Glenwood City’s Makayla Sina grows as an individual after visit to Japan
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MAKAYLA SINA
By Amber Hayden
GLENWOOD CITY — For Makayla Sina, the opportunity of a lifetime came during the summer of 2019 when she was able to take part in an exchange program through Youth for Understanding (YFU).
“I am so lucky to have been provided the opportunity to participate in a cultural exchange program,” said Sina. “It gave me experiences that have changed my life.”
Sina is the daughter of Matthew Sina and Stephanie Heinbuch, and is a junior at Glenwood City High school.
“I believe that the qualities that I have expanded on through my six weeks in Japan are independence, patience, and acceptance,” according to Sina. “Because of my experience, I have learned so much about myself and a different place across the globe.”
After Sina graduates in 2021, she plans on attending a technical college for the first year before moving on to either UW-Madison or Milwaukee to major in Japanese and will look into translation and interpretation as a career.
Applying
She had learned about YFU during a power point presentation given by Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) teacher David Weikel.
The thought of being able to experience Japan for six weeks over the summer amazed Makayla, and after learning a former Glenwood City high school student had taken part in the exchange program, she decided to give it a try.
“I had the full support of my family, and my dad offered to pay for all the application fees and was helping me every step of the way,” she explained. “My family supported me and said it was a great opportunity, and if you get the chance to go for it.”
The application process was extensive, according to Sina, and took her about three weeks to complete due to needing an updated passport, vaccination records, and social security information for different parts of the process.
As the date came and went that Sina knew she would be notified if she had been selected for travel to Japan, she felt nervous. But a few days after the deadline she received the email stating she had been accepted into the 2019 Japan summer program.
Not only was she accepted into the program, but she had also received a scholarship that paid for two-thirds of her tuition and had done some fundraising to cover the complete cost of the trip.
“My parents had to create restrictions for when I could start packing because I was so excited,” she explained.
Makayla joined 70 other students from around the nation in Chicago for a two-day orientation before taking a flight and heading to Kobe, Japan.
Japan
After her orientation, Sina boarded a plane that would take her from O’Hare International Airport to Tokyo, but a minor mechanical issue caused the flight to make a pit stop in Anchorage, AK.
The flight had originally been scheduled to be a 17-hour non-stop flight to Tokyo from Chicago, but after the stop in Alaska, the pilots agreed it was too late to finish the flight and stopped in San Francisco where the students stayed the night in the VIP section of the airport.
When Sina arrived in Tokyo, they were once again put up in a hotel for a few hours, and she was able to see the lights of the city from her room.
“I couldn’t see the Tokyo Tower though,” she said. “It’s in a whole different area and Tokyo is so big.”
When she arrived in Kobe the following morning she was greeted by her host mother, Kaori, who surprised Makayla by giving her a hug.
Sina had painted a picture of her host family as a gift and when Kaori saw it peeking out of a bag, she became excited and opened it at the airport.
“When I first saw her, Kaori, my first thought was she is just so tiny,” commented Sina. “I laugh at it now as I don’t know why I thought that.”
While in Japan, she stayed with her host father, Takashi, Kaori, host sisters Moe and Yui, and brother Takumi.
Sina stated she always felt safe while staying in Kobe even when stepping out of the house after dark, and she also made a few trips by train to Osaka to do some shopping with her host family.
“My host mom told me when we were passing by one of the food vendors that had pancakes that they weren’t any good,” Makayla said.
Some of the simplest things she did were the most memorable, according to Sina, from picking up crabs at the tide pools to comparing prices at the grocery stores.
“I like the people, and I made so many great friends and my host family was amazing,” she said. “It was a huge part of why I loved Japan so much.”
She also met up with other students who were in the Kobe area between six and seven times to sing karaoke or visit spocha, which is a sports complex with bowling, trampolines, and various other sports.
Sina is hoping to return to Japan for an exchange program for a semester after she enters college.
Youth for Understanding
The YFU exchange program began in 1951 in the United States in an effort to heal the wounds of World War II.
John Eberly had made a proposal to church leaders to bring teenagers from Germany to the United States to live with a host family and attend school for a year.
In 1951, 75 students from Germany and Austria made the trip after being selected by the Army of Occupation to live for a year under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of State.
YFU offers several programs which include a one year program beginning in the fall or spring, semester and trimester programs, a summer program, or a specialty program for art, music, film and theatre, language and culture, sports and outdoors.
Students wishing to take part in the program must be between the ages of 15 and 18-years-old, and have a C average based on a 4.0 scale for the summer programs and a B average for the year long and semester programs.
YFU offers exchange programs to 39 different countries with the featured countries such as Spain, Germany, Greece, Japan, France, Argentina, Sweden, Korea, and Italy.
For anyone wishing to apply for the YFU exchange program they are welcome to visit www.yfuusa.org with a due date of March 15 for summer and fall, and by October 1 for spring and winter.
