EXCHANGE: Song in his heart

Learning the language, focusing on schoolwork and trying to make new friends took a lot out of the American, who thought, at times, of giving up on the experience. »It was very hard at first,« he remembers. »The stress level was killing me.«

Despite coming from a small town in New Jersey, John also had some trouble adjusting to his German home. After a month-long language course in Frankfurt, the exchange student moved to Beienrode, a tiny village near Königslutter, which isn?t that big itself. »It?s hard here sometimes,« he said. »There?s nothing around. I had problems when I first came here.«

Eventually, he says, he »made the mistake of relying on home.« More phone calls to his parents, more e-mails to his girlfriend - it seemed, he says, like the best way of dealing with homesickness. But after a too large phone bill prompted his host parents to sit him down for a chat about finances, he cut back on contact with family and friends back home - the best decision he says he could have made.

»The point of going away is to learn about yourself, to become independent. If you rely on home, that doesn't happen,« he says. »The more contact you have, the more you rely on the people who will always be there for you, the less you accomplish. If you do that, you end up stuck in the middle. You don?t belong here or where you came from.«

Instead, he began to get involved in the same sort of extracurricular activities he did back home: playing sports, making music, getting involved in church activities. »I use music to express the things I?m dealing with in life,« he says, listing the church music groups, state choirs and musical theater he?d been a part of in America. »Over here I?ve tried to do new stuff, but I?ve also done stuff I already know,« he says.