ColoradoBennett

Hossam Al Mazrowe. I stood in the airport on Saturday night for almost two hours, holding a sign with this name on it. I actually did get a few dirty looks, one from a security guard. Mostly people smiled at me because I had Tristan with me. The happy bouncy boy that he is attracted a lot of attention. Anyway, Hossam is our latest exchange student from Saudi Arabia. He was arriving on Saturday, very nervous because this is his first time to travel abroad. So when he didn't show up I really started to worry. I did laps through baggage claim, had his name paged 4 times (I'm not sure that they ever really got it right). Left my information at information and took off. I was bummed because I had to pay for a babysitter to watch the girls while I did this. My plan was to pick up Hossam at 4:35, drop him off at home, catch a "girls camp meeting" at 6, Stake Conference at 7, then dinner with two of our home/visiting teaching families until 10:45. But walking around the airport for two hours really messed up that plan. So I left. Feeling slightly guilty that maybe the poor guy was going to have to spend the night there. But then this morning I got an email from him in broken English saying that he had his friend pick him up and he was in a hotel near his school. So he took a taxi to our house. The kids and I took him to the bank to set up a bank account. The sweet girl from Columbia wouldn't let him open a bank account. It was very awkward. First she asked him a while bunch of questions really fast with her heavy accent. Then when he looked at me because he didn't know what to say she said she couldn't open an account for someone who couldn't understand English. If he spoke Spanish, that would be OK. The reason being that he could come back and sue them because he didn't understand all the bank rules or something. Then she went to her manager to see if she could even open an account for someone from Saudi Arabia. I wrote down the questions on an envelope and Hossam could answer them just fine. But that wasn't good enough for her. So we had to leave. Then we went to the phone store and they didn't care that he couldn't speak English or Spanish, just as long as he had the cash. Then we went to the food store and he tried to buy every kind of candy in sight for Sierra and Kaia, even the diabetic chocolate, which I talked him out of somehow. Then we got home and realized that we somehow we didn't make it home with the very important phone charger. It was an adventure.