Act of Kindness #4

Act of Kindness #4
To a acquaintance

Hosting

Yoshiko Swift is a Japanese DMACC Instructor in the Ankeny Campus. I don’t know her very well and I never took her class at DMACC. I met her once in the Asian Festival and said she was in charge of foreign exchanged program with Sister City of Des Moines, Yamanashi, Japan. Her role was to schedule flights plans, find a room at DMACC and teachers to teach English to Japanese students, and to find host families to take care of the Japanese exchanged students for a whole week through October 13th to the 17th. And she asked me, if I wanted to host Japanese students. I agreed.

Yoshiko then called me 3 months ago. She explained her situation to me and need host families badly. I thought about it for a minute and accept her offer. At the time, I was about to go to my first day at Drake. I was going to host two Japanese students. When the time arrived, I noticed that I was falling behind in my classes. And I could’ve easily told Yoshiko that I didn’t want to host two students. I needed to catch up in my classes. However, I never did tell Yoshiko about my little crisis in Drake and welcomed the two Japanese boys to my family. Of course, my family didn’t have the time to take care of them, so I was responsible to take them places and give them a wonderful time in Iowa.

It has really time consuming. Every day within the week, I had to drive the two Japanese boys to the Ankeny DMACC Campus at 8:00 am and picked them up around 3:00 pm. I take them shopping, bowling, canoeing and etc. I even decided to bring along two addition students, mainly because the host family didn’t know what to do with them and they were afraid that their boys were not having a great time. Plus, I thought it would be interesting for my boys to talk with their friends during their visit in Iowa. Each passing hour could’ve been time to catch up in my classes. Nevertheless, I did it anyways to help Yoshiko and her program. And in the end, she and the two instructors, who came with the students, thanked me and said that they never met a young and kind person, who would take the time out of their busy schedule to help out and showing two or four Japanese students a great time in Iowa. I was the only young person to do such a thing. The experience and their gratitude gave me a great sense of accomplishment, even though I cost me a lot of time out of my classes in Drake.

I guess I tend to do nice things that would bring happiness to other people, but at the same time, make me suffer just a little.