Over the last several weeks my wife and I have been going through the process of applying for a foreign exchange student. My wife received an email about a program in Iowa that was short on host parents, so we tossed the idea around for a few days. I felt this would be a wonderful opportunity to minister to a teen, and perhaps to strengthen their faith and share the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether they are Christian or Muslim. The students for this program all come from either Nigeria or Tanzania, and are approximately 50% Christian and 50% Muslim.

After a week or so of examining and reading student bio’s we chose a student from Nigeria. I am keeping his identity hidden to protect his privacy. We decided on a boy student because we felt for our first year it might work out better due to the fact that we have 2 boys ourselves.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been preparing our spare bedroom for his arrival. The students are already all in the United States and have to do orientation for their stay here in America. They also get to take a trip to Washington D.C. to visit some of the historic sites from America’s history. In 3 days we will travel to Omaha to pick up our student. We are extremely excited to meet him and to start our yearlong journey. We can’t wait to teach him some American culture, watch him experience some American foods (which they have almost no exposure to). In the process we hope to learn more about his home culture as well.

All in all we hope the whole experience goes well and that our student can learn about American life in a Christian home as well as teach us about his own country and customs. If this goes well this year we just may continue to do this every year from now on.

I will be sharing some of this experience on this blog over the next year. How much I will share about our student has yet to be decided, and will be up to them.

Tags: children, Christian, Christianity, Current Events, family, foreign exchange student, IRIS, Nigeria, Tanzania, YES program

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 5:54 am and is filed under Christianity, Current Events, Family & Fatherhood, Ministry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.