“When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, 'Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us.' At that moment I just wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.”
Thusly opens Polish exchange student Michael Gromek’s account of living with a host family of Christian fundamentalists—who tried to recruit him to help “set up a Fundamentalist Baptist church” in Poland.
As I’ve said before, inviting scores of international students to America has been, without much fanfare, one of the most successful methods of diplomacy ever conceived, and it just makes me absolutely furious that there are people who would use the program as a conduit for delivering unwitting victims into their agenda of religious indoctrination. One of the key tenets of the program is respecting the students’ culture and beliefs, while conveying your own—not imposing your own. Totally obnoxious.
(Via Coturnix.)
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