Miranda: We’re both children’s book writers. I was raised to be a good ambassador when someone comes to visit you. Miranda: I want to show people the way I was raised here in Wisconsin. We want to take a little bit of that pressure off of them. I know when I moved to the States, it was tough trying to figure this thing out! You want these kids to go through the process and learn, but sometimes it can be overwhelming. We’ve learned since that it’s actually very difficult to find enough host families for these students.īaptiste: We felt that it was really important, because we know what it’s like traveling to other places, and you have all those fears and phobias and anxiety. We saw an ad in our church bulletin saying that if these students don’t find host families, they don’t get to come do this program. Miranda: Kenya, Peru, Spain, Germany, China, Korea. And we’ve had nine teenage exchange students, as well, over the years. It was a great choice because we had a family support network out here. We had a long-distance relationship until we got married, since I was in Maryland and he was in Pennsylvania.īaptiste: We decided to make Wisconsin a home just before Miranda gave birth to our daughter. Needless to say, he called, and here we are, 19 years later. I felt bad because he was so polite, so I gave him my real phone number.

Miranda: He had only been here, what? A year at that point.

Afterwards, Baptiste asked me for my phone number, and I gave him a fake one. He brought all the other volunteers from this project. After the race was done, our friend was going to meet us. I rowed crew, and we were in Philadelphia one weekend, rowing on the Schuylkill River for a regatta. I was in college in Maryland at the time. Miranda: While he was working to help the homeless, one of the alums from my college was a volunteer on the same project. I coached soccer at an inner-city Catholic school, where I introduced soccer to kids who had never played. I worked with homeless people on the streets, and I also volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and an after-school center for vulnerable kids. I moved to Philadelphia to be a volunteer. Baptiste: I left Saint Lucia a few years after I graduated high school.

Water is water by miranda paul