Host Friend Program creates lifelong friendships with international students

Lote Larmane was nervous when she first got to Eau Claire. After a long flight from Latvia, she arrived in a foreign land where she did not know anybody. But then she saw a welcome sign with her name on it, and breathed a huge sigh of relief as her host mom gave her a comforting embrace.

Lote Larmane highly recommends the program to both international students and families in Eau Claire. Photo by Anis Filza Abdul Samad

Lote Larmane highly recommends the program to both international students and families in Eau Claire. Photo by Anis Filza Abdul Samad

“My host mom welcomed me so warmly,” she said.

Larmane is just one of the 95 international students who arrived this semester and joined the Host Friend Program organized by Center for International Education.

The Host Friend Program is a volunteer opportunity where families in the Chippewa Valley area will provide a homestay for international students. After picking up their host students from the shuttle station or Chippewa Valley Regional Airport, they will spend three to four days together before finally dropping the students off at their residence hall.

Sarah Vowels, the community outreach coordinator for CIE, said this is to ease transitioning international students into the American culture.

“There is that family feeling, and they don’t feel alone right away when they come here,” she said. “They left a home, and then they come into a home.”

Benefits of joining for both parties

Nay Myo Win, a student from Myanmar, said he loves learning about the culture and traditions of the United States on a more personal level. He also enjoyed getting to travel with his host friends and meeting new people.

Vowels said as international students get used to the college atmosphere and meet other students, it’s easy to get comfortable and stay on campus without exploring other places in Eau Claire. With the Host Friend Program, they get to go out into the community and attend various events with their host friends that they would usually not go to.

“A lot of students end up leaving saying that the program was the best part of their experience,” Vowels said .

It’s not just the students who learned about the American way of life, they have a lot to offer as well.

New host friends Dave Lundberg and Peggy Blomenberg said they’ve learned so much from their Brazilian, Japanese and Latvian host students, who share with them about their own cultures. The exposure to other cultures opened their eyes about the issues in other countries that they are usually unaware of.

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Host parent Dave Lundberg, student Rihard Steins from Latvia and host parent Peggy Blomenberg. Photo by Anis Filza Abdul Samad

CIE organizes a potluck twice every semester, and Blomenberg said whenever there’s a gathering with other host friends, it brought a lot of families in the area together too.

“While welcoming students from across the ocean, we are also getting to know our own community,” Blomenberg said.

Bonding moments

While the primary focus of the program is providing homestay for the first weekend and meeting up at least once a month to catch up with each other, the Boettchers and their host students are a “busy little family.”

They’ve taken a trip to Yellowstone National Park, celebrated the holidays such as decorating eggs for Easter, throwing a Halloween party, having Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, attended the Minnesota state fair, went fishing, tubing, and done many other activities together over the years.

The Boettchers have hosted 14 students to date, from England, Brazil, Myanmar, South Korea, China and Japan. A friend told them about the program and they decided to give it a shot back in 2008. They loved it so much that they keep hosting every year.

The Boettchers have the students call them “mom” and “dad” as they are now part of their family.

“Even when they go home, they’re still part of us,” Laurie Boettcher said, adding that they have their own private Facebook page with all the international students they’ve hosted so that they could all keep in touch.

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The Boettchers plan to continually expand their international family by hosting more students in the future. From left: Timm Boettcher, Jungwon Woo, Kyra Boettcher, Laurie Boettcher, Subinuer Tuerhong, Hikari Nakata, Nay Myo Win, Deklan Boettcher and Igor Daniel de Araujo Evangelista. Photo by Anis Filza Abdul Samad

Having grown up in a small farming community with very little diversity, Boettcher said she loves the fact that the program made her children, age 7 and 10, become much more culturally aware. They see the students as their own brother and sister, regardless of their races and nationalities.

Boettcher said her husband went to England recently and had a chance to meet up with a student they hosted from there awhile back. They’re also planning to go the student’s wedding next summer.

“I made my husband promise that I could go over for (our host students’) weddings and when they have children, I’m going to go see my grandbabies,” Boettcher said.

Visiting students in their home countries is nothing new for veteran host friends. Jean Holmen and her husband have hosted 26 students since 1998 and have traveled around the globe including Malaysia and got a chance to attend their host student’s wedding in Germany recently. They’ve also taken trips to Lambeau Field, Colorado, and California with their host students.

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Chuck and Jean Holmen with their host students, Changhyun Yoon from Korea and Diego Silva de Deus Vieira from Brazil. Photo by Anis Filza Abdul Samad

Vowels said some host friends have even hosted up to four students at a time.

“They have a connection with a student who might be here for four years, but then they can keep hosting new students and kind of build an international family,” Vowels said.

 

The need for host friends

Center for International Education uses the term host friend because they accept applications from different types of family, including non-traditional ones and even a single person in a home who wants to get to know an international student.

While there are currently around 300 host friends registered at CIE, not all of them are hosting this semester. The number of international students at UWEC is rapidly increasing and CIE is trying to keep up with the number of host friends as well to make sure every international student who applied for the program get one.

The program has been going on for over 40 years and continuously receives positive feedback from the participants.

“I can’t quite tell you what our secret is, but I know that it’s the host friends themselves,” Vowels said. “It’s their positive energy, willingness to be flexible, to volunteer to open their home to, in their eyes, a stranger and someone they haven’t met yet from another country.”

For Larmane, having a lot of interaction with her host mom also gave her the opportunity to practice her English before starting the school year. Larmane said her mom back in Latvia is relieved and really happy with the support system she has in Eau Claire.

“It’s an amazing program,” Larmane said. “It’s like having a home away from home.”

For more information or to apply for the Host Friend program, head over to CIE’s website or email [email protected].

(Anis Filza Abdul Samad is a senior international student and participated in the Host Friend Program in 2012.)