My high school had a lot of exchange students.  My father always called them “foreign students”, which is what they were, but my mother always scolded him and insisted upon calling them exchange students because she said it was more respectful, even though nobody from my school ever went to live in any of their countries.

When she was growing up, my mother's family, who had plenty of family members of its own, hosted a student from Brazil who painted a picture of some flowers that we still have on our wall.  My father's family also hosted a student from Kenya, who was  purportedly there to assist in mutual horizon broadening, but who I suspect was invited to help my father overcome some deficiencies in his campaign for class president, such as a lack of a person with the ability to walk on his hands hanging a sign from his feet during an assembly which, according to my father was a direct cause of my father's legendary term, which I'm certain brought about lasting changes, such as the addition of “class president” to my father's college applications.

Regardless of the reasons for my parents' hosting of students, they were both high on the idea and when I was in 8th grade, decided we'd host a student named Ilian, from Bulgaria.  Ilian was very polite but was about outgoing as a rabbit, believed women were not equal to men, and spent nearly all of the time he didn't spend doing paper routes in his bedroom, wearing purple sweatpants and playing the guitar.  

Though we never formed as close a bond as my parents' visiting siblings, Ilian taught me a lot, such as that it was possible to wear the same flannel shirt my mother bought him 78 days in a row, and that in Bulgaria, most people had cars that were made out of something like cardboard, or a ping pong table.

In exchange for all of the cultural fine points we gleaned from our friend, my family taught him a lot as well, like about forcing him to attend soccer games in the cold even though he would have preferred to stay in his room, and driving several hours in our car to visit my grandparents, who also had bedrooms in which he could play the guitar.

But my family wasn't the only family in town who was up for inducing a little culture.  During my senior year, my school welcomed a guy named Rui from China.  I didn't spend much time with Rui but remember him most for his bringing a baseball mitt to the season's first soccer practice and his graduation speech, which was essentially a list of American holidays and their accompanying tangible traditions i.e. “trees at Christmas, pumpkins for Halloween etc.”  The fact that his host parents had been of little use in imparting even a shred of conventional youth Americana was not surprising, given that their only son had a ponytail and spent his time drawing very detailed dinosaurs with ball-point pens instead of going to class, a skill for which he received an extraordinary level of praise from teachers,  and for which he received some sort of a college scholarship.  Rui's family also refused to provide him with a key to their house as they were apparently distrustful, and concerned that he would steal something, a VCR, or perhaps, a dinosaur drawing, which he could theoretically take to China, where he would tell someone it was his, possibly to obtain a scholarship.

In addition to seeking out youthful ambassadors who could make our school more worldly, we also sought foreigners who could help us, through cultural collaboration, to discover our own abilities to win soccer games.  During my sophomore year, my team won the state championship with the help of two such characters, the first, a quiet Swede who stood 6'2” and who ran as fast as most people his age ride a bike, and another guy from Bosnia, who was 6'4” and looked like an underwear model and was about 400 times better than the second best player in the league.  He was probably 30 years old, but nobody complained about it, either because he was a refuge or because he was handsome.  It would be totally unfair to say that our team would definitely not have won the championship without them,  unless you said our team would definitely, absolutely, not in a million years have won without them.

When I talk to my friends who come from other places I realize that my high school and family were outliers when it came to welcoming foreigners.  When I think about this, I have to wonder why so many people would chose to broaden their children by sending them to a small town with no McDonald's and some of the worst weather on the planet. What kind of people would do this, you ask?  People with cardboard cars is who.