Traveling abroad as an exchange student can be a life-changing experience, but it can also be a harrowing one, especially when your home stay family’s cultural traditions and lifestyle differ drastically from your own. For most students, small traumas (like my friend who ended up sleeping in a room above the livestock in her Nepali host family’s home only to wake up one morning covered - head to toe - in itching bites courtesy of the bugs inhabiting the animals’ living space) build character and teach independence. When I was 14-year-old exchange student staying with a family in France, my personal traumas involved embarrassment over not understanding how to shower in the curtain-less bathroom without causing a flood and discovering I had unwittingly eaten gizzard one evening thanks to a gap in my vocabulary.

Unfortunately for one Maine teen, the experience of being a foreign exchange student involved real trauma. Jonathan McCullum, a 17-year-old student, reportedly dropped to a scant 97 pounds from his starting weight of 155 lbs when he ended up with a family that failed to feed him adequately. When McCullum returned home from his year living abroad in Egypt, his family was understandably shocked to find their son had lost one third of his bodyweight. Not the AFS organization is in hot water over the mess. As for the host family, their religious practices apparently involved a great deal of fasting. The story below also suggests that the host family balked at having to feed a strapping American boy, whose appetite exceeded that of the daughter they sent to the United States as part of the exchange program. Whatever the truth, it’s a sad story and a cautionary tale for anyone considering a study abroad home stay program.

Student Starved During Egypt Stay