While Jag Sunderram and his wife, Anu Venkat already have two small children of their own, they say it feels like they really gained two more members of their family over the course of a couple weeks.##M:[more]##
The couple, who have lived in West Windsor with their two children for two years now, hosted two 19-year-old girls from Sweden, Desiree Risberg and Karin Rylander, at their home on Stonelea Drive, for some time during the girls’ three-week visit to the West Windsor and Plainsboro area.
From picking up the couple’s 6-year-old son from the bus stop after school, to sitting down to watch American Idol in the evening with them, their guests have formed such a bond with them that Venkat has already promised the girls that she will fly out to Sweden for their weddings.
The two girls have been staying at the family’s home as part of their visit to West Windsor-Plainsboro’s two high schools to do research as part of a global project. Their time in West Windsor with the family actually came to an end March 16, when the girls moved on to another host family due to the family’s previously-arranged spring break plans. The group, the Learning School, is preparing to leave the WW-P area to move on to New York and to San Francisco for spring break this weekend — a break from the 10 months the group spent traveling to schools around the world to research student views regarding the future of education.
And Venkat and Sunderram say their first time hosting international students couldn’t have been a better experience.
The family moved two years ago to West Windsor from South Brunswick. Sunderram’s father was an engineer for the army, and Venkat’s father was a banker. Both of their mothers were stay-at-home-moms.
Venkat, a physician with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the faculty staff at the University of Pennsylvania, first heard about the opportunity to be a host from a friend, who sent her an E-mail a few nights before the students’ flights were arriving.
Since Venkat says she loves to cook and entertain, “I just felt inclined to do it, and we were excited,” she said.
Her husband, also a faculty staff physician at the Robert Wood Johnson University hospital, was a little cautious at first, but only because of the couple’s busy schedules and lifestyles. Sunderram said he asked his wife if she was sure she could handle it.
“We do have a lot on our plates,” Sunderram said. But “I must say at the end of it, because they were such wonderful kids, we actually didn’t find it at all difficult.”
Sunderram says that since the students want to feel at home with their host families, “they behave like they’re part of your family. Although they’re very courteous, at the same time, they blend in so well. By the end of a week, they were part of the family. It wasn’t hard at all.”
“They’re like our cousins,” said Sanjiv Sunderram, the couple’s six-year-old son.
Venkat said she was given a profile of the girls online before they arrived, and used it to look up their nationalities, and then to find out what types of food are eaten in Sweden. She says she wanted to make them feel welcome and at home with food they would enjoy, so she found they eat a lot of rice and potatoes. Every night, they had some potato dish, she said.
But trying to make them feel welcome, they found, also included sharing their own food and culture with the girls. “It’s impressive because we were planning on preparing meals that were more European-centered,” Sunderram said. “They came in and said, ‘No, don’t do that; don’t change anything you do. We want to eat what you eat.’”
This also gave the couple’s two children — Shreya, 10, a student at Village School, and Sanjiv, a student at Dutch Neck — the chance to share their own culture with the two girls. “We taught them how to eat with their hands,” Venkat said. “The kids had great pride in showing their culture to others. That’s good to be comfortable to be who you are.”
In fact, it was as much of a learning experience for the couple as it was for their children, who played games, asked questions, and interacted with the girls.
For Shreya, an aspiring journalist who loves writing and being around other people, the experience also gave her a chance to see what it’s like to interact and ask questions of someone of a different culture. “It was a really fun experience,” she said. “We got to meet people completely different and find similarities between America and Sweden.”
“We learned a lot about what they eat and their education,” she added. “We learned basically their day-to-day life schedules.”
Sanjiv said he enjoyed hearing about the games they play in Sweden, and that he realized they were very similar to the games played in America. And, “they call soccer football,” he noted.
As Desiree and Karin got comfortable in their temporary new home, they played sports with the children outside, taught them a different way of playing dominoes, watched American Idol (in Sweden, what Americans would consider reruns are currently playing there) and went shopping in Edison’s Oak Tree area to Indian shops there, as just some of the activities.
“The Indian dresses were very nice,” said Desiree, who was wearing one. “They’re very comfortable, and you could do pretty much everything in them.”
The family also exchanged some lessons in language with the girls as well. The family, who speaks the Indian language called Tamil, taught the girls words like “Nandri,” which means thank you. The girls taught the family common words and songs.
Sunderram, Desiree says, is a natural at saying the word for “yes” in her Swedish dialect — a word which the family compared to a slurping sound.
“You can’t really spell it because it’s like, ‘Yes,’ breathing in,” Desiree explained. “They tried to do it in the Swedish dictionary, by spelling it S-H, or something. Then it becomes ‘Shhh,’ which it’s not.”
“In Northern Sweden, you’re efficient with words,” Desiree added. “You say much with as little words as possible.”
Besides pulling out some extra sheets and towels in the couple’s in-law suite, they said they didn’t have to do much at all. “We ended up having a really nice couple of girls,” Venkat said. “They were very natural, very easy going, and they blended in with the family quickly. I’m going to miss them. The next couple of days I’m going to go through withdrawal.”
She said she would recommend the experience to any other parent who might be thinking about hosting a student in the future. They say they weren’t worried about their family’s safety or security.
“It’s a natural worry that people have these days unfortunately,” Sunderram acknowledges, but that didn’t cross the couple’s mind.
There weren’t really any worries, Venkat says, other than natural worry for the safety of their guests, since the couple was responsible for them. Venkat took the girls to Philadelphia one day to let them explore the city while she was at work. She gave them a cell phone, maps, and a SEPTA pass. She asked them to call at certain times to check in, and when she didn’t hear from them because the girls had accidentally turned the phone off, her natural motherly instincts kicked in, and she began worrying about their safety.
Venkat advises other families looking to host a student that if they have certain ground rules in their homes, that it is a good idea to explain them up front.
“We told them we were vegetarians,” Venkat said. “We remove our shoes; we don’t walk with our shoes on in the house. Apparently, in Sweden, they remove their shoes, too, so that’s one new thing we learned.”
And “because these kids have traveled around, they know a little bit about different ethnic backgrounds,” Venkat added. “They’re very sensitive to the other person’s cultural differences. They adjust very easily.”
Venkat says any family should consider hosting a student if they have the space, and the right mind for it. They said they couldn’t think of any drawbacks for doing so. In fact, they are planning to host Desiree’s brother when he joins the Learning School next year.
Of course, the same goes for Venkat’s own children, whom she says she would allow to travel abroad with the Learning School. “I want them to feel comfortable with people, to respect other people’s culture and religion, to understand more about the rest of the world, and to believe that we are all one universe,” she says.
They have already gotten some tips from Javier Vazquez, a 26-year-old member of the group from Spain, about what to do for fun in his country when they visit there soon. The family has also penciled in its next vacation. Destination? Sweden, of course.
