Regional Conferences Reunite Alumni

Alumni from selected countries recently participated in two regional conferences that promoted leadership and community service, and also gave the participants a chance to reunite with their fellow alumni from neighboring countries.

The Pakistani and Bangladeshi alumni from the AYUSA YES consortium joined alumni from other programs and consortiums at the South Asian Regional Youth Leadership Conference held on April 15th-18th at the American Center in New Delhi, India and the Vidya Sanskar School in Faridabad, India. The conference was organized by the American Embassy in New Delhi in collaboration with the U.S. Educational Foundation in India. Conference partners were the Vidya Sanskar School, the nongovernmental organization Haryana and AFS/India.

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Host Family Visits Yemen

If anyone had told Kathleen Kain and her daughter Clare four years ago that a trip to Yemen was in their immediate future, they would probably have laughed it off as a joke. However, Yemen was their destination this past June, when they traveled to Aden to visit Ali Hussein Salah '05, their host son and brother.

Ali and the Kains have kept in close contact since he spent the 2004-05 year with them in Houston, Texas as a member of the second cohort of YES students to arrive in the U.S. Kain remembers Ali as a flexible and resilient student. "He worked hard at his studies, and he often shared stories and wisdom from Yemen with our family," she noted. It was those stories, as well as the travel books Ali brought with him from Yemen, that prompted the family to consider visiting the country.

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