CONTACT FAMILY

Living far away from home without the close connection of having your close family and friends around you, are harder than most can imagine. However, most teenagers imagine that it must be the ideal life to live at a boarding school surrounded by friends, often “in real life” the feeling of missing more close adult contact takes over. 

 

We cannot replace the relaxing and comfortable feeling of close family and yearlong friendships, but we can find you a family that you can meet for a coffee or dinner one to two times per month, and to whom you can reach out if you feel the need of extra support or just a friendly hug on a rainy day. This family will probably also celebrate you on your birthday and include you in some of their family traditions for Christmas, Easter, and other national holidays. Your contact family is also the place to go and stay, if you get sick and cannot stay in your room at the college till you get well. 

 

GKX arranges contact between international students and local living families who are interested in introducing students to their daily life by inviting them for dinner on the weekends. The families can be a younger couple without children, a family with young children or teenagers, or a retired couple. It can also be a single person without a partner or children. Common for all families is that they are interested in getting to know foreigners, learning from your traditions and culture, sharing their Danish traditions and culture, and helping you with understanding the Danish way of living. 

 

Contact families are interviewed, screened, and prepared for the meetings. From experience, we know that often the best friendships often appear by coincidence in the meeting and also when opposites meet. Therefore we do not have a strong focus on shared interests, personality types etc. After the first meeting, we contact both the family and the student and check up on the meeting to ensure that you had a good time with each other. If not, we will introduce you to a new contact family.
 

Your contact family can invite you to visit them for holiday weeks, were the boarding school is closed, but they are not obliged to do it. Contact families are non-paid volunteers, and therefore any costs connected to trips like entrance tickets, public transportation, lunch, etc. is covered by the student. The Contact Family fee covers our work for locating, coordinating, and screening the family.