From July 21 to August 8, Northwest International Student Exchange (NWISE) is hosting a summer camp in Wallingford for teenage students from Chengdu City, in the Szechuan Provence of China. The visiting students will have a wonderful opportunity to experience American life here in the Pacific Northwest by taking English immersion classes, and participating in cultural activities. They’ll be using OmCulture as a base to their camp, but the organization is seeking Wallingford families to host the teachers and students coming over for the camp. Here’s some of the information from NISE:
What is the commitment? We have the Chinese students in class and activities all class days (every weekday) and so families just need to provide room and board for the 2 week stay and a safe, loving environment in the evenings and weekends. We also ask that families drop off the students roughly at 8.30 am and pick up 5:30 pm at the camp location during the weekdays. You can host half of the time or all of the time. We will also do our best to help with transportation rather than lose a great possible host family. Many families carpool anyway.
Why do it: Hosting allows you and your family to have a fantastic international experience in the comfort of your own home, have an international friend for life and lots of fun with your own family and community as you share your life and culture.
How many students can a family host? Families can host between 1-2 students. Think about how much fun it could be for your own children as well to have this unique opportunity to be a little or big brother/sister to an international visitor for only a 2 week commitment.
Participate: We hold welcome and farewell parties and activities that all host families and children are invited to attend. We also are happy for families to attend many of our activities. In fact, we will encourage cultural exchange between the young people, so the more families I have involved the more I will build the program to be fun for the American as well as Chinese kids to learn and play together.
Weekend travel: Families that are enjoying weekends away- the students are hoping to be part of your family and would love to participate in any of your summer weekend family trips! If you want to host, but don’t know if you will be able to host the first or last weekends, please contact us anyway as we will likely be able to work around these scheduling issues.
Who we are: We are an organization known as Northwest International Student Exchange (www.nwise.org) and are part of the US diplomacy effort to promote international understanding and goodwill. We have a nice video on our website of a previous summer camp- check it out!
If you want to sign up as a host family, or have questions about the program, contact Lara Clark:
Email: [email protected] or call: 509-879-0459
Since China is my next big international trip (I hope), this would be a great opportunity for me and a student. Plus, I’m going camping two of those weekends and it would be great to take a student with me. Thanks for posting this information.