Mom's Turn: Introducing Mao

SOOOO – we now have Mao, a foreign exchange student from Japan, living with us. It was a big surprise with unusual circumstances to get her in the middle of the year like this. She came to the USA in August and has been with a host family in Slidell. For various cultural and personality reasons it just didn’t work out and she needed to be moved rather quickly. Teeny’s old Japanese teacher remembered that I had been interested in hosting an exchange student several years ago, so she called and asked if we could take Mao in. I thought it would be a very unique opportunity and a blessing in disguise because we could give it a trial run for half a year instead. We are running into some problems with the Baton Rouge public schools…how perfect is that for a glitch! The private do, but they require acceptance at the beginning of the year. So we may simply be a means to an end holding her until Ann (the coordinator with the ASSE program) can find another host family outside of Baton Rouge with a school to accept her. Although, we all are working very hard to get it fixed because we would love for her to stay.