Me with our Japanese exchange student. Sadly I wish I could cover my face as well. Freshmen year was rough, my friends.
For as long as I can remember, my dad was a member of the local Rotary Club. Since service is a big part of Rotary Club membership, Dad often “voluntold” me to work the Rotary food booth at a variety of local summer festivals. We also seemed to spend a lot of time with foreign exchange students. Dad was always curious about other cultures, so we would often host a student for a weekend. There was the high school student from Germany who picked out lots of disturbing horror movies like “The Omen.” Then there was the kid from Australia who seemed very polite and mild-mannered until my mom did his laundry and produced a pair of tiny black bikini underwear. (It’s always the quiet ones. Hopefully we don’t get in trouble with Rotary for judging other people’s underwear styles. We couldn’t help ourselves.) And lastly there was the businesswoman from India. She was incredibly smart, and her English was impeccable; she was thrilled when she learned she could watch the movie “Gone with the Wind” at our house on a video disc player. (Yes, those huge discs that were pre-VHS and pre-beta). It turned out that that was her favorite movie, and she was eternally grateful to me as I loaded and unloaded the two discs at the right times. I remember her clutching herself and gasping in sadness when Scarlett’s father kept saying, “I’ll have to talk to Mrs. O’Hara about this,” even though the woman had been long dead.
After those trial runs with various students, my parents decided it was time we hosted a student for an entire semester (the student would be here for a year overall). After all, my brothers were both off to college, so we’d have the room. They must have thought it would be cool and fun for me to have a “sister” as I headed into my freshman year of high school. As luck would have it, my dad’s Rotary Club was sponsoring a 15-year-old girl from Japan, whom we’ll call Himari.
