My name is Guinevere Hewitt, and I am extremely excited to be an AFS student! For years I have had the dream of travelling to different countries and immersing myself in the culture of that country; through AFS, that dream could become a reality. I believe that the best thing that a young person can do is travel the world, and exchange a part of their own culture with another. I hope that going abroad with AFS will not only help me to expand my knowledge of world cultures, but also to provide me with a gateway to travelling to other countries. Going to Japan will definitely be scary at first, but I know that once I have lived there for even a short period of time, things will not look quite as intimidating as before! Hopefully through AFS, I will learn to be a global ambassador of peace and equality, and I can leave a part of my own culture with my Japanese family.
When I first broke the news to my friends that I would be travelling halfway around the world to JAPAN, of all places, they looked at me like I had gone insane. Once the arrangements of my journey had become more concrete, one of my friends asked me, “Are you sure about this?” I can honestly say that I have never been surer about anything else in my life. My friends do agree with me that this experience will no doubt be life-changing and perhaps one of the most fascinating I will ever have, but they are mostly upset that I will be leaving for a year and won’t be able to spend most of my senior year with them. My family, on the other hand, has been with me on this trip from the very start, from helping me fill out the preliminary application to rushing around trying to get all the medical forms completed for the program. They believe that this is a tremendously important opportunity for me, and I cannot thank them enough for all their help on trying to make this whole thing work.
From the very beginning, our budget for the program was very tight. This was one of the most challenging obstacles that my family and I faced; even now it is difficult for us to amass money for the rest of the program. This enormous roadblock was the one thing that held my family and I back from finalizing our AFS decision for about a year. I have not yet taken action in terms of fundraising, but I do plan to ask friends and extended family for financial assistance in the weeks to come. I am very, very excited about this program, and I sincerely hope that my family and I will be able to add donations from family, friends, and others to our AFS budget. This year is going by so fast, and I can’t WAIT to go to Japan! Only five more months to go…
Thursday, October 22, 2009
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