Swiss people

When I was twelve, our family decided to host an exchange student. It was a group decision--we went through a big list of them and picked a girl with a good understanding of English. It was so exciting the first time. My mom wanted a girl so that my sister and I wouldn't fall in love with him, a notion my sister and I both found ridiculous. She wanted someone who had at least one younger sibling so that she could deal with our family, and someone whose first language was neither French nor Spanish so that there was no bias towards one of us--Allison was taking French at the time and I'm fluent in Spanish. So we got Andrea. Andrea was a Swiss fifteen-year-old who had been to Florida a couple times with her mom but never spent significant time in the USA. She had one older sister and one younger sister, and all of us were younger than her. She went to school in another district because ours didn't have room for any more exchange students, but she got by.

Everyone loved Andrea. She brought us Swiss chocolate and still sends it to us every Christmas, which is a fantastic side effect of getting a student from the land of Toblerone. She got along very well with my sister, which is an incredible feat in itself--my sister saw her as the older sister she'd never had, which is a little odd to me as the oldest child in the family, but Allison and I are close enough in age that she doesn't see me as a big sister. Swiss people are very clean and Andrea loved doing the dishes, so my parents used her as an example for us. "See how nice Andrea keeps her room?" "See how Andrea does her homework right when she gets home?" Andrea really was like a sister to us, and her experience went exactly the way a year long exchange program should go. She learned a lot about our culture and we learned about her culture too. We learned that fondue pots must be thick, and that swatches are superior to all kinds of watches, we learned not to eat Hersheys because it is offensive to Swiss people (just like how Lindt is offensive to americans? wait...) and that Mount Rainier is nothing compared to the Alps. We learned a little about diplomacy and French and German cultures, and what it's like to live in a neutral country, and that Swiss people despise Turks. And we ate lots of chocolate.

Two years later, we got Michele. Michele was Andrea's little sister, and she wasn't too good at English but Andrea convinced her to come stay with us because we were a good family and would teach her about other cutlures. The thing about Michele is that she didn't want to be here. This is huge. The most important part of learning to assimilate with another culture is wanting to assimilate, and Michi was this little sister whose family had seen the merits of an exchange program and convinced her to come. She had a very possesive boyfriend back in Switzerland who we later learned sometimes threatened to kill himself from time to time if she did not come back soon. Funny, we'd thought only American guys were that angsty. Michi played volleyball here and she went to my school, but when she was at home she stayed in her room the whole time. She didn't eat much and she didn't do much with our family, and my parents didn't know how to react to that. Michele was supposed to stay for a year but she left after a semester.

So the moral of that story is that you can't judge a culture by one person because people are different everywhere. Just how they tell you on tour that you have to be on your best behavior because you're representing America to whoever you visit, as a host person you have to understand that not all people from the same culture act the same and that while society affects some aspects of people, individualism exists in all societies to some extent.