What is it like to host a foreign student? A parishioner talks about her experiences to Vanessa Williams of St. Brelades College

“We started because my husband was given a pay cut and we needed to find some extra money. I’ve worked with children in the past as a youth leader and we thought hosting foreign language students could be the ideal solution.
Hosting has been a real eye-opener, we’ve learnt such a lot about different cultures; things we’d never really thought about before. For instance, we had a university student from Hong Kong to stay who had never been outside of Hong Kong. He was so pleased to be here and we were amazed to hear that he was more than happy with the fairly small single room we offered him, because at home he slept in the same sized room but with his two brothers.
Another lovely student came from France and said "Good morning" every time he saw us. Obviously he thought it meant the same as "Bonjour" (hello). It was only after a few days that we felt brave enough to tell him that he couldn’t say good morning after lunch time!
Of course it’s time consuming, but we really enjoy sharing our home and many of the students have become friends. One of our adult students loves gardening. When she stayed last year she noticed I was too busy to do the garden, so wrote to us at Christmas to say she’s returning this year with her tools!
All the students we’ve hosted have loved Jersey and we’ve felt really lucky to be able to show off our beautiful parish. Although many of them arrived with very negative opinions of British food and thought that we only eat burgers and chips - they’ve been amazed at the healthy food we serve. Apparently the European media love to say how unhealthy the British diet is so it’s nice to have the opportunity to show them that our food isn’t so bad!”