BLOG: 'Life of Bryan'

With all due respect to Monty Python, I just want to write about the joys and troubles of being a temporary parent. Bryan Donat is my son, but not for long. He is a Rotary International Youth Exchange student from Brazil.  Bryan arrived in the US just before school started way back in August. His first host family lives near , so he was registered there to complete his Senior year in high school. A Rotary exchange student spends an entire school year in the host country. Bryan will be here until the end of June.

Bryan moved in with my wife and I just after New Years. He is our fifth child. Our two “natural” children, Jim and Kathryn, are now adults residing in Minnesota.  Gustavo Shalders was our first Rotary host child, also from Brazil. Aiko Naozaki was a previous host daughter from Japan. Both Gustavo and Aiko lived in our home when we still had two kids at home. This time it was very different.

A Rotary youth exchange student typically lives with three host families throughout the year. It works out to be about three to four months with each family.  That is enough to get plenty comfortable with one another, yet just short enough so that personalities do not get in the way of a healthy year.  As expected, Rotary must comply with vigorous U.S. State Department regulations on vetting each host family. The same goes for the students. We are sharing our homes with a high school student whom the sending Rotary club felt was well-adjusted and prepared for the rigors of living away from home for a year. 

We did not have ANY of the typical language/culture based growing pains that are common with exchange students. Bryan speaks better English than many Americans that I encounter—and certainly better than the numerous cabbies that we encountered during a weekend in New York City! Nope, Bryan was quite familiar with the US culture after “studying” us from afar by watching Friends, Vampire Diaries, Charmed, How I Met Your Mother, and a whole host of American television shows!  He knew more artists on the Grammy’s than I did. So, I’d say that he is darn close to being a typical American high school senior. Oh, except that he is carrying something very close to a 4.0 GPA—in a second language!

A host child becomes a part of one’s family. Bryan simply became part of our regular life and everyday routine. We re-learned the joy of making sure the whole family is up in time for school each morning, idling in that awful line to drop off kids at the school, mood swings, syncing teenage social calendars. 

The only real challenging part was putting up with the daily commute. Oh, yes, that and the continual fear that Bryan was too bored at our quiet home in our quiet neighborhood with no other teenagers. Little did we know that Bryan’s main focuses were little more than that for normal teenage boys: sleep and eat. And that he did.

Bryan is an exceptional young man in many ways.  He is well-spoken, interacts surprisingly well with adults, has well-thought opinions on a number of controversial topics, and is clean, courteous, and respectful. In sum, he is an outstanding ambassador of his country. We are proud to have called him our son.

Bryan did cause us to get out and explore a bit more than we normally would. His lifelong goal was to spend time in New York City.  We went twice, but that still wasn’t quite enough for Bryan.  We spent time in Baltimore, Washington DC, Annapolis, Northern Virginia, and even ventured up to Gettysburg, York, and Harrisburg, PA.  His previous host family took him on a family trip to Oregon and the next host family is taking him to Florida over spring break—so I think he is getting his fair share of travel.

I didn’t even mention Bryan’s affection for shopping!  Bryan knows how to shop.  He says that almost everything—particularly clothes—is much cheaper in the US than in Brazil. Of course, he does have an eye for designer brands, so that isn’t all that surprising. He showed up with about a half a suitcase full of clothes. As he leaves for his third host family, Bryan’s cache is equivalent to about four suitcases!

I hope that we offered Bryan a good experience. One of the goals of the Rotary Youth Exchange program is to provide various perspectives on life in the US.  I know that living alone with two adults is a much different experience than that he will experience in both his first host family and his last. I suspect that his stay at our home was a bit closer to that he had back in Brazil since he is an only child.

So, did we provide a good perspective of American life? I hope so. Will I miss the drive to Arundel High each morning? Definitely not. Will be miss Bryan? Most definitely. In fact, I hope that he visits again—and that we can visit him in his home in Brazil sometime in the not too far future.