The urban landscape of exchanges

In one of the group discussions here at the 2014 AFS World Congress in Paris we talked about the reality of sending and hosting. Amalie from AFS Denmark brought forward an interesting point — in Northern Europe a large number of participants are hosted in the countryside while most of the participants we send are from urban areas.

I thought about this when I went jogging in the morning. I had to cross a highway and several streets to get to the park. What an experience it must be for an individual growing up in a city like Paris to go to the countryside of Denmark and enjoy large fields and being in close proximity with nature. It also reminded me of one of the AFSers we hosted in Iceland some years back — she is from Hong Kong (you know, skyscrapers and stuff) and was hosted in Breiðdalsvík (population: 139). She told me that this was the experience of a lifetime and she would never want to trade that for a City experience.