A year with our foreign exchange student

I received an email in August informing me that more host families were needed for some foreign exchange students.  They were from many different countries, including China.  Keith and I discussed it and decided this would be great for our family.  We sent in our application and started the process.  In the middle of it, I felt like we were starting the adoption process again.  We were filling out paperwork, and sending in pictures of our house, of the room she would occupy and of our family.  My friends were getting phone calls to give us reccomendations and we had several home visits.

Dandan's bedroom

We were able to choose who we wanted to stay with us for a year.  We looked through the pictures of the avaliable girls.  There were two girls from Anslee's same municipality, but one was allergic to dogs and the other was ruled out for other reasons.  We decided on a girl from Kunming named Dandan.  After that, things happened quickly (unlike the adoption process), and before we knew it, we were at the airport picking her up.  We had her call her mom and dad to let them know she was safe and we headed home.

  Keith registered Dandan for her highschool classes.  The counselor helped us, but we had to make some adjustments here and there.  She loves the two electives we picked for her - photography and chorus.   She is doing extremely well in Chemisty and Algebra with over 100 averages.  U.S. History and American Lit have obviously been a little harder for her.  When I tried to help her at the beginning of the school year, it was overwhelming.  There was so much background she would have learned here in elementary and middle school that she had never heard.  She found a student tutor who comes to our house once a week, and that really made a difference.

                                               With some friends at lake Blackshear

We've had so much fun introducing Dandan to life in the United States.  She is amazed at all the holidays we have here.  She says Chinese New Year is like Christmas, New Year, Valentines Day and birthdays all wrapped into one holiday.  Halloween was a huge hit with her.  She loves american candy and thought it was so cool that they could knock on doors and people would hand her candy!

                                                         

Ready to go trick-or-treating

Breakfast with Santa at Buckhead Diner

Dandan was so excited for Christmas morning.  She doesn't get presents like this in China.  For gifts, she gets red envelopes with money inside.  We did make a blunder with one of the gifts we gave her.  In China, it is in extremely poor taste to ever give anyone an umbrella as a gift.  In chinese it sounds similar to the word seperate.  Andrew gave it to her for Christmas because she doesn't want to carry one of our big umbrellas at the bus stop when it's raining, so he found her a really cute small one.  She looked at us funny when she opened it, but didn't say anything.  It wasn't until I read about Chinese faux pas  that I found out.

I asked her about it, and she said she was suprised to open her first gift and find an umbrella!  Luckily, all her other gifts were a huge hit!

Dandan loved helping decorate for Christmas.  After we decorated the tree in the foyer, she would sit on the floor in front of it to skype with her parents or friends so they could see it.  She was so suprised at the effort we put into decorating.  She said she was going to do it at Christmas at home.

We had our first white Christmas in Georgia since 1882.  We were so excited!!  Little did we know how much snow we were going to get in January!

Dandan has never seen such exteme weather in one place.  Her hometown of Kunming feels like spring year round.  She was so hot in August and then so cold this winter!

I hope Dandan has enjoyed her experience in the U.S. as much as she expected she would.  She's made many new friends and has spent the night with them and had friends spend the night here. She has really enjoyed school and has done really well academically.  I asked her if there was anything she really wanted to do before she went home.  She said she wanted to go to New York City, so my mom, Nana and I are going to  take her in May.  We are going to stay right in Times Square, and we have tickets to see Wicked.  She is thrilled!  It's been a fun year.  It was hard getting used to having a teenager in the house, although I think we adjusted really quickly.  We are really going to miss her when she leaves in June!