Today, on this special Thanksgiving, we’re bringing back, “Thank You Thursday”. As always we’ve received so many thank you notes from our students, former and current, that we would like to share with you. This year has been challenging for all of us, and we are especially grateful to our host families and coordinators for making our program happen. We would like to start out this special Turkey Day with Gulbahar from Turkmenistan who shares her thoughts on what her experience meant.

My gratitude to my host family, my school and town communities cannot be expressed in words. 

Thanks to those people, this year was filled with so much joy and fun. There couldn’t be a better place for me to be placed. Now I can undoubtedly say that I have another family in the U.S. that treated me as their own daughter/sister and did their best to make my experience the best; another school that taught me so much just in 9 months and supported me (school played a big role in my experience); my community, specifically church community,  that was very nice to me, curious about me and my culture, and gave me some insights into christianity.

My host family and host community (including school and church) will definitely stay in my heart forever.  I wish I could repeat this year again!