Raffe Ruengprach, the girl with a weird name and a funny accent, is well known at LP this year as an exchange student from Thailand. Like other exchange students, Raffe is staying with a host family that takes care of her this year on volunteer bases, attends Lewis Palmer like a regular American high school student and is having time of her life experiencing the U.S.

However, it wasn’t easy to get a full scholarship to study for free the whole year in America. The inspiration for Ruengprach was a senior at her high school back in Thailand who had just come back from the exchange program. He was talking about his experience during the school assembly, and it sounded very exciting to Ruengprach. She decided to become an exchange student herself.

It didn’t seem realistic – even though she took nine years of English, it was on the lowest level.

“I didn’t even know which verb matches with ‘I’. I thought it was ‘is’”, Ruengprach said. “I only knew the word fish and I couldn’t even spell it”.

But after the decision was made, she started to work hard on it, nevertheless her family didn’t believe she could do it. Every day during lunch time during the whole school year Ruengprach came to the school library and studied English grammar by her own.  When she applied to participate in an exchange program, she was the only one picked from her high school.

Being a leader of a youth group and having an active life back at home, Ruengprach continues this in America. She is involved in choir, and was in the cast in the musical last fall. Her favorite thing, however, is playing tennis on the JV2 team.

“I love tennis because it’s my first experience of high school sports”, Ruengprach said,” And the tennis team is awesome!”.

Ruengprach doesn’t seem to have problems with making friends even in a foreign country. “I’m a clumsy girl and people laugh at me all the time”, she said. “And I become friend with those who like me. I say hello to people all the time, and I am weird”.

Ruengprach says that experience in the US will help her a lot in future. She learned English that will help her to get a better job, but has also explored new culture and learned how to work with people from different backgrounds.