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with Brad and Dawn Fisher and their children, Tara and David. Missing from the pizza party but “home” for a visit a few weeks earlier was Rodrigo from Chile, who was both the Fishers’ first international student and the first international student at RCHS.
Rodrigo came in 1978. “We saw an ad in the paper, asking for host families,” Dawn Fisher recalled. “It sounded neat. We had no teenagers at the time. Tara and David were still in elementary school. So we thought we’d practice being the parents of teenagers with somebody else’s kids!” she joked.
“We loved it. It was absolutely wonderful, marvelous,” Mrs. Fisher said of that first year. So Kirsten came in 1980, Josephine in 1984 and Thomas in 1986. They came to be more than visitors from another country; they came to be family. And they’ve all stayed family, even after they returned to their first home.
“They’re still family. Once they’re in your heart, they never leave.”
“Once they’re family, they’re family forever,” the pizza man added.
And while they are in America, they’re Americans, the Fishers explained. The young people go through an intensive orientation program in their home countries that helps with the cultural adjustment and then there’s a refresher course after they’ve been with their American hosts for a month. “There’s a lot of work involved for the kids. They’re learning all the time, but because it’s fun, because they’re making new friends, they don’t realize they’re learning,” Mrs. Fisher said.
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