For a number of years, the American Field Service (AFS) Committee has happily accepted one foreign exchange student to the Parker community. This year the tall, slim, dark haired sixteen year old senior Vlado Vojdanoski, a student from Macedonia joined the school through the foreign exchange program.

Vojdanoski traveled to Chicago with eleven other students from his home country through a program called Youth Exchange and Study (YES), which is sponsored by the State Department. Vojdanoski describes it as “a program that has a point of making a cultural exchange betweeen the U.S. and many other countries in order to promote tolerance, peace, and understanding.”

His home is Ohrid, a town in the southwest of Macedonia, close to the border of Greece and Albania.  Macedonia is a country located in the Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe, is filled with beautiful mountains, valleys, and rivers. It is a successor state of the former Yugoslavia, having gained its independence in 1991, and becoming a member of the United Nations in 1993.  “There are many things from Macedonia to miss,” Vojdanoski said. “I do miss my family and my friends, but Chicago, and Parker in general has been very supportive and very accommodating.”

Parker is not what he was used to in Macedonia. “Parker is a very interesting school. Quite different than the one I was previously at,” Vojdanoski said about his old school, St. Clement of Ohrid. “During the two months I have been here I was met with nothing but positivity and warmth. I truly feel at home and like I am a part of Parker.” The AFS Committee heads help to create a smooth transition for the foreign exchange students joining Parker.

The AFS Committee provides students like Vojdanoski with an opportunity for friendships and with support. Then it’s up to the student. “He’s super friendly,” junior and AFS Committee head Maya Sanghvi said. “It’s amazing that he was able to jump into school here and the social life. I mean he’s so outgoing, and it’s really amazing.”

Another AFS head and a friend of Vojdanoski, senior Henry Holtz feels the same way about his transition. “He’s thriving,” Holtz said. “He’s already got a ton of friends.”

Vojdanoski takes Elections, Precalc, Advanced Physics, Introduction to Programming, Robotics, and Web Design, a very full schedule.  For extracurriculars, he participates in cross country and the Robotics Team, and he hopes to take on swimming in the near future.

“I intend to major in IT, possibly in the states.” Vojdanoski said as he discussed his future, “I do intend to be an entrepreneur  but I am also very interested in politics, so only time will tell.”

He is benefitting from the journey and impacting others as well. “The whole purpose of an exchange program is not only because we think we have something to offer those who visit our school and our community,” Vojdanoski’s advisor and Upper School French teacher Lorin Pritikin said, “but we also participate in these exchanges because they have so much to offer us.”

Like Pritikin, Kathy Monahan, Vojdanoski’s host mother and parent of seventh-grader Gianni Baglivo, finds the exchange reciprocal. “Not only is he learning a lot, but we are learning a lot,” Monahan said. “The questions he asks us I’ve never even thought about. We’ll never look at things in the same way.”