Two months.

It seems so strange that Audrey has been in Ghana for over two months. Audrey's Dad and I are now in Phoenix, hoping to move into our new home in less than a month, and enjoying being near to family who loves Audrey as much as we do.  

It's great to hear her having new adventures, but hard when she is struggling through difficulty.  

I have been thinking a lot about some of the struggles we had with out students, when I hear about Audrey's hard times.  I really feel like we were ill-prepared to deal with exchange students, like we were schooled in the program rules, how to teach our own rules to the students, and how to deal with cultural adjustments, but not in the things that would have made our experience so much easier.

For instance, we struggled a lot with our students with regards to their grades.  There was a tremendous amount of pressure from us to get a specific level of grades.  Yet when Audrey calls and tells us that she is probably going to fail her classes (she has changed classes several times and still is expected to know all the semester information plus information from the past several years for her exams), it is very easy to say "That's okay, honey."

We did ask our coordinator for more guidance, and at times I told her, "I don't think we're right for this," but she only said, "Oh, you're great!"  

Honestly, in retrospect, I think she only cared about the beds we could provide, and not the experience we were providing at our home.  I really wish she had provided coaching for the families each month, and not just social events for the students. 

I think Audrey's host parents would probably benefit from the opportunity to talk to other families about dealing with their exchange student, and they would probably like the chance to "talk" to us as well, so that we could encourage our student to be a better member of their family.

Audrey with Allie, another exchange student, and a Ghanian student (stolen from Allie's blog :))

At any rate, there is a lot of learning for us all.  I wish I had a chance to do parts of our hosting years over.  I think we did the best we could with the information we had at the time.