Alfaj0r.com

If the answer for you is yes, click here to go and sign a petition. It’s really easy!

The major premise is that friendship leads to understanding, and understanding leads to peace. And I can tell from first hand experience that youth exchange programs are great developers of friendship and understanding, and that’s why I have already signed the petition.

I spent my weekend with a dozen exchange students, in Elko, Nevada. I also drove us there and back, in a minivan that the Northern Nevada International Center kindly let us borrow… When I returned the van yesterday, it said I had driven for 835 miles in 3 days. Yikes!

Anyway, the orientation was great. We had a lot of fun, with the main event at the TS Ranch, learning about Cowboy life. All the exchange students really liked it, as they got to learn about this very particular lifestyle, and they even got to try some things for themselves.
I also took my camera and took a bunch of pictures. Most of them can be found in the AFS Album.

Of course there was also a serious part to the orientation, and I was in charge of leading it. We talked quite a bit about how one gets ready to go back to their home country after having been here for almost a year. The hot topics were separation anxiety, reverse cultural shock and logistics of how things work, and I think that it all went pretty well. Some things were brought to discussion that I really hope most of them will keep in mind as they spend their last month as an AFSer.

I probably won’t see these kids until “Departure Day”, the day that they get dropped off by their host families, and they go to the airport to catch a plane heading home. I will be there to once again give a little orientation, and to try to make their experience end on a high note. It should be fun, intense, but most of all, rewarding, for this is when I really get them to think about how their year has gone, and it’s usually pretty awesome to hear everyone’s insights on their own experiences. :)

I hope you’ve noticed the flags on the right. When you click on a flag, everything will be translated to the language of choice. Google does the job, so it’s not exactly accurate, but it does work remarkably well, and it should be enough for most people to get an idea of what I’m writing about, without knowing English.
Installing that guy was pretty easy too, it just took about 15 minutes to look at all the documentation and doing all the necessary changes in files here and there.

Speaking of installing things on the website, the AFS forums have received a lot of work. I’ve installed several mods, and gotten my hands dirty with PHP, MySQL and a bit of HTML. Everything seems to work fine too, so it looks like I did everything right. Which is good, because at least a couple of hours went into all the modifications and additions to the forums.

My brother Juan, who lives in Mendoza, asked me earlier in the week to do him an e-favor. He had been trying to run an AFS online discussion board in a number of free places, but he was continually dissapointed with the options, and I had once commented to him how much extra bandwith and storage I got with this account.
So yes, there has been an addition to Alfaj0r.com, and it’s the AFS forums! It’s at www.alfaj0r.com/AFS, and we’re just getting it started. I have no idea where it’ll go, or what the purpose is, but I am excited to host it, because it’s interesting and I am, after all, an AFSer too.

So if you know what AFS is about, go register and say hi! Goooo!