From the Harrisburg Patriot-News. By Sylvia Grove. Published online: Saturday, August 13, 2011, 2:25 p.m.
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| From left, Linda Flowers, Cedric Mossuz and Rick Flowers. |
A few weeks ago, a tanned, curly-haired boy with piercing blue eyes visited Paxtang [ed.: Paxton] Presbyterian Church.
“Oh, I see you’ve brought your grandson,” friends commented to Rick and Linda Flowers of Paxtang.
But this boy was not one of the Flowers’ relatives. He was Cedric Mossuz, a 15-year-old from Grenoble, a city near the Alps of southeast France. He arrived in Harrisburg on July 7 and was staying through July 27 under the auspices of LEC, a French exchange program founded in 1972. The Flowers were Mossuz’s host family.
“We don’t want him to leave,” Linda Flowers said. “He’s a gem.”
From their sunroom on Paxtang Avenue, the Flowers family admitted they had known little about France and had been nervous about opening their home to a student they’d never met.
“You hear horror stories [about misbehaving students],” Linda Flowers said. “But we decided to go for it. Three weeks isn’t too long of a stay; it’s manageable.”
Mossuz, one of seven students who lived in the midstate during the month of July, said he already had visited the West Coast with his family, but he applied to LEC to see the East Coast and get the added benefit of practicing his English, his favorite foreign language, with a real family.
The Paris-based organization, which stands for Loisirs Culturels à l’Etranger — Cultural Activities Abroad — focuses on building relationships through family homestays to enhance language skills and to promote cross-cultural understanding. The 2011 midstate LEC program included no academic instruction or organized student outings, just family time.
“We ask host families to provide room and board during the students’ visitation period, as well as hospitality and hearts and minds open to teaching and learning,” local LEC coordinator John Robinson said.
Families in Dauphin, Cumberland, Lebanon, Perry, Montgomery, Lancaster and York counties have hosted 48 French students, ages 12-19, over the last four years.
During his visit to Harrisburg, Mossuz attended a Senators baseball game; liked the roller coaster, Fahrenheit, at Hersheypark; and, boated with the family on the Chesapeake Bay.
His only request while in America had been to visit the Abercrombie & Fitch at Park City Mall — he’d Googled it before his arrival. The Flowers family fulfilled his wish.
Mossuz took a picture of his first American doughnut and spent much of his free time hanging out with the Flowers’ three grandchildren in their pool.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had teenagers in the house, but from the moment we met him, I was impressed,” Rick Flowers said. “He came right out of the [LEC pick-up] van and shook my hand.”
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| Sylvia and the Lechene family with Dimitri. |
In Bressler, Keila Mercedes-Lechene sits at a wide, wooden dining-room table with her 13-year-old daughter, Kilsia, and 14-year-old Dimitri Karayan. A native of Rhuis, France, population 137, Karayan also arrived in the area on July 7 through LEC. This visit was his first time in the U.S.
“I didn’t come to be a tourist,” Karayan said. “I came to the United States to be part of a family.”
His host mom, Mercedes-Lechene, is a native of the Dominican Republic. She has a bachelor’s degree in romance languages; is fluent in Italian, English, French and Spanish; and, worked on the French island of St. Martin for eight years before coming to live in the United States.
Mercedes-Lechene previously taught at Milton Hershey School, where she would occasionally open her home to students on weekends. Now she is a freelance translator for legal and medical services.
She said she first heard about LEC when her husband, Shawn, brought home an advertisement. For her, there were little nerves or concern about hosting a student, just curiosity.
“My husband knew I’d be interested,” she said.
Mercedes-Lechene said she was eager to show Karayan her corner of America, enhanced by her own cross-cultural perspective.
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| Keila Mercedes-Lechene |
“I know we are not the ‘typical’ American family,” she said. “So I was really intent on telling Dimitri how things were. But when I found myself talking and saying, ‘Now, this is typically American,’ it made me really see American culture all over again.”
During Karayan’s 20-day stay, the family visited Philadelphia, Hershey and New York City. Karayan also encouraged the family to spend time at home. He helped in the kitchen and kept his room clean. He even handed out sodas at the Harrisburg Invasion 2011 block party hosted by Harrisburg First Assembly of God.
“In the end, he just wanted to see daily life,” Mercedes-Lechene said.
Karayan saw Harrisburg as a “big city, with many stores,” which made Kilsia laugh.
“We sometimes see this place as so small, but for him, it’s different,” she said.
DETAILS:
For more information about LEC, go to
www.leccapitalregion.blogspot.com or email John Robinson at
jkrsmr@comcast.net.
The photo of the Lechene family with writer Sylvia Grove and the photo of Keila Mercedes-Lechene did not appear in the newspaper. John Robinson took them when accompanying Ms. Grove to the Lechene home. The photo of the Flowers family did appear, and the individual faces of the Lechene family appeared across the top of the page with people featured in other articles on the same page!
Our thanks to both of these families for being interviewed and to all of our host families.
I thought you might get a charge out of the comments that appeared online at the end of the article. They were obviously written by ill-informed readers! My responses follow each one. (I am "lecman!")
icejam August 13, 2011 at 5:35PM
the French poodle fotoed, was part of the exchange as well?
