How a Chance Encounter With a Silver-Haired Lady Changed My Life
Re-visiting my Tunisian AFS Family in 2017
When I was 14, I came out of our local grocery store with my mum to find a sweet silver-haired elderly lady selling raffle tickets. We stopped to have a look at what she was supporting and got chatting. Her name was Nina, and she was from an intercultural (or student exchange) program called AFS. Little did I know it at the time, but Nina was the lady that was about to change my life, in the most unimaginable and wonderful way.
We chatted for a while and as Mum was purchasing a couple of raffle tickets she mentioned how she had wanted to go on an AFS exchange when she was a teenager, but her mother was shortly diagnosed with terminal cancer and the opportunity was ripped away.
My mum and I had always had the idea that I would do a student exchange. She took me backpacking through Asia, Holland, and The United States when I was five years old, had taught me to be a pretty independent kid and had always encouraged a sense of cultural curiosity from a very young age. When I heard this revelation from my mum who had given me so much, I felt an instant determination to make her proud, to accomplish what she couldn’t, to make up for lost opportunities, and to seize the one that was sitting directly in front of me.
I took a handful of pamphlets and started applying as soon as I got home.
Even though at the tender age of fourteen and a half I was officially too young to be accepted into the program, my application went ahead and interviews began for the next intake when I would be old enough to travel. After a couple of rounds of interviews, I had officially been accepted into AFS, and it all started to get a little more real.
I spent weeks mulling over the list of possible countries I could live in… “Did I want to go to South America? Somewhere warm would be nice. But Europe would be amazing, think of how much I could travel. Ohhhhh I do like the look of Italy, and it would be great to get in touch with my roots in The Netherlands. Oh, but this place, Tunisia looks cool too. I have never heard of it before, but it sounds adventurous and you can go to the Sahara…”. So I sent my final preference list off to the AFS head office in the order of Italy, Tunisia, and The Netherlands, having no real preference of where I would end up.
A couple of anticipation-filled weeks later I came home from school to find a large A4 envelope on the bench, which, of course, my mum had already opened. She looked at me with an unreadable face and said: “Open it”.
I was going to live in Tunisia for a year.
Having chosen this country with knowing nearly nothing about it I think she started panicking a bit. Thinking I should have done a bit more research before I sent off my country list I jumped on the internet went straight to Wikipedia and read up on the important facts:
It’s in North Africa, between Libya and Algeria.
It’s 97% Muslim.
The official language is Arabic, and the second is French.
Apparently, Tunisians spend a lot of time watching TV.
They have a lot of influences from the Mediterranean culture.
After the news of my new home sank in, I started telling people where I was going and what I was doing. Their initial reaction was always either “You’re going where? Where is that? Is it safe there?”, or “It’s a Muslim country? Do you have to wear a burka? Will you have to dye your hair?”. –Not the usual sort of questions you expect when you’re going on a student exchange. Then again, I guess most people go to the United States or France… Not a place that you had never heard of yourself until seeing it as an option.
I think people were generally quite surprised that I had chosen somewhere so “off the beaten track”. Of course, there was a lot of apprehension from both of my parents when they discovered their soon-to-be 16-year-old daughter was going to go and live in some random country neither of them had previously heard of in North Africa with a completely different culture and language for an entire year. But they had raised me, they knew how stubborn I was, and that there was no chance of talking me out of something I was determined to do. After a few piercing questions of “are you sure you want to do this?” they put on their brave faces and jumped in to support me full-heartedly.
Now, doing a student exchange is expensive, and most families do not have a casual $10,000 lying around in their bank account for the day their child decides they want to move across the world. So Mum and I got into fundraising mode. We hustled from friends and family to donate money and items and sold our own raffle tickets, we hosted dinners and event nights with a fabulous local restaurant who contributed in a massive way, I worked my ass off every weekend at a cafe, and creche and babysat at every opportunity I could. And a few weeks before the payment deadline, I received a phone call from our local AFS chapter saying that I had won a scholarship of $2,500 to contribute towards the cost, in return for writing a few newsletters and a bit of volunteer work (I guess that’s where the blogging began!). And just like that, we had made it.
A couple of weeks before my departure date I got the pack containing all the details about my future host family. I was going to have a younger sister, two older brothers, and a mum and dad in La Soukra, Tunis. Equally as excited as finding out what country I would be going to, I jumped online and tried to track down my future family with emails and Skype messages.
After a few chats and emails in broken English with them, the next thing I knew the date for my departure had come, and I said goodbye to my friends and family at Auckland airport with 3 other New Zealanders heading in the same direction, and didn’t look back.
The year flew by, and before I knew it it was time to go home. I had made a new family, a whole load of culturally diverse friends, been exposed to a completely new religion, and two languages, eaten completely differently and fallen in love with the food, attended a new school, and been immersed in a completely different educational program, had my first love (and my first heartbreak), and although I didn’t feel like it (or know it at the time), I was a completely different teenager from the one I had been when I left Auckland Airport. Most shockingly, I was not at all prepared for the hardest part of my whole AFS experience: Re- immersion.
With Friends in Tunisia at the tender age of 16.
Arriving back into a small town for the last 6 months of my high school education was my own personal hell. Having been fortunate enough to not experience homesickness while in Tunisia the reverse culture shock I experienced when returning back to New Zealand was the most challenging few months I had faced in my life. My friends (or those who I thought were my friends) were still doing the exact same things and continued to act on my arrival back home as though nothing had changed. They had absolutely no idea what I had been through, what I had seen, heard, learned, experienced, grown, and been exposed to, and how much more important things there were to talk about than who liked who. Girls would make racist “jokes” about “dirty Arabs” and laughed at the videos of my friends singing in Arabic, boys teased me asking if I lived in mud huts and drank from a river. I would go home, go to the toilets, or my favourite teacher and cry. 17-year-olds can be real assholes.
I didn’t want to belittle them or continue to talk about my incredibly life-changing experience, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be teased and upset all the time… and I also didn’t want to be completely ignored and pretend like it never happened. I became incredibly unhappy with my peer group, I dreamed of returning to Tunisia to be with the people who had meant so much to me throughout the year. In the end, I fell out of my social clique and threw myself into my studies, making up for the academic year I had missed with reasonable ease, and immersed myself in art history, media studies, and French classes.
Because I now had nothing better to do than study, I enjoyed my classes so much that I received better grades than most of my friends who had spent their entire year at school and I was accepted into University without an issue. My misery ended when I left high school, moved away from my home town and started Uni with a fresh group of people from diverse backgrounds to befriend. I spent four more years in New Zealand before my insatiable wanderlust took over, and since 2013 I have been hopping around the globe soaking up all that it has to offer, returning to Tunisia as often as I can.
It was in these last six months of high school that I realized just how much I had changed in that year and although it was one of the most difficult, hurtful, and stressful times of my life, I came through it with an even more determined sense of adventure, wanderlust, and desire to go my own path and explore the unknown. Those who stuck by me those last six months have stuck by me until now, and now we are all a little more grown-up we are going on our own adventures on the other side of the world together.
I know now that if it wasn’t for that exchange there is a high possibility that things could have turned out very differently. Of course, I still feel like I would have traveled and seen places, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been with such ease, such comfort, and enthusiasm. Perhaps I would have gone with the trend and done the unthinkable for any committed globe trotter- a stint in London, a Contiki tour, and then return back home to get married and have babies. And that’s definitely not a bad life, it’s just definitely not the life for me.
I probably wouldn’t have developed such a love for writing and I most definitely wouldn’t have learned French, which would have made my position living in Paris now almost impossible. To think that I wouldn’t have met my amazing, loving, and generous host family is absolutely heartbreaking because I can’t possibly imagine life without them and the amazing year I had with these people who made me feel like I belonged.
The most important thing that AFS taught me is that different cultures are neither good nor bad, just different.
Because of this, I have never been afraid to follow my heart and never had the feeling that I am missing out on opportunities because I try to take as many as I can. I have no fear that I am not going to know anyone when I go somewhere new because I know how quickly I can adapt to a new situation and make new friends. Although difficult at times, I try to see the world with a view of compassion, knowing that people are generally welcoming with open arms.
Riding a camel in the Sahara in 2013, my first time back in the country since the exchange.
But of course, I can’t put this all down to sweet old Nina. She was just the catalyst that set this whole adventure into motion. There was also the entire team at AFS, who created and still run (mostly voluntary) this incredible program for teenagers to experience such a life-changing year. The local AFS chapter decided that I was worthy of the scholarship which helped me get there. My friends and family donated money, time, and food, and came to dinners dressed up in belly-dancing costumes. The beautiful family in Tunisia who welcomed a stranger into their home and treated me as their own child for an entire year. And of course, my parents, who supported me every step of the way and encouraged my sense of curiosity and everlasting wanderlust.
There is no possible way you could ever regret doing or sending your child on an AFS exchange. Even if they have the most difficult and challenging year of their life, even if they have an incredible time, and then come back and you have to watch them suffer through the crap, they will come out of it changed for the better. More open, more brave, more accepting, more compassionate, and more grown up.
No regrets.
For information about this world-changing organization AFS or to inquire about going on an exchange yourself visit http://www.afs.org/
Eat well, live well, travel well.
Xx Ainsley