Day 3: Homestay

I'm referring to our international homestay student, from Seattle. She's our third homestay student in the four years we've been in this house. She is 18 and was a senior at high school, but her mother decided to send her abroad for the last 6 months of school. Within the first week of being here, she reminded me of everything that's wrong with America.

Dont get me wrong, she's perfectly lovely, but she walks around all day with earpods and can't put her phone down for a second, not even at the dinner tabke. (We've learned to text her when dinner is ready, because she doesn't hear us call.) Her room is a pigsty, and even though we don't allow food in the bedrooms, we keep finding empty chip bags and candy wrappers. Her parents sent her with $500 spending money for the six months and she went through that in less than two months, mostly on coffee and bubble tea.

But what's really annoying is her parents. You can almost hear the helicopter blades. She's 18, and presumably they sent her to New Zealand to learn independence, but they still treat her like she's 12. They send us emails suggesting we take away her phone at night! We smile and nod and ignore them.

When Covid-19 started making the news, I didn't realise Seattle was one of the first cities hit, and while I knew her father was a doctor, I didn't realise he was responsible for part of the response. (We even saw him interviewed on the Seattle news the other day.) When Seattle shut down their schools two weeks ago, we commented about how lucky she was to be here and still attending to school. 

A few days later, the AFS - which enables American students to study all over the world - decided to recall everyone. It made sense as an organisation, but in cases like ours they were moving kids from low-risk areas to high-risk areas! That said, we knew New Zealand was headed in the same direction and it was only a matter of time before we'd be in the same situation, so we spoke with her parents last Friday and agreed she should go home. 

On Monday we heard from our homestay student that her parents had decided to leave her with us! She said they were going to call us, but they never did. It was bizarre. 

The next day, New Zealand announced the lockdown, schools were closed and we were in exactly the same situation as Seattle, only with an extra child. 

So now we have a 19-year-old who desperately doesn't want to live at home, an 18-year-old who is 12,000 miles from home (and couldn't get back if she wanted), a 17-year-old who is incredibly moody and a 15-year-old who wants nothing more than to go skateboarding, but (I kid you not) he broke his skateboard the day before the lockdown! (Amazingly, he ordered a new one online and they shipped it before the government clarified that couriers could only ship "essential supplies.")