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Exchange students give back to Longmont

International students enrolled at local high schools earn volunteer hours by helping build homes for the Habitat for Humanity

Editor's note: This article has been updated to remove references to the Veteran's Community Project, which is not part of the volunteer work the students participated in on Saturday.

Ten students from across the world came together Saturday to help build the homes at Habitat for Humanity in Longmont.

Two of those students — Henry Bogomil from Germany and Hlonolofatso Letsie from South Africa — agreed that the physical labor of the volunteer work was different from what they normally have done, which made it all the more rewarding. The international students volunteered with Habitat for Humanity as part of their exchange program.

Debbie Odom is the local coordinator for Academic Year in America, which places high school exchange students from all over the world in the Longmont area. This year, her cohort was 13 students including 12 attending St. Vrain Valley School District High Schools.

The students live with host families for either a semester or the full school year, and part of the program is to do volunteer hours, with some required to do a minimum of 50 hours while they are here.

Letsie, 16, has already volunteered over 50 hours. On Saturday, she helped clean up the construction sites and paint some of the homes, which she especially enjoyed.

“This is the first time I’ve done something like this, like a house kind of thing,” she said. “I normally do soup kitchens or the Humane Society or little things like that.”

Letsie has been in Longmont since the start of the school year, attending Skyline High School. She said her time abroad has been a lot of fun, including all her time volunteering in the community.

“I love helping people, and this has genuinely just made me love helping people more,” she said.

Bogomil, who’s 16 and attending Silver Creek High School, was also enjoying helping build the homes, though he did note that his fingers were a bit cold from the spring air. He said he’s really liked being in Colorado and getting all these new experiences.

“I feel like my goal has always been to get to know new cultures, languages and countries because I just really like traveling,” Bogomil said. “It gives you a new perspective. It widens your horizon.”

On Saturday, many of the exchange students were joined by the host families, who volunteer to house and feed the exchange students for the semester or school year. Odom said she loves seeing the connections built between the students and the host families.

“This year will impact their lives forever, and the connections that they make with their host family and their host siblings, they last a lifetime,” Odom said.

She said that all types of families host the students, including families with high schoolers, younger children, empty nesters and families that don’t have kids. She encouraged people in Longmont interested in hosting an exchange student to learn more at https://www.academicyear.org.

Odom noted that bringing international students to Longmont benefits the whole community.

“It’s really great to show other cultures and countries and different ways of life to people because a lot of times not everybody has the ability to travel and go to these other countries,” she said. “It really opens up doors for our own kids in the community, in these high schools, to sit next to somebody from Germany and learn more about it from them.”