“The purpose of the program is to develop personal friendship between American and Afghani students and have an exchange of ideas about cultures and ways of life,” Dougherty said. “American students get to meet Afghani students as real people and hopefully as friends. Afghani students get to return with a better understanding of what life and values are like in America.”
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Terry Dougherty helps bring students from Afghanistan to Indiana
Afghan teens coming to learn – and educate
By Krista J. Stockman
The Journal Gazette
Four teens from Afghanistan will arrive in Fort Wayne this month to spend a year with area families learning about American culture and attending local schools.
This is the second year teens from the war-torn country will visit Indiana and several other states across the country as part of Youth Exchange and Study, a program under the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Three of the teens will arrive Sunday after a monthlong training session to help them adjust to life in the United States and two weeks before school begins at Homestead, Heritage and Woodlan high schools, where they will attend.
The schools with modern science and computer labs and classes with often 30 or fewer students – both boys and girls – are radically different from the schools they attend at home.
Terry Dougherty, who helped bring the students to Indiana, said the exchange student his family hosted last year attended a school in Kabul with 10,000 other girls who went to school in two shifts. Classes generally had at least 60 students, and the girls attended school through the summer with no air conditioning.
“There is nothing like a lab for science,” he said. “The girls have never had sports or athletic participation.”
Even physical education class and riding a bicycle were new for his exchange student, Dougherty said.
He became involved in the exchange program when as a Peace Corps volunteer working in Afghanistan he heard about the program designed to expose Afghan and American students to one another.
“The purpose of the program is to develop personal friendship between American and Afghani students and have an exchange of ideas about cultures and ways of life,” Dougherty said. “American students get to meet Afghani students as real people and hopefully as friends. Afghani students get to return with a better understanding of what life and values are like in America.”
Heritage Principal Chris Hissong said he believes his students got a lot out of having an Afghan student in the school last year.
“The young lady was able to talk to some of our classes and talk about Afghanistan and what the country is like,” Hissong said. He said instead of only reading the often dry accounts of Afghanistan in their textbooks, students got to hear about the customs of the country from someone who lives there.
To participate in the program, the Afghan students have to want to come to the United States and have to be able to fully participate in an American high school, meaning they have to be fluent in English and have had enough education before arriving to keep up with American classes, Dougherty said.
He said about 2,000 students applied for the 40 slots to come to the United States, and this year nearly half of the students are girls. While girls were not educated in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule, most of the girls in the program come from families who left Afghanistan during the civil war in the 1980s and returned only in the past few years, Dougherty said.
