This month AFS-USA is pleased to spotlight Laura Raymond of the Greater L.A. Area Team. Laura has been a volunteer since 2004. Most recently her efforts have been instrumental in pulling together the Greater L.A. LIFT project: Thai means much more than food! Congratulations Laura!
How did you learn about AFS and what prompted you to get involved?
In 2004, when we lived in the Palm Springs area, my husband was invited to be a welcome family for a boy from Spain because he had been a Rotary GSE participant in 2001. I thought it sounded like a cool idea. It didn’t work out, but I had fallen in love with all the students, even the one that didn’t work out with our family, and the volunteers, and asked the Desert Valleys Area Team somewhat timidly if they needed volunteers. They said, why yes, they did, and I became a liaison and a driving volunteer.
What keeps you coming back to volunteer each year?
I believe in the program mission passionately, and the people involved — all of them, from staff through students to volunteers — are the finest people I know. I love being a part of carrying the mission forward in any way that I can.
What have you learned or how have you been personally affected from your experience with AFS?
AFS has had a huge impact on my life. It’s my tribe: I have met people from around the world who have become incredibly dear to me, as close to my heart as my own children
and siblings and aunts and uncles. It’s helped me see other cultures with much greater understanding and tolerance and respect. AFS has helped me cultivate similar values in my own sons and friendship circles, and it is exciting to see other people open their minds and hearts to once-strangers.
Please share the best thing or funniest thing that’s happened to you while volunteering with AFS.
How to choose just one…. I really have to say that so far the pinnacle of my AFS experience has to be my chaperone trip to Ghana last year, in June of 2018, and even that was an
amalgam of dozens of experiences. I visited several of the standard tourist sites including the slave castles, the arts centre, the Kakum National Park, Volta Lake, and many other places, but the absolute highlight of my time there were the long, long conversations I had with my taxi drivers, my AirBnB hosts, and people chance met along the way about life in Ghana, their lives, others’ lives, politics, history, culture. I was so lucky that people were willing to talk with me, and so grateful that they were willing to. I felt as though I made many friends there and hope to see them again on another trip.
What do you want to
say to people who might be interested in volunteering with AFS?
Volunteering with AFS opens doors on life! Sometimes it’s a little hard to find your best role at first, but be persistent — everything you put into AFS is richly rewarding emotionally. You learn so much about yourself and others, and it’s all in a good cause!
What’s one thing AFS volunteers and staff don’t know about you?
Two things — when I was in my 20s I was a professional belly dancer, and in my 30s I earned a Master of Science from Carnegie Mellon in Public Policy and Management.
Photo 1: From a trip to Ghana. Ellen, the girl in the photo, was a YES student I worked with in 2013-14; we went to stay at Akosombo and went on a boat ride on Lake Volta together, and had such a great time.
Photo 2: From the Songkran Festival, this shows the AFS “Morning Crew”. From left to right the people are Carlos and Lina Rosa, who came all the way from San Bernardino to be there; Dawn Klein and me in the middle frame; and Suzie Scott, our hosting coordinator, and Serena Tang in the right-most frame.