WHITE NOISE INSANITY

(AP photo from the article linked below)

Unfreakingbelievable. A Maine exchange student goes to Egypt and ends up in a family who are Coptic Christians (means Egyptian Christians) and comes home less than a 100 pounds in weight! Coptic Christians don’t eat 210 days out of the year. Good gawd.

It would have been nice if the exchange program told the family about this family’s religion, don’t you think?

From the Associated Press:

“The truth is, the boy we hosted for nearly six months was eating for an hour and a half at every meal. The amount of food he ate at each meal was equal to six people,” Hanna said. He added that the boy was active, constantly exercising and playing sports.
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Hanna, an engineer, said his family went out of its way to prepare special foods, including fish and chicken, for McCullum during the fast periods.
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McCullum disputes that. The family served meat early in his stay, he said, but that ended during the fast period.
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He said he never got breakfast and his first food of the day usually was a small piece of bread with cucumbers and cheese that he would take to school for lunch. There was a late-afternoon dinner consisting of beans, vegetables and sometimes fish, and a snack of bread later in the evening.
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McCullum sometimes bought food, but at one point was reduced to stealing it from a supermarket. He was caught, but the store accepted the small amount of money he had and let him go.

He was eating as much as six people at every meal according to the Host family? Oh please! What a bunch of liars these Coptic Christians are!

I’m telling you right now, my family years ago when us kids were in school took in two different exchange students (one from Finland and the other from Japan) and the one thing you don’t do is abuse or neglect these kids. They’re here to learn about our culture, yes, but submitting them to starvation is just plain wrong and shows that there are many families out there that take in exchange students (or foster kids I may add) just for the money and nothing else!

Our experiences with exchange students was interesting. The boy from Finland came from a very wealthy banker family and he wasn’t too impressed with our ‘digs’ if you know what I mean. He stayed with us for 6 months and then went to an uber wealthy family on the other side of town to live out the rest. We all remained friends with him, but it was very apparent he was used to living in certain conditions! LOL Then we had an exchange student from Japan who was absolute delight. I’ll never forget the time we were up to our summer camp and my father came out of the bedroom with plaid pajamas on and Kazinobu (sp? We called him “Kaz” for short) said, “Ahhhhhhh, new style Ronnie?”. *shaking head* He was a good match for our family. Always smiling and joking.

Anyways, this is just bullshit that this child was submitted to this kind of ‘torture’. Don’t you think? I think so. His family should have been told what this religion was about before going over there. I’m sure this young man didn’t want to offend his Host family and probably wanted to experience their religion for a time, which is what an exchange student does, but when it started getting out of hand, the Host family should have put aside their own beliefs and should have started feeding him for crying out loud!

As a mother myself, this story bothers me to no end. I can’t even imagine how this young man’s parents feel knowing they let him go into the ‘lion’s den’! I guess you can’t control everything. Dammit.