1. Experience the feeling of being home-away-from-home in a place that feels more comfortable than your real home, a cross-cultural community completely different from where you live now and yet a place that feels so “home-like”
2. Make some of the best friends of your life with students your age as well as with your summer leaders
3. Be utterly surprised by and okay with living days on end without texting, tweeting, twittering and emailing, without books and curricula and “normal schedules”
4. Prepare to be stunned…by discovering the joy of working with your hands on community service projects, knowing that you are building something of value and use to your host community and then hearing from local people that your volunteer work really matters
5. Get far away from your daily routine to clear your head of a lot of stresses
6. Feel amazing after finishing a hike, gathering around a bonfire, playing spontaneous pick-up games….always “having some fun…even working!”
7. Learn a lot about yourself, your leadership potential and where it might take you….feel many doors open to your future…
8. Fall in love with the people and the food of a new culture, and the country itself, while gaining wonderful memories, laughs, new friendships, and an awareness of a range of opportunities you never imagined
9. Immerse in a foreign language in a way that makes you truly want to improve your language skills while connecting and speaking with local people, with the support of your language-fluent counselors….
10. Know what it’s like to have a summer experience that “Can’t be described without making up new words.”