AFS Camp! :DDD

all the excahnge students in our area team!

The Americans! Moira from Lopez Island, Washington, Johannes from Massachusetts, and Me!

The Awesome broken umbrellas that were at the entrance of the Youth Hostel we stayed at! (Moria, Me, and Bluette from China Town Paris, France)

The Volunteers! (Roman from Russia, Nolwenn from France, Martin from Germany (AFSer in Maryland last year),and Louisana from Venezuela.) Yes only one of our volunteers is actually German. The others had thier AFS in Germany. Roman and Luisana now live in Germany, and Nolwenn just came from France for our awesome orientation!

Moira and I playing on the playground!

The first weekend of October I had my first AFS orientation! It was amazing! There is only 15 or so foreign exchange students in our area team, but the weekend was awesome! It was great to hang out with other exchange students! There are three Americans including me in our area team. From one country we are the largest group. All of the orientations were in English since most of our German is not good enough to understand. We had a lot of energizers that we did. I remembered a lot of them from when Max did them at January orientation my first year I volunteered with AFS. We had several group sessions where we broke out into smaller groups and talked about how things were going so far. My favorite activity we did was when we went in to the city center of Muelhaussen (the city where the youth hostel was that we stayed at). We were broken into three teams given 5 questions about the city, and we had to run around the city looking for the answers. It was really cool!, and fun! After the activity we were given time to just walk around the city. It was really nice to just chill in the city center with 15 awesome exchange students! We had a talent show Saturday night, and that was a lot of fun. We (The Americans) did our own version of the Throwdown Hoedown. It was pretty funny. We didn’t have music so I sang and Johannes kept the rhythm, which I kept forgetting about, and Moira danced. The original plan was for Moira and me to both dance and sing, but I hurt my knee so badly that it made it hard to walk. So I just sang. There were other talents too such as salsa dancing from the South Americans, singing from the French, a Thai dance, the national anthem from Finland and Brazil, and skits. The whole weekend was just absolutely amazing! We all had soooo much fun! I can’t wait for the next orientation in January!