Think about going into your junior year of high school. But instead of buying your school supplies and comparing schedules with friends, you’re packing a suitcase. You hop a plane, travel 5,000 miles away, and leave behind everything–family, friends, your school and your language for an entire year.
That’s what German exchange student Elisabeth Gruner did when she landed at Grant this school year. The 16-year-old Gruner is now overcoming language barriers and cultural changes as she finds her place in the Grant community.
Gruner–one of seven exchange students attending Grant this year–arrived in August as part of an exchange program. She’ll return to Germany in July.
She describes herself as “a very open person for the world. I like to travel and see different places and get to know other people and how they live.”
In Germany, she lives with her parents, who are both musicians in the symphony, and her two younger siblings.
Here in Northeast Portland, she lives with a host family whose own daughter, Grant junior Danielle Jewett, is in France as an exchange student.
A lover of music, Gruner’s passion is singing and she is part of the choir at Grant. It’s a school she calls “big and fascinating” compared to her 400-student school in Germany.
Inspired by the exchange students her friends in Germany hosted, Gruner jumped at the chance when her dad brought up the idea of an exchange, and set out on the pathway to make her world a smaller place.
On a recent school day, Gruner sits quietly among attentive faces in Don Gavitte’s U.S. history class. Unable to keep up with the fast pace of English, Gruner has no idea what the class is learning about, let alone the joke Gavitte has just made. But it doesn’t faze her as she shrugs. She joins in laughing with the rest of the class. “I am so happy to be here,” she says with a smile.
Gruner’s host mother, Traci Laurent, describes her as an easy fit. She’s determined to integrate herself as much as possible into life in the U.S. When Laurent asks what Gruner wants for dinner, she replies: “Whatever Americans eat.”
“She has a very kind heart,” says Laurent.
Though she has only been here a few weeks, Gruner has already experienced Portland at its finest. “I love, love, love Voodoo Donuts!” she says of her new-found favorite American food. She has also visited the Rose Garden, downtown Portland and even floated along the Willamette River in inner tubes.
It feels like a vacation, says Gruner, who will have to repeat the year of school she missed while in Oregon. But this doesn’t faze her: “Many teenagers can’t imagine to do exchange like me so far away from home, and people you love,” she says. “It’s a big thing.”
Gruner says she won’t have contact with any of her close friends in Germany because she wants to “meet friends here. When I write my friends I miss them more. I don’t want to spend time missing, I want to enjoy time here.”
She says at first she thought Americans were fat and ate a lot of fast food, but has developed a different view since then. She says people in Portland “like to live” and are “motivated at many things.”
Gruner will take away from her experience in the U.S. a lot self-confidence and independence. “She’s here to have an adventure,” says Laurent. “This is just the beginning.”
