RSS Feed
|
|||||
|
Exchange Students Enjoy
Pablo León Ibáñez and Shreyas "Rey" Rajendra Borkar traveled unusually long distances to sit down for a chat during Chelsea School’s Diversity Day celebration. Pablo hales from Chillan, Chile, while Rey comes from Wardha, India. The two foreign exchange students currently call Chelsea and South Royalton home, respectively. They spent a recent Friday as an ambassador-like team, visiting classrooms in Chelsea to share personal descriptions of their home countries with students in grades 1-12. When they took a break from that tour to sit down with The Herald, both spoke in eloquent, fluent English, making sophisticated global comparisons between Chile, India, and the United States and focusing on the cultural, economic, and social impacts the exchange experience will have on their lives. Both live in cities back home, but still do not consider the central Vermont area rural in the context of how people live in their countries. "If you want to see rural, you have to go to another country," smiled Pablo, "this," he gestures before him, "is not rural." Rey agrees. He thinks of sparsely populated areas of India, where people live in huts or spend nights beneath a few poles with fabric draped over them. The difference in interpretation illustrated a distinction between a rural landscape and a rural population. When asked how the exchange experience had changed them, both Pablo and Rey, who are 17 and 16, respectively, were adamant that the Vermont schools they are attending should encourage their students to travel more. Both see immeasurable worth in traveling to gain perspective about your own land and your life. "You don’t push your students to go to other countries," observed Pablo. "They (students) should have the same dreams of seeing other countries." "Americans live in this huge country where they have everything. They don’t realize the things they can find in other countries," asserts Pablo, referring not to the material things he has experienced in another country, but to the personal discoveries along the way. As the two young men visited classrooms throughout the day, they altered their presentation style according to the age group, joking that the harder questions would come in the afternoon when they met with middle and high school classes. Their grasp on their own country’s history and geographic make-up was natural and unrehearsed, as they cited major city’s populations, described the physical regions within India and Chile, and referred to tourism highlights. Their detailed approach to analyzing their own countries allowed Pablo and Rey to make equally specific observations about the United States. "Since we are both from developing countries, we were very interested in visiting a developed country to have a comparison," shared Rey, who aspires to be a doctor like both of his parents. Rey has enjoyed playing both soccer and basketball in South Royalton, where he is now living with his second host family, the Murphys. As a Rotary exchange student, he lives with more than one family while he is here. He spent the first part of the school year with the Farnsworth family. Pablo, an AFS exchange student, lives with the Lembke/Willard family in Chelsea. He also played soccer and has enjoyed snowboarding regularly as well. He thinks he might like to become an engineer, intentionally taking a different route than most of his family, who are mostly doctors. An exciting change for both Pablo and Rey since the beginning of their visits has been the improvement in their English. They are thrilled to point out that they now think in English as well as speaking the sometimes confusing and inconsistent language. "At first, I would think about what I wanted to say in Spanish and then translate it in my mind before saying it in English. Now I just think in English without even realizing it," Pablo said with a smile. ____________ |
for larger version     |
||||
