Home away from home: International college students spend Thanksgiving with Sauk Valley-area families

ROCK FALLS – For many college students in the U.S., Thanksgiving break is a time when they return home to their families for annual traditions of turkey, football and parades.

But for international students who may be stuck on campus, the University of Chicago International House started the Thanksgiving Homestay Program, during which international students can experience the holiday with host families in southern and western Illinois.

The Rock River Valley International Fellowship, a partner of the program, welcomed 15 students – from Japan, China, Azerbaijan, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Korea and the United Kingdom – to the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Rock Falls on Wednesday. The students have been staying with eight different host families in Dixon, Sterling and Morrison until their departure Sunday, said Steve Caudillo, a state coordinator for the program.

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Maddie Carruthers of Cambridge, England meets the Young family, dad Aaron, and daughters Jadah (left), 11, and Ariah, 9, of Morrison Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024. The family will host the University of Chicago student as part of a Rock River Valley International Fellowship weekend. (Alex T. Paschal)

As state coordinator, Caudillo helps pair students with their host families based on availability or personal preferences.

For example, the family might “have small children and they’re all female, so they want a female student, or vice versa,” he said.

But before he became a coordinator, his involvement in the program began in 1997 with hosting students. This year, he’s hosting two students who are from Azerbaijan and Brazil, Caudillo said.

Caudillo celebrated with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at his home with turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. For the rest of the weekend, he planned to take the students to see “the Mississippi River, the Dixon riverfront, the Ronald Reagan statue and things like that,” Caudillo said.

Another family, the Youngs in Morrison, are hosting Maddie Carruthers of Cambridge, England, who’s a first-year graduate student. She arrived in America in mid-September and said that she’s excited because she has never been anywhere outside of Chicago.

“In the United Kingdom, Thanksgiving is completely not a thing,” Carruthers said.

The family has been hosting students for a couple of years now and has stayed in touch with all the students they’ve hosted, Aaron Young said.

“We’re smoking a turkey [Thursday] and have a bunch of family coming in,” he said. “It’s nice for them to get off campus for a little while during the break.”

To wrap up the weekend, the Rock River Valley International Fellowship was hosting an international buffet dinner Saturday at the church in Rock Falls “to experience the socialization with other students, as well as with the host families,” Caudillo said.

At the dinner, the students are going to prepare foods from their cultures to serve.

“You learn about cooking, you learn about their family, learn about their family customs, which I think is really awesome,” Caudillo said. “When it comes right down to it, we all have something in common. We share the same values and things like that.”