Gonzales' first foreign exchange student returns for a visit

There’s an old stereotype that claims small towns tend to make visitors feel like home. Gonzales’ first foreign exchange student would agree with that fact, especially because he came back “home” to celebrate Gonzales High’s Class of 1975 40^th anniversary reunion.

Michael Boon, hailing from South Africa, returned to Gonzales to reconnect with his former classmates.

The South African recalled his time spent here and talked about his reasons for joining the Rotary International Exchange program.

“I was curious,” Boon simply said. “What’s the rest of the world about?”

After talking with other people who have gone through the foreign exchange program, he thought this would be the best way to go about this adventure.

“The primary way that they did it then, I don’t know if it still is, is that you finished your high school year and then you would go for an extra year to a foreign high school. So I repeated, if you like, a senior year and it happened to be Gonzales High. I got here I joined the class which became the class of ’75.”

The selection process was completely random. As Boon explained, it’s as if they threw a bunch of names into a hat and randomly selected places for them to go.

But after landing in Texas and beginning to assimilate into the culture, he soon began to realize how similar his home was to Gonzales.

“I came from a very small town, so the similarities were very profound in some respects,” he said. “There were lots of crossovers.”

The differences, however, between KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Gonzales, for Boon, were Gonzales’ worldviews versus his own. Your worldviews are shaped by your environment, so it would make sense that Boon’s outlooks on life after living in South Africa would be different than someone from Gonzales. Therefore, it was important for Boon to not only dive into the Texan culture, but also sort of embrace it.

“I said, ‘okay, what is it than to be Texan?’ Now you ask people out on the road there, ‘tell me what’s the Texan culture?’ and they’ll go ‘hmm, now let me think about that’ because it’s quite hard to define your own culture. During that year I tried to establish what that was.”

Boon then got involved with everything he can, from learning the music and dances to even embracing the rodeo culture.

“I did anything that seems to be a very specific thing from this region I got myself involved in and was different to what I would have been involved in at home,” he said.

A great story Boon retells is his time spent in rodeo.

Boon represented a province in South Africa where he played polocrosse. Polocrosse is like lacrosse, with the main difference that athletes rode on horses. With this, Boon knew his way around horses and rode well.

“When I got here, I wasn’t about to tell anybody that,” he laughed. “When they said ‘y’all ridden a horse before?’ I said ‘yeah just a bit.’”

“‘Well we’ll lead you around a bit,’ and I’d get on real carefully and they’d lead me around. It became fun.”

The ruse didn’t get too far as he was figured out in just a couple of days. But it was a fun few days before he got to show off his skills.

Horses weren’t the only animals Boon rode during rodeo. He even built up the courage to ride bulls.

“I really got involved, much to everyone’s utter amazement.”

Getting involved with everything was important for the experience. To fully take in a culture, Boon had to do everything a Texan would do that he wouldn’t necessarily do back home in South Africa. This willingness to do it all gained him some popularity and he was even featured in a student paper ran by the Inquirer back in 1974.

One headline reads ‘Mike Boon is GHS Exchange Student’ where he was profiled.

“A 28-hour plane trip would be quite an experience for anyone, but even more so for someone who had never flown in a plane before,” the article reads.

In the Jan.  21, 1974 issue of the Inquirer, the front page main art shows a sign with Boon standing in front of it reading “The Gonzales Rotary Club welcomes Michael Boon to the USA.”

“That’s a very important starting point because you think, ‘wow!’ You’re 17 years old,” he said, “you’re a little bit concerned about where you’re going, you’re on your own and hey, there’s this big welcome.”

“Each of the families was extraordinary in terms of making me feel safe, included and completely at ease in their homes first, which is really important, you got a safe and secured base and then making sure that I was properly introduced to all the little things that they knew that I might not be familiar with.”

After his year was over, Boon returned back to South Africa, where he was to serve a minimum of two years in the nation’s army. He would spend 10 years serving the military.

But during his time back home, Boon was still able to keep in touch with his new family in Gonzales.

“I always thought that I was going to go to South Africa and go to the army and maybe come back here and go to school here, go through university here. It didn’t work like that. A little thing called a war got in the way. But I stayed in touched with my host families and my friends who are friends till this day. Very very close friends.”

Eventually Boon came back to Gonzales for a visit, though it was between 15-20 years after his initial time here. But even after all that time, it was as though he didn’t left. The small town of Gonzales accepted him again as his its own.

That’s why he wants to come back as often as he could, though 28-hour plan trips don’t come cheap.

“It’s an incredible and deep privilege to be included in the Gonzales community,”  Boon said. “I feel like a son of Gonzales, I really do. Although I live in another country and I’ve traveled the world, if I have to put a peg in where really a second home is, it would be Gonzales, Texas. This is home to me. Even with my unusual accent.”