Coming Home
The return home is never the end of the AFS experience. The journey continues, but the experience changes.
ONE STORY OF COMING HOME
We are pleased to post here a story that was originally part of the 1984 AFS publication in the Occasional Papers in Intercultural Learning. This is one young woman’s story of her cultural confusion when she returned to Denmark after her AFS exchange year in Kenya, and of the journey she made back to Kenya that helped her understand her experience in Kenya and complete her journey home.
Read But I am Danish by Julie Gehl, a young Danish woman who participated in an AFS Year Program to Kenya during 1979-1980. When she wrote this essay, Julie Gehl was a third-year medical student in Copenhagen and an active AFS volunteer. Now she is an oncologist and Clinical Associate Research Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Copenhagen Department of Oncology in Copenhagen University
Hospital Herlev. Because of her powerful description of her re-entry experience, we are happy to reproduce this article for AFS in the 21st Century.
FOR PARENTS AND PARTICIPANTS WHO ARE COMING HOME
Read some special advice addressed (in this case) to Brazilian parents and their returning teenagers from AFS Educational Advisory Council member Andréa Sebben and Raquel Fernandes.
THE LONG AWAITED RETURN HOME is funny, emotional, and very much to the point for the parents who miss their son or their daughter but may be quite surprised to meet the young man or woman who comes home.
(EL ANSIADO REGRESO A CASA)
WHAT’S UP WITH CULTURE?
Bruce La Brack, also a member of the AFS Educational Advisory Council, has long had a special interest in the experience of re-entry. This online website is designed for university-level USA students and their parents, but the parallels with the AFS experience are many, no matter what country you are from.
For parents waiting for their students to come home:
12 Tips for Welcoming Returnees Home
(Doce Consejos . . .
For students waiting to come home:
Preparing to Come Home
Don’t forget to read the essays that 10 AFS returnees wrote for the 2007 Essay Contest, My Different View
