An Opportunity for Winnipeg hosts
- To get to know people from other cultures and ways of life
- To walk with university students trying to make their way in a sometimes strange land with strange customs
- To enjoy eating and chatting together, learning from each other
The situation:
International Students arrive in Winnipeg each year, ready and eager to study, achieve a degree, and make a future for themselves.
- They come with high expectations, often high levels of anxiety, and many questions. How will they fit into the community? How will they survive the very different history and culture? Who do they talk with about their experiences, their questions?
- This program, built on a similar program that has been running for some 25 years at Durham University in the UK, is being introduced here by me, Ray Temmerman of Winnipeg, It is aimed at helping the students integrate into, become comfortable with, this wonderful city. It also aims to help the students, through integration, to be better able to continue and complete their studies.
- And it seeks to introduce hosts to a rich range of cultures, languages, and practices.
We hope all participants will benefit.
Here’s how it works
- International Students, and those interested in hosting them, are invited to register to take part in this project.
- We will contact those who register to be hosts, to talk with you about how it works, the roles and responsibilities of both host and student, and answer any questions you may have.
- Assuming you are satisfied, you will then be paired with an international student. (If you say you are happy to be paired with more than one, an attempt will be made to do that, provided there are more students than we have hosts.)
- Thanks to the generosity of Peter Ginakes of the Belltower Cafe, situated on the lower level of St Paul’s College, U of M, 70 Dysart Rd, hosts and students will gather early in the fall term for the initial introduction. (Exact date and time will be made known.) There, each host family will be paired with a student.
- Thereafter, the host will invite the student to their home for two more meals in the fall term, and three in the winter term, of the academic year. (Hosts are welcome to invite the student for more meals if they so choose, but 2 in the first term and three in the winter term are expected.)
- The student will be welcome, should they so choose, to bring with them to those ‘home’ meals one other international student. (Note: this proviso is purely to afford the student a sense of safety and confidence, knowing they are not alone in going to a strange home.)
- Hosts will be responsible for ensuring the student(s) get safely from the university or residence to the home of the host and back again. (Note: This does not mean the host must pick up and return the student, but only be responsible for the safe and secure passage to and from where the student’s home.)
Hosts may, should they so choose, invite the student to join them in visiting and participating in other places and events in Winnipeg. Any such optional invitattion should never take the place of the meal with the family.
This pairing will continue for the academic year, though the host and students may continue beyond that as friends if they so wish.
At the end of each term, there will be an opportunity for both hosts and students to provide feedback, so that the program may be improved to better meet the needs of both hosts and international students.
If you would like to discuss this opportunity further before you register to take part, you can contact me at ray.temmerman@gmail.com, or via WhatsApp.
If you would like to become a host (and I hope you will) and enjoy the rewards of the program, please go to the registration page found at https://tinyurl.com/4chpfezf:
Only those who register will be able to participate in the program.
Thank you, and I hope you will join me in this project.