The U.S. Government authorizes some 45 or 50 American private voluntary associations (PVAs) to run high school youth exchange programs (YEPs). In a typical YEP an American-based organization like Youth For Understanding, Open Door, American Field Service or Rotary sends American teens (typically age 16 to 18 1/2) abroad for a year of  study in a foreign secondary school.  And vice versa:  approved PVAs bring non-American teens to the U.S. for an academic year or semester at a North Carolina or Virginia or Alaska high school.

I am most familiar with the YEP of Rotary International, having introduced the program to the Rotary Club of Detroit and having been involved with  Rotary Youth Exchanges in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in Washington, D.C. and now in North Carolina.

Your typical American PVA which does international youth exchanges specializes in YEPs and does only YEPs.  Rotary, by contrast, does many other things: local community service, international efforts to eradicate polio, provision of research scholarships to adults and the like. But all youth exchanges, no matter who organizes them, are radically "intercultural." A teen from Japan comes to North Carolina and learns to eat grits, drink sweetened ice tea and the like. A girl from North Carolina goes to Japan and learns to do things the Japanese way.

Exchange students live with host country families. Exchangees are neither servants nor honored guests of those families. Mexican or Hungarian exchange students in Buncombe County are treated as members of the Tarheel host family: as children, brothers and sisters, or  as nieces and nephews and cousins.

Exchange students live the life of the host family, largely if not entirely on the terms of the host family. And that means interacting with the religious practices, customs and beliefs of one or more hosts for four to twelve months. Thus, it is possible and it has happened, that a teen from Western North Carolina goes to India and lives with host successive host families who are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Jain. Or a Catholic girl from Brazil or a Buddhist boy from Thailand comes to Franklin or Murphy or Asheville and lives with families which are Baptist or Methodist or Episcopalian or Lutheran. Or Unitarian or Bahai or agnostic.

Teens are different from twenty years ago. Once most Rotary exchangees were boys. Now they are girls. On September 13 [1997] I attended a Western North Carolina Rotary Youth Exchange program in Waynesville to orient 17 non-American "inbounders" and their host families. There were 15 girls and two boys. 

Today's teens also have strong, self-confident personal agendas . They know what they want from the exchange year and they are determined to get it. Their parents may have one set of reasons for sending Susie or Mohammed abroad. The receiving Rotary Club of Black Mountain or Sao Paulo may also have its goals for the teen. Ditto the host parents. Ditto authorities and teachers at Irwin or Asheville or Lincolnton or Kaiserslautern or Melbourne high schools. We Rotarians sometimes, however, seem to be taken off guard when our 17 year old visitors or the 18 year old Americans we send abroad are closer to being autonomous young adults than they are to being docile, adorable pre-teens. And this self-confidence is true of the teens' religion, as well.

In practice, religious differences between exchange students and host families are said to be not that big a problem. Thank God! The easiest albeit perhaps saddest situation is where neither host family nor student is notably religious. So there is no friction. The hardest situation occurs when both hosts and student are serious practitioners of well-defined, boundary-setting religions which are perceived as mutually exclusive or competitive. The host parents in America or Slovakia or Australia in such situations hold all the cards, should the game degenerate into one of adult power over the student. In the sending country the family of the teen-age student may count as exceptionally good Christians and go to church a couple of times a month and on all high feasts. In the host country, however, the same young person, now reincarnated as "exchange student" may be seen as a slacker unless compelled to go with his host sisters to three services on Sunday and one on Wednesday.  And if he wants to go to his own church, well, o.k., but that has to be in addition to the four times with members of the host family. It happens.

Now think about that. Before you know it, you are  mishandling an issue of human rights. If you are Presbyterian and your Catholic cousins from Rhode Island come for a few weeks visit, would you compel them to attend your church? Or would you simply invite them, make them feel welcome if they chose to come? Facilitate their attendance at their own faith's local congregation--if they needed a ride? Are exchange students different?

Older non-American teens have formed their religious values far away from here and their parents are not entrusting their children to us hosts to dismantle their Buddhism or their Islam or their Unitarianism. 

As a matter of cultural survival and personal self-respect during their sojourn abroad, the teens might do well to consider themselves as "junior anthropologists" when it comes to all features of the host country's culture: food, religion, politics, social relationships, schooling and the like. Observe the differences with the greatest of respect and tact. Note them accurately. Write them down, if you like. Discuss differences dispassionately with host parents, host siblings and with fellow students. But do not feel obliged to repudiate what your families have taught  you.

To the extent which your conscience allows, do it "the host parents' way." Keep the peace. For your God is a just God and will not hold you personally accountable for an uncomfortable personal situation created by your sending country's culture or your host family's religious traditions. If you can, by all means graciously participate, observe, analyze how that culture's approach to the transcendent and the divine helps or hinders your personal  search for ultimate reality. But keep the peace as well as you can and talk to your host Rotary Club's or PVA's specially designated counselor to help you in such situations. Be a fly on the wall, an anthropologist if you like. Respecting others' values while honing your own is part of growing up.

As a matter of their rights as God-created humans, we need especially to respect the religious insights and preferences of the non-American teens whom we host--tentative and uninformed as those views may be. This is not a proper area for exercise of sheer "adult power." For it is not a teen's fault that he or she is a teen. Being a teen is what God wills him or her to be at this stage of the human drama.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE