Sometimes host families and their exchange students are the perfect match. They get along very well. The host family shows them around in their country and they spend time together. 

But not everybody is that fortunate. 

Sometimes the host family and exchange student don’t match. The host family doesn’t include the student in their life, and shares nothing about their culture. Sometimes the exchange student feels like their host doesn’t care. People should be aware of what some exchange students have to go through during their exchange year. I would like to share my experience.

I am 17 years old and an exchange student from Germany. I was very excited about my exchange year in Nebraska because I always wanted to attend an American high school. I have a lot of friends in Germany who did an exchange year before me. Their high school experience inspired me to do an exchange year too. I always dreamed about participating in school spirit and trying out subjects that my school in Germany doesn’t have. I found out through my teacher that Education First (EF) would be a good organization to do an exchange year with. 

The first months with my host family seemed amazing, because I was very excited to be in America and follow my dream. But looking back at it now makes me realize that they controlled me. I was blinded by my excitement and realized later on that something was odd.

When I stayed with my old host family, they limited my consumption of food and controlled how much I was eating. One time they took the bread away that I was about to toast, and said that I already had a piece of that bread today. It got to the point that I would put all snacks away once I heard footsteps. They would only let me eat snacks when they were eating them too. I could only eat one snack after dinner. I felt very controlled and felt like every step of mine was being watched. They also put a camera up in the kitchen. They said it was supposed to watch the dog, but it would always point in my direction. 

My old host family and I also had complete opposite personalities. They were very introverted and would prefer spending time alone without any friends. I am a very outgoing person and love to talk, and when they didn’t talk to me it made me feel excluded. The first week I got here my host mom had to work while I had one more week of summer break. I stayed home with my host dad for four days. He would only talk to me once my host mom would be back. At that time, I didn’t know anybody in Nebraska. I had no opportunity to get out of the house and meet people. I felt horrible and spent the whole week alone in the basement since nobody seemed to want to talk to me.

January was the last month I spent with my old host family because we had a huge argument. I came back from state theater on Saturday, Jan. 6, and was very exhausted because we stayed up late and had to wake up early, so I slept in. I went upstairs to the kitchen to boil myself an egg. While I was doing this, my host dad came up to me and started talking to me in a loud tone. He expressed that I couldn’t sleep in and prepare my own food, since they purchased the food. That incident made me extremely uncomfortable and insecure about eating at somebody’s house, even though I knew that I didn’t do anything wrong by boiling one egg. It was already hard to be in another country without my family. It made it even harder when I was treated badly.

After this, I called a friend to pick me up. I was starving at this point. I was so uncomfortable. My friend drove me to her workplace and I had some food there. I called my EF coordinator hoping she would be able to get me out of this situation and help me. She suggested that we should have a talk all together. This was our second talk together, because a similar situation happened previously at the end of November. The fist talk my coordinator had with the host family was about the host dad not allowing me to eat one more bread than them after dinner.

The talk happened three days after the incident. During those three days, neither of my host parents talked to me. They acted like nothing ever happened. One thing did change though. My old host mom started bringing me food downstairs. When they were eating upstairs like usual, they started excluding me in their meals. I felt very lonely and upset.

The talk happened between my coordinator, me and the old host family. It didn’t help. At this point, I started to be scared of eating in front of them and they excluded me in everything. I spent two more weeks with that family and started to wonder if I should have ever done an exchange year just to suffer and cry myself to sleep on weekends. I was thinking of going back home early. But, just because I was placed in the wrong family, I wasn’t ready to leave my friends in Nebraska yet and it was my dream to experience an American high school lifestyle.

I decided to stay, I accepted that they acted like they didn’t want me to be included in their life. I was still very respectful to them and tried having conversations with them, but they would just give me a one word answer and continue scrolling through their phones. 

My breaking point was Friday, Jan. 26. In front of Southwest, I got a call from my mom who sounded very concerned. She told me that the EF organization called her and my dad in Germany. My host family called and said that I was a very disrespectful, rude person who was always late, didn’t care about others and only thought about myself. Hearing this shocked me. It upset me a lot to hear those lies about me. I spent about 10 minutes in front of the school crying. I couldn’t get my thoughts together. What broke my heart more than anything else was how my mom must have been feeling.

Right after school was over, I received a call from the office of the organization EF in America. That person told me that he would have to talk to me about what is happening. I was very grateful because I thought that he knew the situation I was in. Instead he told me that I was the one who misunderstood my host family, and that I was the one who excluded myself out of everything. That was my last straw.

I talked to my EF coordinator and I told her how I felt, that I couldn’t do this anymore. I was mentally and physically exhausted. I needed out. My parents in germany were very supportive of my finding a new host family and I also had an amazing friend at LSW who was always there for me. My coordinator agreed on moving me out and finding me a new host family.

I left the old host family behind me. That was probably the best day of my life. My current host family is amazing. They are very nice people and we have similar personalities. They have a great family and everybody is very nice to me. 

Sadly, I’m not the only one who has bad experiences with their host family. There are actually a lot of kids whose host families make them feel isolated and alone, control their food, or just simply don’t include them in their lives.

Exchange organizations need to pay more attention to what host families they are accepting to host. They could ask more people for an opinion about the family and should try to match the personalities of the students with the host family. They need to pay close attention to what the intentions of the host family is. One of the most important parts are that the exchange students don’t always get listened to. It is a long and hard process of changing the host family. I think that the placement of an exchange student would be more successful if both sides get the right to say whether they want to be a match. 

One thing I learned from this is to value simple things more. I got more grateful for what I have and for every single day. I learned to treat everybody very nicely, because we never know what they could be going through. Everyday is great and I swore to myself that I will always be grateful for everything I got and will be a very happy person.