The Galatti Years: AFS Is.
Art Howe: Putting AFS in Order Art Howe on 'Denationalization' of AFSers The Rhinesmith Years: With Proper Training
The Dyal Years: Beyond Evolution to Revolution
Ulric (Rick) Haynes: From Strength to Strength
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Preface It's an act of faith in something to open your home to an adolescent (or adult) from another culture, but it is a risk that thousands of families take each year. In the process, you may get to know your own family better and learn to love someone whose skin is a different color or who comes from halfway around the world.
Forty years ago, the founders of AFS International Scholarships --- the volunteer ambulance drivers of the American Field Service --- were sure that bringing young people from war-torn Europe to spend one year in the United States would be universally meaningful, even though the experience itself was personal.
Alongside the French in WWI and the British in WWII, the AFS volunteers developed friendships that personalized the wars. Their memories of people and families were more important than governments and ideologies, and this is what they sought to promote in their peace-time activities. Now, 40 years later, almost 158,000 people from 90 countries have been AFSers, having an affect on families all around the globe.
AFS has weathered many storms during its evolution, shaped by forces within and outside of its control. AFS International today is a far cry from the six-person, one-room office that served as headquarters in the early years, but, as you will see in this book, the focus has remained startlingly clear: People can learn to understand and accept differences in other people and can even learn to love each other, too. And if one person can achieve this rapport with one family, then there is increased hope for humanity. International, intercultural, interracial, interreligious, interurban ---name the gap and AFS has bridged it.
As I collected the stories that fill this book, I realized that each one illuminated a slightly different point of view or spoke with a different accent. Life-long volunteers or recent returnees, staff members or host siblings, stories and poems all make a contribution to the AFS whole and to this book.
I hope you can find your story somewhere in the following pages. But, if you read just one piece that makes you think, that challenges some prejudice, that startles you or strikes you as so funny that you have to retell it, then you, too, will have had an AFS experience. Welcome to the family!
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