Bronwyn Horton's experience with her host family, school and community was unique... as happens with every exchange student. No two students live the same life. If Bronwyn's fellow Australian students in Thailand were to publish their own letters home, the reader would see that their lives (though sharing common elements) would be totally different. Even were a student to live in the same village, the experience would be vastly different.

During their year away exchange students go through cycles which have been researched and documented. These can range from such emotions as homesickness or frustration --- to feeling so comfortable and acclimatised that the students do not want to return home.

Coupled with the love and protection of a host family and a professional exchange organisation, these aspects of a student's sojourn help define the experience.

back cover information:

In 1984, 17 year old Australian Bronwyn Horton set out on a one year voyage of discovery as an exchange student to Thailand. The only exchange student in Angthong, central Thailand, Bronwyn began a series of regular letters to her family back home --- a thread of communications which assumed great personal significance. Her letters, and the subtle changes that they reveal over the year, paint a fascinating portrait of her life in Thailand through her teenage eyes. A decade later, in a special supplementary chapter, Bronwyn reflects on what her experience means to her now, and how it has changed her life and thoughts.

About the Author

Bronwyn Horton, originally from the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, became interested in the world at a young age. She has worked in England and Thailand as well as around Australia. Highlights of her career include nursing Aboriginal children in Alice Springs, three months' voluntary work in the Leprosy Rehabilitation Centre near Chiang Mai, Thailand and studying for her Midwifery Certificate in Somerset, England. Since her exchange experience, she has visited Thailand four times and continued her volunteer involvement with AFS. Bronwyn now lives in Victoria, and has plans to settle in Tasmania soon.

AFS International Exchanges

The world's oldest and largest student exchange organisation, AFS had its origins as a volunteer ambulance service during WWI. A dream began among those early volunteers of fostering people-to-people contact to promote world peace. They began exchanging students in 1919.

Today, 10,000 students participate in an AFS student exchange each year. In 1989 it became the only exchange organisation to be awarded a testimonial citation by the United Nations.

Foreword

When I went to California as an AFS student in 1968-69, the program was a radial pattern of exchanges: students from the US spent time in one of the dozens of participating countries whose young people went only to the USA.

This book is a record of a similar but different kind of AFS experience; for, as we know, since the early 1970s the program has become more profoundly international. My own family hosted a Japanese student in 1975, and by now the number of Australian families who have opened their homes to young people from all over the world must be in the thousands. And conversely, of course, many young Australians like Bronwyn Horton have been offered the rich opportunity of experiencing a foreign culture as an adopted member of a family and a community.

How wonderful it is that these exchanges are happening at a time when we are redefining our sense of our own society, when a growing number of Australians were born either abroad or to foreign-born parents; when our art, our diet, our schools, our media, our language and our literature are being modified and enriched by the impact of other cultures.

Those of us who had the good fortune to benefit from the AFS experience have not only been given a great opportunity for personal development. We have been shown in a fundamental way the diversity of all human experience and therefore its oneness; and this understanding can, when we return to our own societies, show us the importance of living our lives as citizens of the world.

Nick Enright

Contents

Foreword People Places Introduction Newsletters:
	1. Bangkok, March 1984 2. 17th April 3. Thailand, 6th May 4. Thailand, 21st May 5. Thailand, 4th June 6. [July]	7. Thailand, July 1984 8. Thailand, Early August 9. Chaiyo, September 10. Thailand, October 11. Thailand, Dec/Jan 1985 12. January 15
Some simple recipes from Maa's kitchen Ten years on

Dear Reader,

This little book is a collection of observations and thoughts, as seen through the unworldly eyes of a once-shy Australian teenager living in a remote area of Central Thailand in the mid 1980s.

It is not a complete collection of my letters by any means. Over the course of a year, a 17 year old's impressionable mind inevitably resulted in a mile-high wad of correspondence which would form a small library on its own, I'm sure. Having already been edited and typed into newsletter form to be forwarded to various friends and relatives by my mother at the time, these letters from Thailand have been dusted off and published by a committee of enthusiastic AFS volunteers for you, also, to read.

I hope you enjoy the following pages. They go some way to attempt to show a few of the differences and similarities between two cultures sharing the same world.

Bronwyn Horton

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