For teenagers with a hankering for faroff places, an organization called Youth for Understanding could give them the trip of their dreams while providing a cultural education they won’t forget.
Left: Max Guen sits at a tea house in Japan with his “host aunt,” who performs tea ceremonies, along with a master and apprentices at the tea house. Right: Victoria Guen is pictured at the airport in Argentina with her host family mother, sisters and a brother. The family owns a supermarket in Goya. Karen Allen-Guen of East Brunswick said the nonprofit organization, which got its start in the years following World War II, provided her children with an enriching cultural experience. Last year her son Maxwell Guen spent seven weeks in Japan, and this summer her daughter Victoria Guen visited Goya, Argentina.
“Normally, trips like that would cost seven or eight thousands dollars, but I only paid $600 in administrative costs for each of them. They have a great scholarship program,” she said of Youths for Understanding.
The educational organization enables young people between the ages of 15 and 22 to spend a summer, a semester or a year with a host family in another country. The students aren’t tourists. They live like the people in the country where they are staying.
The program was started in the 1950s by a minister in the Midwest who thought that bringing German students to the United States would be a way to help heal the wounds of World War II. With the approval and financial support of the State Department, 75 teenagers came to live with American families in Michigan.
Eventually, the program grew to include more than 50 countries and a network of 60 partner offices and organizations. It’s now one of the longest-running student exchange programs in the world, having exchanged approximately 200,000 students.
YFU receives extensive support from private donors, foundations and corporations. The Japanese and Finish governments also provide scholarship money.
“My son received a letter stating that an individual in Japan was sponsoring his trip. My daughter received a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cook Foundation,” Karen said.
“It’s hard to put your kid on a plane,” she noted, “but I have a lot of faith in the organization. They are really well run.”
Students and their parents go for a weekend orientation in Fishkill, N.Y., before they leave the U.S.
“They go through simulations with the kids — what it’s like to go through customs, what it’s like to be in a foreign country. They are well prepared,” Karen said.H
er daughter, who is 16 and will be a senior at East Brunswick High School, has studied Spanish since third grade and wanted to go to Argentina.
“It wasn’t until after she got the scholarship that she realized that it would be winter in Argentina. She practically missed summer this year,” Karen said with a laugh.
Victoria was placed in the home of a single woman who was in her 60s and worked long hours. That left the sociable teenager alone much of the time.
“She was unhappy, so I called the regional headquarters. They were on it in a minute and had her staying with another family in a week,” Karen said.
Even though Goya is a modern suburban town, Victoria had to learn to contend with power outages, a shortage of hot water for showers, and using the phone at the local ice cream parlor to make calls to home.
“She’s had to learn to adapt,” said her mother, which she noted is a good thing.
Max, 17, spent the summer before his senior year in Okinawa, Japan. He was attending Rutgers Prep and had been studying Japanese for two years. His Japanese teacher brought up the idea with his mother.
“At first he wasn’t sure he wanted to go, but I told him to just apply for the scholarship and then if you get it you can decide,” Karen said. “He won the scholarship and ended up loving Japan, the food, the culture and the people.”
Max enjoyed being totally immersed in Japanese culture.
“People are living their lives, and it’s totally different from one you have at home, and you’re just put in there. You wake up and you have a Japanese breakfast, and then you go to Japanese schools and you spend time with Japanese friends. You have to speak Japanese all the time,” Karen said.
Max had problems with the language, especially at first. The parents in his host family did not speak English, and the young people he met had studied English in school, but were hardly proficient.
“I ended up trying to describe a word I was looking for with other Japanese words,” Max said.
In the year since, Max has kept in touch via e-mail with friends he made. Next year he will be going to school at the University of Vermont, where he will be majoring in environmental science and hopes to minor in Japanese.
The experience is designed to give students the skills and perspective necessary to meet the challenges and benefit from the opportunities the fast-changing global community has to offer, according to the program. For more information about Youth for Understanding, visit its Web site, www.yfu.org.