By Bob Strohm
bstrohm@wbcowqel.com
Being a student in a foreign land can be a daunting experience, however the transition can be a little smoother when your host family has hosted exchange students before.
Nate and Jennifer Roshon are one of those host families with experience as currently they are hosting their fifth foreign exchange student Teodora Stojanovic. Teodora, who goes by Teja is attending Bucyrus High School by way of Vranje, Serbia.
Jennifer Roshon explained how they got started with the foreign exchange student program.
“We heard an ad for it on the Christian station WXML and we were in a time of transition in our lives, and Nate came home and said, ‘What do you think about having a foreign exchange student?’ And me who researches everything said ‘OK’ and we jumped in and in five weeks we had our first student Diogo from Brazil,” Jennifer said.
Nate Roshon explained what has been the most rewarding aspect of hosting the foreign exchange students.
“We don’t have children of our own, and so it has been awesome to open our home. We have often said our home feels empty when there isn’t a student or a loved one or someone staying with us. It fills our home and we love them, and love hosting, and we love infusing culture into Bucyrus through bringing in international students to Bucyrus.”
Teja Stojanovic explained some differences between school in Serbia and the States.
“School here is a lot easier than my school in Serbia. My school is like really hard and we don’t have as many after school activities. We go to school and then after school we just study the whole day, and people here are in a lot of activities so they don’t have the time to study as much.”
Stojanovic explained some of her favorite aspects at Bucyrus High School.
“Making friends, because through the activities you get the opportunity to socialize,” Stojanovic said.
Stojanovic, whose favorite class in both Serbia and America has been choir, participated in volleyball at Bucyrus High School this past season.
“It was really hard and it was overwhelming for me because I am not used to it, but I liked that I made some new friends and that I am hanging out with them,” Stojanovic said.
While Stojanovic’s dream is to see New York City during her visit stateside, she has enjoyed some of the sites around Ohio including Cedar Point, Put-In-Bay, and Blackhand Gorge.
“Cedar Point was interesting because, while she was excited to go to Cedar Point, once we got there she saw how tall and fast the roller coasters were she was like never mind, forget it. But we coerced her into riding them, and she rode almost all of them and lived to tell about it,” Nate Roshon said.
“I kept my eyes close for the first three, but after that I kept my mind open,” Stojanovic said.
“She found that the rides were less scary if she kept her eyes open,” Jennifer Roshon added.
Jennifer Roshon spoke about the perspective of being a host parent.
“From a host parent perspective I would say it is an adventure. It is awesome, it is great, and it is stressful. Because any time you add an extra person into your family it changes the entire dynamic of the family,” Roshon said. “So when she came we can’t expect her to do all the changing. We changed too.
“I am having to change my job schedule to pick her up from school, and to make sure I am home an evening or two during the week. So I am kind of morphing too. As people go into a hosting people they need to understand that it is a give and take process, and that there are certain stages that you go through. You go through the honeymoon stage where everything is awesome you get along just fine and everyone is always on their best behavior.
“Then you get tired and act like you normally are, and that is when you start grate at each other, and your student does something that you don’t understand and you find it quite rude which might be something normal in their cultures,” Roshon said.
Roshon added that the best way to gain understanding is to communicate with each other.
“We had to communicate last night over some differences and disagreements we were having, and as you do that there is a lot of understanding that you glean, you have to be quick to forgive, and you have to laugh. As long as you can laugh and enjoy each other it makes the experience 10 times better,” Roshon said.
Jennifer Roshon shared her favorite aspect of being a host parent to foreign exchange students.
“For me it is the lifelong relationships that I have. I have free housing in Brazil, Germany, Serbia, and Romania. I have connections with these people that will last a lifetime. We have got a what’sapp group called family that our first foreign exchange student set up, because he considers our other students his brothers and sisters.
“In fact our Romanian foreign exchange student and her mother travelled to Brazil to see our other foreign exchange students. They never would have been able to meet without these connections we were able to make. It just makes the world so much smaller,” Roshon said.
Teja explained that the life lessons that she is learning is the most rewarding aspect of being a foreign exchange student.
“I feel like I have a set of second parents now. And it teaches you what you have when you leave your country. It teaches you who your real friends are and who will be there for you, and like who are the real people are in your life, and everything when you leave that. It is also a nice experience to do things you have never done before,” Stojanovic said.