I just spent 72 hours with 73 American high school exchange students in a hotel south of Los Angeles International Airport. Last night at 1 a.m. PST, the last of them caught their flight to New Zealand. For the first time in a few days, I headed home to my own bed.

I’d agreed to serve as a volunteer Group Leader for AFS, an internationally respected non-profit exchange service. This week in Los Angeles, AFS sent American high school students to live in Japan and Australia for the summer. In the hours before departure to their respective host countries, AFS walks students through an intensive orientation in which students are introduced to different communication techniques and behaviors which will aid them in their transition to life in their new home.

“Does this orientation really help?” one student headed to Japan asked us over dinner.

Good question. Did I remember any of my pre-departure orientation before I spent a year in Italy? I tried to remember back to 13 years ago. We were high school students stopping in New York for two days before heading overseas to our prospective host families in Italy. Excitement, anticipation, and nerves exhausted us; it was the first time many of us had ever been away from our parents. In the college dorms where our orientation was held, there were more than 50 of us, full of hormones and newfound independence, and we all had something in common: we were all giving up what we knew to be safe and familiar to spend a year of our lives in a foreign country.

I don’t remember much of what our Group Leaders said to us. No doubt they covered the intricacies of high-context and low-context cultures, non-verbal communication, and ways to better integrate into our host families and communities, just as we had with these students. Mostly I recall the students I met at that orientation, and our experiences together during that year, and how our lives have changed in the years that followed.

“Yes,” I told her. What would I have wanted to hear, on the eve of my own departure? I didn’t tell her that her time abroad would change her. The re-entry to one’s native culture after spending time in a host country is often more challenging than leaving home in the first place. How much can parents understand what their children experience while they’re away? My own time as an exchange student was difficult, as were the first years I spent trying to reacclimate to my natural home. Looking back, I found the most comfort in the empathy shared by other exchange students who became my friends, those same people I met during the orientation, with whom I shared nothing else in common.