International 4-H Youth Exchange

Hello Everyone,

Now that the camp is over and my life has slowed down a lot I can finally catch up with everything I should have been doing each day. I have been keeping a journal of the events of each day and found that I was behind almost the whole time I was at camp. I am now living down in the most southern part of Sweden in a county called Skåne. It is very interesting to know that before I left Wisconsin I wanted to visit both the far north and extreme south. Well, I did it. I managed to see both ends of Sweden and will also get a chance to see both the east and west side of Sweden also.

I have just finished part of my host stay in Skåne county. The family that I just finished staying with is Stefan and Ingrid Andersson and they live just east of Vollsjö. Vollsjö is located about 1 hour from the east and south coast of Sweden and also about 1 hour from Malmö. Stefan is a pig farmer raising 500 pigs and Ingrid is a teacher in Vollsjö, where the kids go to school. I have four host siblings, 2 boys and 2 girls. The oldest is Emanuel, age 13; then comes Gabriella, age 11; Torbjörn is next, age 10; and Fredricka, age 9, is the youngest. Emanuel could speak pretty good English and Gabriella and Torbjörn could speak very little but could make sentences to practice saying to me. Stefan and Ingrid could speak really good English and have been to the USA several times so they knew quite a bit about it. Stefan also grows oats, barley, wheat, and sugar beets. Harvest season was almost here while I was with them because they didn't get much rain this summer. It was also the 8 week period changing time for the pigs. Every 8 weeks Stefan has to move the pigs around starting out with the big pens of pigs that were weaned off their mother last time. He moves them to another farm and weans another batch of piglets off their mother and put in the newly opened pens after it has been cleaned. He then has to move the pregnant pigs who are going to have their piglets in the next 8 weeks to individual pens. Usually during the first week after moving them into the pens they start to have their piglets. I got the opportunity to help Stefan move all of these pigs around and have determined that I really don't care for pigs, except to eat them. I have never really got up close to the pigs except maybe during weigh-ins at the fair or in Baldwin but while I was here I did. I also spent quite a few days working for them doing miscellaneous jobs like move large square straw bales, cleaning things up around their farm, and fixing their computer.

I didn't get a chance to see many sites around the area because the host family was really busy with taking care of the pigs, harvesting the crops, and finishing the house before school started. They recently added on to the house and have been working on the interior of it along with remodeling the old part of the house to match the new part. They have white (or gray maybe) bricks on the old part, which really looks nice and they are going to put on a layer of insulation and add some type of cement mixture to the surface of that. I thought the brick looked better than the cement design but Stefan disagreed with me.

We spent, more like the kids spent, a whole weekend at a soccer camp that was held in the area. Stefan and I went to the camp in the evenings and I got the opportunity to be goal keeper for one of the teams because they were short team members. That was very interesting to play. I only let 3 goals past me. I had never played soccer ever in my life. We also played another game kind of like softball but a little different. The running around the bases was the same but you were hitting a tennis ball instead of a softball and if they caught the ball you were not out but the team who caught the ball got a point for that. If you were running, after the ball was hit of course, and were not at a base when the "burner" got to their base you were out and the other team got a point. If you got home your team got a point. My team won. Something I found interesting about the whole weekend is that it was pretty much put on by most of the parents. The parents were very interested in helping out to make that weekend very successful. It was nice to see that a lot of the parents were highly active with their children's sports.

While I was at this host stay I got an opportunity, more like I had to, go see a doctor. When I was helping move the pigs at the other farm Torbjörn found one of their cats injured or having problems so we decided to bring the cat home. I took the cat from him and carried it to the house. I must have touched it wrong so that it felt a lot of pain because it bit my thumb and stuck it's claw in my chest. When I finally got the cat free from me I laid it down and washed my wound. I was really worried about rabies because the cat just looked a little bit rabid. Both my host family and the doctor laughed at me when I mentioned rabies. The last case of rabies was in 1871 so I didn't have to worry about that. That was definitely good news. I definitely didn't want to remember this host stay with a whole series of rabies shots. I did, however, get a tetnus shot just for prevention of any diseases affecting me.

In comparison to the north, there is a lot more crop land down here and a lot less woodlands. The crops are actually crops and not just grass. That was nice to see. There are also a lot more people who live down here then up in the north. Something else that I found interesting, only unique to this family, was that the kids didn't call their parents mom and dad like they should. Instead they called them Stefan and Ingrid. I didn't think that was right but that was the way this family is. Also, like I have said in previous newsletters, this family is somewhat rude at the meal table like the other families were. They just reach for things that they want instead of asking for them and also interrupt conversations and demand that they get heard right away instead of waiting until the conversation is finished.

Overall, I think I had an interesting experience. I got the opportunity to work with pigs, which I found that I hate, and see how soccer is played.