A whole year?

Age limit is not a myth

It’s there, at CFR 22 § 62.25. The student must be “at least 15 years of age but not more than 18 and six months years of age at the time of initial school enrollment.” It would seem simple enough to provide that information, or a link to it, under Requirements on the Department of State Web site. Maybe they don’t bother because they think the Code of Federal Regulations is beyond the comprehension of the average American.

The age requirement is for a J-1 exchange visa. I talked to a person at a student-exchange company and he said 15 has been the age limit for quite a while, but it hasn’t always been strictly enforced. When the applications were filled out by hand, it took a person to read them and determine if the applicant met the age requirement. On an electronic form, it’s easy to code the form to not accept an answer outside of predetermined limits.

There’s also an F-1 student visa, but that’s for an independent student (not with an approved student-exchange organization) and must be sponsored by the school. Now all we can do is wait to hear from the host family to see how they want to proceed.

Surely it doesn't have to be this difficult

Got a message from the host sister asking for help to come here. I talked to the club coordinator (same district, different club than Vashon) and the district inbound coordinator. I’m still not convinced that the US State Department won’t grant a visa (maybe it would have to be a different kind of visa) to a 14 year old, but it sounds like it’s going to take some creative thinking to get her here in September. I’ve spent hours searching Web sites and cannot find an age limit. You would think that on the US Department of State Web site, under Visa Requirements, that there would be an age limit listed. You would be wrong. It could be buried deep in the law but I haven’t scoured Federal Registers yet looking for it.

Schools won’t take anyone who is not officially sponsored by an approved organization because that’s the only way they’ll receive tax dollars for that student, and a school can’t be expected to educate the student for free. The school district where she’s supposed to go doesn’t want her to start in the middle of the semester, so the principal suggested that she would be welcome in January when the new semester starts, but not before. Rotary says she can do that or wait until next year: the choice is hers, so I’m done looking there for extra assistance in getting this girl here as promised.

I e-mailed back suggesting that she might be able to live with us until she’s “official,” after she turns 15 in the middle of October. She might be able to come here with no visa at all, as long as it’s under 90 days. There could be a problem with getting an exchange visa when she’s already in the country, though – there is so much yet to learn. Rotary is also concerned that if she were to do that, she’d make friends here and not have the best experience if she then transferred to the original school. There are several possibilities, all of which would require cooperation from many different people. She could live with us as a “tourist” until she’s 15, after which she could enroll at Vashon. I could homeschool her (with the cooperation of Vashon) so that she wouldn’t be behind when she officially enrolled at Vashon for the rest of the term, although that presents another problem, because Vashon is on a trimester schedule rather than semester. Then she could transfer to the original school in January. Or perhaps Vashon Rotary would sponsor her and she could finish the year there. I told her that we’d be happy to have her live with us for the entire year.

I’m willing to be flexible and work around the system, but I have no idea what her parents might think about all of that. They’ve already not quit at the first no, so that’s encouraging. I don’t even know if homeschooling is legal in Spain, which might be a scary proposition for them. And they have no way of knowing if I’m capable of teaching their daughter and am not some whack job who will teach from the Patriot Act and spout anti-rest-of-the-world rhetoric. I think homeschooling is great, for maybe 10% of the kids who are homeschooled, but it’s not something I’ve ever been interested in doing. This is a special circumstance, though, and I just can’t bear to imagine the spirit-sapping crushing disappointment she must be feeling right now.

Photographic evidence

Chloe has been threatened with dire consequences if she doesn’t keep up her blog when she gets to Spain, and that means posting photos, too. I haven’t enforced the consequences (indeed, haven’t even defined them) while she’s living in the same house, so I'm not sure how I'll do that when she's living half a world away from home. Other than making her feel bad for not providing the people who have supported her exchange with at least a token amount of appreciation in the way of regular updates, it’s mostly an empty threat.

I’ve been researching digital cameras for at least a year and finally bought one last week. I’m going to hate to let it go with her. So far, I’m pretty impressed. It’s a Kodak LS743 (sounds like the department heads of the Car Naming divisions at Lexus and BMW had a meetup), it’s small, metal instead of plastic, the photo quality is quite good, and it takes videos. It’s relatively simple to operate, yet has a lot of good features. We have an older digital camera and from that I learned that the two most important things to me (after image quality) are rechargeable batteries and the time between shots. We’ve been practicing with it so that Chloe gets used to all of the features – and will use them. We’re also going to have a few simple composition lessons. I told her we’d look at lots of photos posted on the Web and I’ll explain why many of them suck: “See this? Don’t do it.” I’m by no means anywhere near an expert, but most composition problems can be solved by learning two words: get closer.

In addition to bringing photos from home to show the people she meets next year, Chloe has to create a presentation to give to her host Rotary club. We’re starting out by taking pictures of uniquely American things: giant SUVs and pick-up trucks, Wal-Mart, supermarkets, and aisles of grossly large packages of stuff that can be found inside Costco (the camera came from Costco online). Those are the things I’m interested in. There is no shortage of photos of trees, bridges, and skylines. In fact, the Rotary district here is providing the kids with a CD full of local photos. But what I’m always interested in is the dairy aisle at the grocery store or a typical bedroom, kitchen, or bathroom. What does the average parking lot look like? Do they have Slurpees? Is there a store on every other corner where one can buy reams upon reams of paper? Can a person in Spain buy a six-pound bag of gummi bears, a nine-pack of men’s briefs, and an inflatable bounce house with the convenience of one-stop shopping?

It don't add up

I’m still worried (big surprise, that) about the younger host sister being able to come to Washington in September. I saw somewhere (but not on an official US State Department Web site) that a person must be 15 to get a student visa, in which case it doesn’t matter what Rotary is telling the family because they won’t be able to get her a student visa.

But then I read on the US Embassy in Macedonia’s site (this sort of information is not as easy to find as one would think) that since 1996 student visas are not granted for elementary or middle school students, but they are for high school students (grades 9–12). It also says that the student must present proof that the entire unsubsidized cost of her year of education in the US will be paid to the school. No minimum age is listed, just the grade level. Chloe started 9th grade a few days after her 14th birthday. The host sister would turn 15 a month and a half after starting school here. I’m going to e-mail back and reiterate that if something doesn’t work out I’d be happy to do all I can to help get her here some other way.

When does the smooth sailing start?

My, what a circus ride this has been. The host father e-mailed back with answers to a few questions I had. Then, at the end of the message, he writes, “While I am writing this letter” and goes on to say that he has just found out that the younger daughter can’t go on the exchange because she won’t be 15 until October. Her older sister is going to Kansas, and a girl from Kansas is going to their home. The younger daughter was coming to Washington, and Chloe from Washington is going to their home. One of his answers was that both Chloe and the girl from Kansas would be living with them at the same time. Haven’t heard from any of the other Kansas RYE contacts, by the way.

We have an idea of what they are going through because of Chloe’s experience in December. You can’t just rip this opportunity away from a 14-year-old girl at the last moment. Someone failed in a big way by not noticing her birth date before now. I e-mailed back, asking if he would consider having her come here unofficially, and that we would be happy to have her stay with us as long as necessary and do whatever it takes to make it work. Chloe checked and it looks like no visa is needed for stays of 90 days or less, so that would make things easier. I have no idea if the host parents would consider this, and my lack of Spanish and their lack of English is really getting in the way. These are tricky things to discuss and I’m quite sure I’m not communicating what I mean. Chloe wrote to the daughter expressing the same thing, and tried to get across her success with not taking No for an answer in December. But that was a decision based on opinion, not on law, and so was more easily reconsidered.

As I write this, the father has sent another message: Thank you, but don’t worry. Rotary has assured him that they will find another state for the daughter to go to. He said Washington law doesn’t allow her to go to school here (don’t know how accurate that is). He also said to please ask him if we need anything for Chloe, and that first impressions are important because being away from home for a year is not easy.

Whew! In the back of our minds today was this: What if they don’t take Chloe because Washington won’t take their daughter? Or because they don’t have room for three girls at the same time?

Now we know that Chloe and a girl from Kansas will be living with the same Spanish parents at the same time. I wonder if that happens more often than we’ve heard? It could make things so much easier, but they’ll have to make an effort to not isolate themselves together. It would be so easy to fall back to English when the going gets tough. Our mission to find this ”American girl of Kansas” is renewed and now we have a first name.

More contact

Got a message from the host father yesterday. He said he’d been to a Rotary meeting the day before and they didn’t know when Chloe was coming, but they thought it would be about a week before school starts on September 6. We got Chloe’s itinerary today: she arrives in Pamplona after 8:00 PM on September 5.

Apparently we misread the host sister’s message because the father said that both of his daughters will be in America while Chloe is in Spain. He apologized for his English, but it looks like his English is a lot better than my Spanish (which is actually Google’s Spanish – oops, make that the Spanish of Google). I know that pronouns are especially tricky in translations and am wondering if that’s where some of the confusion is coming from. Or it could be with the 18 million forms of the verb “to be.” Even so, Google and other online translation tools are miracle workers. My messages to them must look like they’re from a second-grader who can’t be bothered with vocabulary or word order in sentences.

I e-mailed back asking if we’d understood the daughter’s message correctly that there will be a girl from Kansas at their home at the same time as Chloe. Again, possible pronoun problems. There’s a bit of difference between you and I. I’ve heard from two of the Kansas Rotary contacts, both of whom said they didn’t know of any girls going to Spain. I hope the rest of the contacts respond. I also asked if Chloe will need a uniform for school or school supplies. This not speaking each other’s language is entirely knew to us, but I keep reminding myself that there are people who don’t speak the same language who marry each other and live long, happy lives, so I should quit whining.

According to Chloe’s itinerary, she leaves on September 2 instead of September 3 and will spend about 26 hours either flying or waiting for flights. At least she leaves at noon, so we don’t have to get up at 2:00 AM to make a morning flight. Would proably have to call the whole trip off if that were the case.

Lack of hosts

Bought some slippers for Steve and there were Rotary plaques all over the Red Wing store walls, so I asked the guy about exchange students. Their club is only four years old, so they haven’t done Rotary Youth Exchange yet. But his old club did it a few times. His family hosted a girl from Finland for the entire year because the club couldn’t find anyone else to host. He said getting host families and schools is a problem, which is consistent with what I’ve heard about other clubs. That doesn’t seem to be the case with Vashon, though. Although I’ve not talked to many of the people involved at the club level, everyone I have talked with is excited about the thought of exchanging teenaged ambassadors.

By the end of the year Red Wing-guy’s family was glad to see their exchange student go home. At home she lived with her divorced dad and older brother. The dad traveled all the time in his job for Ford Motor Company, so she and her brother got to do whatever they wanted. He said she was a spoiled brat who called Daddy every other day complaining about something, including the slum she was living in. And his family thought they lived in a perfectly respectable home in a nice development.

Chloe’s a low maintenance person and is also polite. So many of these personality clashes boil down to impoliteness. Just be nice, even if you don’t mean it. Easier said than done, I know.

Contact from home away from home

I’m drying my hair in the bathroom yesterday when I hear a loud commotion and the door flies open: “She e-mailed back! She e-mailed back!” and whoosh, Chloe’s gone.

Her host sister e-mailed, in Spanish. Chloe parsed the message as much as she could, then ran it through Google Language Tools to translate it. I love reading machine-translated material: “I hope that your stay in Spain is of your affability.”

Alicia goes to the same school Chloe will (a ten-minute walk from home), and has a sister Chloe’s age who will be in Kansas while Chloe’s there. She said Pamplona is a small city of 180,000 inhabitants, which is quite large to us. She also said, “During your stay here, you will be with an American girl of Kansas.” We don’t know if “here” means their home, their school, or their Rotary club. I e-mailed all of the RYE contacts in Kansas to see if they know of this girl so she and Chloe can talk. I’ve never heard of a family hosting two students at the same time from the same country.

At least now we have Alicia and her father’s e-mail addresses and we can e-mail photos, too. I’m going to compose a message to Alicia’s parents in simplified English and then translate it with Google. I’ll include both the English and translated versions just in case they speak English. To begin a message to strangers who will be caring for my daughter with, “Do you speak English?” would be a bit presumptuous and rude. Chloe finds it amusing that I won't have control over the placement and choice of every word in the message I send them.

Not fair

A few days ago Chloe called from school with terrible news: Andy wasn’t going to Spain. Part of the excitement of this trip was that they would get to travel to Spain together. Having a friend on the long trip there would have helped with the anxiety and it would have been fun to share the experience with a friend. He was upset, Chloe was crushed, and we all felt awful on his behalf. He’d been planning on Spain since he was told so in December or January, and this is pretty late in the game to have to start over (and he’s had two years of Spanish). He was told that the kid from Spain who was going to come here backed out or otherwise was not coming, so there wasn’t a space for Andy there. It sounds like the Rotary district in Spain knew this for some time – which is why Andy didn’t have his guarantee form back yet – but they didn’t bother to tell the coordinator here.

Andy’s first choice had been Italy, but they said they couldn’t find space there and offered Spain instead (“Italy’s hard.” But there’s a girl there this year, so I’ve never understood why it’s hard to get a student into Italy). Now they told him they had a space in Germany, but he didn’t like that idea, so asked them to look in South America. From what Chloe said, I gathered that Andy was resigned to going to Germany, but was not happy about it. When I asked the travel agent how many students were going to Spain, she mentioned Andy and then I reminded her that he’d been jerked around and now didn’t know where he was going and that everyone was disappointed. She understood, but said, “Usually something like this happens because there’s something better waiting.” She doesn’t seem the Pollyanna-type so I didn’t dismiss her sentiment out of hand (I usually agree with that statement, but not until after I’ve had a nice little pity party), but it was still a rotten deal. The months of learning about and anticipating Spain seemed to have been wasted (although, rationally, nothing learned is ever wasted, there is no place for rational thought in the immediate aftermath of unexpected bad news). And now Chloe was suddenly more apprehensive because, instead of embarking on this exciting but scary journey with a trusted friend, she’d be doing it alone, like everyone else.

Tonight Andy called with “the most amazing news!” They found a spot for him in Italy.

Leaving from

Part of the paperwork that we completed this week asks which airport the student will be flying home to. I’d talked to the travel agent about keeping that Seattle, but specifying that Chloe would depart from London. That way we could end our trip with a few days in London, and my flight home would be a lot cheaper than having to go back to Pamplona and flying to Seattle from there. Although she cautioned me about the potential for things to change before then (a risk I’m willing to take), she thought that would be fine.

She called today and said she’d asked her boss about it. If Chloe had to come home early for any reason, she’d have to leave from London. Neither of us had thought of that. I wouldn’t want to worry about her having to get to London before she could come home in an emergency. We changed it back to Pamplona. I was really looking forward to spending a few days in London, but that will probably be too much for this trip. She mailed the itinerary today so we should have all those details in a day or two.

As long as the travel agent was on the phone, I asked her a few questions. She’s working on nineteen kids who are going to Spain (don’t know how big of an area she covers). All of the Rotary kids in the US fly to Chicago, meet up, then fly to Madrid via Copenhagen. Rotary International picks them up in Madrid for an orientation until Sunday. Then they all fly to their respective cities. Chloe’s school starts on Monday, September 6, so now we’re wondering if she’ll start school on time, something she’s worried about. It could be quite overwhelming to arrive one night and begin school the next day.