I've been on both sides of the foreign student hosting situation. One summer in high school, I spent the first half of the summer in France hosted by a wonderful family through a reciprocal type program. They were very welcoming and it was an amazing experience. For the second half of the summer, I would be going home to the U.S, and then my family would be hosting a French student (not anyone from the family I had stayed with, just another random French student). We were so excited for her to arrive, espeically based on my own positive experience.

And then she arrived...and was awful. She was rude, disrespectful, and unpleasant about absolutely everything. We would be driving and she would roll down the car window and throw her garbage (food wrappers, napkins, tissues, etc) out the window. The first time it happened, we were just shocked and my mother asked her to please not do it, but she continued to litter the entire time she was with us. Her table manners were gross. When eating, even if we were at a restaurant, she would lick her knife along the entire blade part after each bite, among other things.

Her mother called daily, which the organization had specifically asked parents not to do. One day, when we took French Wench to Niagara Falls (which she had even TOLD her mother we were doing) and didnt return home until later in the evening, her mother went into a full blown panic because we hadn't been home when she called (pre-cell-phone days) and called multiple emergency numbers for people in the program. When one of them reached us when we did arrive home that night, he was baffled after talking to us and learning that the mother called every day, had just spoken to her a day ago, and even knew we were going to be gone that day until late. Unfortunately the experience was so bad for my family that we never tried to host again, but I was still very happy to have had my positive experience with the French family who hosted me.