader understanding of humanity. I needed to find the things we had in common across both continents, rather than the differences that separated us. This meant learning to listen better and with patience; it meant respecting and accommodating different ways. I learned that maturity comes from stretching beyond one's own personal limitations and letting others in. Just as AFS is said to shrink the world, it also expands the individual. I think I just got bigger in my year abroad. It was as though I had tappen into a larger community with a greater power to shape a better life."

J. Brian Atwood, administrator, USAID (USA to Luxembourg, 1959): "My experience in Luxembourg felt like years of learning compressed into a fraction of the time. At every corner I was forced to think about things I had never before considered. I quickly learned to realize that, just because 'that's the way they do it in America,' did not necessarily make the best way. By the same token, I came to appreciate those parts of the Amercian experience that were truly of value and deserved defending. I learned that a great deal of how we view life naturally flows from where we sit on the globe and what we see before us every day.... AFS has made those things we do not understand less frightening and far more inviting."