By Jennifer Moody
Albany Democrat-Herald | Posted: Friday, August 1, 2008 12:00 am
Forget walking a mile in his shoes. Janice Snyder of Albany figures the best way to get to know a person is to spend a year in his house while working in his job.
Janice, 51, leaves Sunday for Hungary on a Fulbright teaching exchange. She and her husband, Steve, 57, will trade homes and jobs with a Hungarian teacher and his family for the 2008-09 school year.
In Hungary, Janice will teach tourism-based catering and marketing classes in English to students ages 14 to 20. She'll be working at a vocational high school in Siofok, a city of roughly 23,000 people about an hour and a half southwest of Budapest.
Steve is taking a year's leave of absence from his teaching job at Tangent Elementary School.
Janice's Hungarian counterpart, Csaba Koves - pronounced "CHAH-bah KO-vesh" - will live in the Snyders' Albany home and teach her language arts and social studies classes at Calapooia Middle School.
Koves has degrees in English and history and speaks English well, said Janice, who has been in touch with the family regularly since the exchange was authorized. Her own Hungarian skills? Not so good, which makes her a little nervous.
"Will I be able to communicate, especially with the ninth-grade kids?" she wondered aloud. "I can't tell them what I want, or what I need, in Hungarian."
The potential language barrier is Janice's only real concern, however. A yearlong stint in 1996 in Australia, when Steve did a teacher exchange there, taught her that everything else eventually sorts itself out.
The couple went to New South Wales with their children, Russell and Kara, who were 8 and 6 at the time. The experience made everyone more outgoing, Janice said, and at the same time drew them together as a family.
"That's why we knew we wanted to do it again," she said.
Russell is 21 now and a student at the University of Oregon, and Kara, 19, is serving with AmeriCorps, so neither they, nor the family's 9-year-old Welsh corgi, Buddy, will be making the trip to Hungary.
For a while, Janice and Steve weren't even sure they'd be making it themselves. They each applied for a Fulbright exchange, aiming for Great Britain, but didn't hear anything for several months after their initial interviews last November.
In May, Janice received an e-mail: Would she consider Hungary instead of Great Britain? Her reply: Of course.
Others had to be open to the idea, too, including Calapooia Principal Pat Weidmann and the Koves family in Hungary.
Csaba will be living in the Snyder home with his wife and two children, ages 14 and 2. To help them along, the Snyders purchased a carseat for the toddler and did some babyproofing in the kitchen.
She's hoping her Calapooia students will grab the opportunity to learn about another part of the world, and that she'll be able to share even more about it when she returns.
"I'm hoping it will really enrich my social studies teaching," she said. "And also to tell them, 'Don't be afraid to go out there and meet people. People are the same wherever you go, and a smile means the same thing everywhere.'"