#afsindia

✨ VSS is proud to host the AFS INDIA Central Zone Member Schools Meet 2025 ✨ A gathering of ideas, collaboration, and cultural exchange that strengthens bonds beyond classrooms. 🌍🤝

Hey there friends, family, and random people alike!! For whatever reason, i have no trouble write multiple 5 page letters to send to my family and friends in America buy find it hard to motivate myself to write on this blog!

Lets see, what have I done in the first 6 weeks of my exchange year in Rajkot?

I have joined the cricket team, and the field hockey team!! Everyone loves to inform me that hockey is the “National Sport of India” with lots of enthusiasm

I have learned the following phrases in Hindi/Urdu/Gujarati: -“mane ungh avache” (i am sleepy in GJ) -“mane bokh legiche” (i am hungry in GJ) -“mare nam Kat che” (my name is kat in GJ. I also know how to say my schools name is RKC) -“taru nam su che?” (What is your name in GJ) -“kem cho?” (How are you? In GJ. The response is “majama!”) -“chumach” (spoon in Hindi) -“shukriya!” (Thank you in Urdu)

I know a few more here and there, but those are the most notable. I know Shukriya because first, it is very similar to thank you in Arabic (shukran!) and secondly, because it is a soap opera that has a lot of adds on my host moms favorite Pakistani soap opera channel 😊

I love all of the TV advertisements here–especially the one for the Munchification chocolate bar! I learned the dance and memorized the song to it! Bollywood music videos are the best, the girls at my boarding school watch them a lot on holidays and breaks in the day on TV.

I have already started to join and sign up for lots of clubs and activities at my school, the Rajkumar College, Rajkot 😁😁 so far, i am in the SSDM club (a social services club with my school. I took a trip one afternoon to a nearby village to plant trees, visit a primary school, and paint a wall happy colors and designs. More on that later) i will be in the History club, i am in the Western Group IPSC chorus, and may compete in the IPSC art competition in November. I am a member of the Interact Club, which is an extension of Rotary. I will spend 5 days in a village in October building houses, painting murals, etc with this club. Actually it might be the SSDM club. I dont remember. Im also in a talent show to sing and play ukulele

I am making friends that make me laugh so hard my stomach hurts!! My classmates are very naughty and mischievous, and i couldn’t be more happy around them! On my very first day at school, they locked out the teacher and turned off all the lights. Lets just say, i was very confused bc of a language barrier and he yelled so loudly that people for the whole rest of the day asked me what happened in history class.

I still have not ridden in a tuk tuk or rick shaw, but i HAVE been on a scooter with Ahji’s host siblings and an AFS volunteer 😁 so liberating, i felt like i was flying through my new beautiful home here, instead of living at school for 5 and a half of the 7 days in a week 😕

The little girls at school are SOOOO sweet, they make me chase them (as in no less than 10 5-10 year olds) and tickle them!! Their laughter makes me feel so much better when i’m down! They call me Kat Didi, which means older sister,

Most people have a really hard time saying my name, which you wouldn’t really think about. How many different variations of “Kat” or “Kathryn” could there BE, right?? Wrong. People call me Kate, Kar, Kag, Katleen, Kashreen, Kare, Kad, Kathleen, and more. I find it funny, especially because its too late now to correct them!!

For the most part, my teachers are WONDERFUL. Right now i can think of one teacher in particular that is just a godsend. I don’t know what i would do if i didn’t have a single teacher/authority figure to confide in or even just be silly and crack jokes with! We do impressions of each other. She always asks me to do her hair for her, and one day she came into my dorm at the hostel and started to show me all of her favorite selfies…of herself.

Okay bare with me people i know this has been a long post and im not expecting most of you to have soldiered through my typos and grammar mistakes but i promise im almost done!!

I have not experience acute culture shock, but a huge bipolar mood rollercoaster within an hour in the first two weeks of school left me fatigued, tired, and just blobbish. I ate a LOT of chocolate to cope 🍫🍫🍫 Things are leveling out now, not always so happy hilarious and fantastic, but also not so black hole sucking out the life of me depressed. Obviously neither of these descriptions accurately describe how i felt, but there was shower crying involved and an honest question for how much calories i must burn in one day from all my laughing!! I will say, for every time i was sad and felt anchor less, i felt so attached and in the moment five more times.

I LOVE my host family, i do. I love seeing my dad walk through the gates to pick me up from school, i love it when my mom answers the door and smiling, and i love watching movies and talking with Aman. My host sister, Adity, lives in Noida (a city just in the outskirts of Delhi) but we talk on the phone often when im home on weekends.

There are just some little things that i love here so much. I love that there are no rules when it comes to food, and that somehow no dish is good enough on its own–no siree, you have to mix the pahji with the dal and cabbage, and eat it with chapatti, you cant eat them one at a time with a spoon!!

Now, how am I to conclude this long post? I have no idea. All i know is that its late, im sleepy, and i have to wake up early to go to Ahmedabad tomorrow!!! 6am!!

A closing thought is this: i am having a great experience, but it is hard to live at school sometimes. I love RKC, but as an exchange student, i feel like it would be beneficial for me to experience life outside the walls of my school for more that half of saturday and all of sunday, when i go on leave.

Theres a philosopher/buddhist monk story i would put here about how you have to be in the present to enjoy a cup of tea and its the same for life but its dark and my book that it is written down in is in a suitcase across the room. Also i dont want to get out of bed. I’ll quote it tomorrow, along with some details from my village trip and photos!!

today was the first full day for us to be in Delhi at the orientation site!! Looking out my window, I see all the ways Delhi is like Cairo. There are high rise hotels and huge apartment complexes next to lower flats and kiosks, and the contrast between socioeconomic classes is very obvious. I love everything about Delhi so far. The honking is not too loud and watching the street is so different from anything we have in America–there will be cows next to auto rickshaws and huge trucks right in the middle of the road! 

So far, we have hardly been able to go outside—the only way to be outdoors is the rooftop garden in the Bristol hotel, aka our orientation site. Of course, it is 99℉ outside so being away from A/C is a much less desirable way to spend our day. So far, there are 3 students from Germany, 6 from America, 15 from Italy, 3 from France, 3 from Japan, 2 from Thailand, and 1 from Russia. 

For most of the day, everyone was bored and sleepy but by dinner time everyone got excited, ending with us crammed into one regular sized hotel room yelling and playing cards and watching bollywood soap operas and playing guitar. We already have our own inside jokes! The Italians are very funny and lively, while the Germans tend to be more shy (except for Dunya!). I feel so happy to be here—i love the beeping cars and the rooftops and watching the loud cricket game going on in the field Julia’s room looks over. We didn’t know what was going on but that didn’t stop us from watching the whole thing! The italians are by far the loudest and funniest people I’ve ever met, and I’m so glad that we get along so well. At first it was very awkward, because most of the other students don’t speak much english, and none of us speak their languages, but eventually it was all ok. I’m glad that we can all talk to each other, whether its yelling in a game of UNO or laughing at dinner.