Foreign Exchange Students

A lady in our ward is the director for a foreign exchange program thats works with a university in China, there are also a few friends that work for this company so we have been asked a few times if we were interested in hosting. It hasn't worked out for us until now and we finally said yes!

   We had the BEST experience with it!

We filled out the paperwork, back ground check etc and promptly got two packets telling us information about each girl coming to stay with us for two weeks. It had their names, ages, interests and a note to us from them. We were so excited and the kids kept asking "how many more days until the girls from china get here?!" 

    We cleaned out the office and got their bedroom set up, candies on their pillows, new lunch pails for them to use while they are here, American flag key chains... We also made a poster to great them with. 

The night finally came and we went to pick them up from a meeting point at one of the host families house. 

Everyone was so excited to meet each other, they all loved the kids since its rre in china to hve siblings. 

   On the drive home I tried asking how their flight was and when it took about 5 minutes and had motions to translate "airplane" I knew it was going to be much harder then I thought!

   As it turned out, it was hard to hear in the car and they just needed a few days to get used to speaking english all day. They have taken It for 7 years but we still used google translate a bit. After adjusting and us learning to giving them more time to think about how to say what they wanted we all communicated pretty well. 

   They went to school Monday-Friday 9-5. I dropped them off and picked them up. We spent evenings and weekends together playing board games, shopping, beach trip and just staying up talking. they loved the opportunity to cook their own food and taught us how to make some tummy dishes. They LOVED our kids and the kids loved them back. They played every minute they were together. 

The next couple pictures were the jet morning with us. Getting to know the kids. 

Tina and Yvonne (their American names they picked)

We did a beach trip one day that turned out to be a bit crazy. We hit bad traffic first which delayed us and then we realized the brakes needed to be fixed ASAP. So that took over an hour as well. 4 hours later we got to the beach and ha a lot of fun (besides having to park super far away!) Yvonne LOVED swimming and boogie boarding. Tina slept in the sand and just enjoyed watching. This was the first trip our kids could actually play and enjoy the waves. 

   We ate ruby's on the pier and let them see their first west coast sunset. I don't think they cared haha

(this was also Reese's first trip to the beach-more about this in the post dedicated to her alone)

One day for class the group had to learn how to prepare a spaghetti dinner, I volunteered my kitchen and it was a say. The students and my kids played for hours and we got some yummy Chinese food after the spaghetti was done. 

 We were sad to see them go after 2 short weeks and wished we had more time with them. Josh and I still text with them daily. They were really nice girls and we hope to see them again!