Mother-daughter community friends Kate and Ashley Rezvani have been participating in MIFP for years.  However, their matchup last fall with an international student from China led to more than a casual friendship; Ashley just returned from a summer touring the home country of her international friend. In her words:  

My friendship with Shuai Yang, who I met through MIFP in the fall of 2013, was an instantaneous one.  We grew closer with every passing month, spending our holidays together, sharing our food, our culture, and our stories with one another. Then, in the winter, she invited me to come back to China with her in the summer.

Months flew by, and the next thing I knew, I was on a flight from Seattle to Beijing. I stepped off that plane and into an amazing adventure.

The next six weeks with Shuai was life changing. She hadn’t traveled much in China, and so we decided to go see it together – and see it we did! We visited over twelve different cities together. She shared her culture, food, and country with me, just like I'd shared mine with her the school year we spent together in Missoula.

Thank you, MIFP! You not only gave me the opportunity for the experience of a lifetime, but introduced me to one of my best friends in the whole wide world.

I can clearly remember the day I met Shuai Yang, my family’s community friend for the fall of 2013. She waved at us, with a huge smile on her face, through the crowd milling around the Carousel in Missoula. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but she would become one of my best friends.

Our friendship was an instantaneous one. We grew closer with every passing month, spending our holidays together, sharing our food, our culture, and our stories with one another. It was at UM’s celebration of the Chinese New Year when she told me her American last name had become Rezvani, and my Chinese last name was Yang -- in the absence of her own family, during this important time of year, we had become each other’s family. That night, before my mom and I dropped her off at her apartment, she expressed to me that she wanted me to come back to China with her over the summer. She would miss me too much, she said, and I agreed.

Months flew by, and the next thing I knew, I was on a flight from Seattle to Beijing. I stepped off that plane and into an amazing adventure.This was my first time abroad, and everything was new and exciting. Shuai and I spent the first two weeks of our trip in Beijing and Langfang, her hometown. I got to meet her family and friends, just like she’d gotten to meet mine back in Missoula. We went through the Forbidden City in Beijing, tried famous Peking duck and saw their art district. I attended a traditional wedding of a family friend. It was held in the countryside -- at 6 AM, since the Chinese get married in the morning, and needless to say, fireworks went off.

Perhaps the most striking thing about China was the loud firecrackers that went off throughout the day, seemingly randomly. When I asked Shuai about it, she told me that firecrackers are only set off for two occasions, other than New Year’s -- when someone is getting married, or when someone has died, to send their soul up to Father in the Sky. It was a powerful and humbling realization, to suddenly become privy to the life going on around me.

The next four weeks with Shuai was life changing. She hadn’t traveled much in China, and so we decided to go see it together – and see it we did! We visited over twelve different cities together. We walked miles along the Great Wall, saw two thousand year old silk in Hangzhou, climbed the Yellow Mountain, hiked three hours to a temple in the mountains get our fortunes told by a Buddhist monk near Wuzhen, saw a traditional opera in Shaoxing, visited the terrace gardens and Reed Flute Cave in Guilin, walked around the Bund and Pudong in Shanghai, and saw the Terracotta Warriors in Xian. Shuai got to discover more of her beautiful homeland, and I got to experience China like a native.

It was with many tears and hugs that I left China after six weeks. I kept in contact with Shuai over the remainder of the summer, and picked her up from the airport when she arrived back for school in August.

Thank you, MIFP. You not only gave me the opportunity for the experience of a lifetime, but introduced me to a best friend, a sister, to one of the greatest people in this big wide world that I have yet to meet and hope to remain close with throughout my life.