Tama Ryokan Homestay Support

July 2009 Project: Longmont

Left High and Dry

The homestay program run by the city of Chino in Nagano-ken has decided to refuse a group of 8 high school students from Longmont, Colorado, its sister city, out of fear of exposing its citizens to the H5N1 flu virus. The decision was reportedly delivered by the city's mayor. The group of 10 (including two unpaid adult supervisors) had already bought 10 non-refundable tickets (about $1000 each). United Airlines will only issue vouchers for future use on the same route. The Chino's mayor has reportedly written to United Airlines, but has not offered any compensation through the city itelf.

The added risk to Chino from these Longmont high school students is probably negligibly low. There have been outbreaks in Japan already, so Chino doesn't appreciably reduce its risk by refusing sponsorship of American homestay students. After all, on any given day, Chino (pop. 56,000) has many Japanese, including its own town citizens and tourists, arriving from other areas of Japan -- and from other places in the world -- where there have been outbreaks. There are no reports that Japanese in Chino are being quarantined by city authorities for any such reason. It appears that nothing can be done to reverse this decision to refuse promised homestays to these American students.

At this writing (June 26th), 6 of the 8 students have pulled out because, even though they had a round-trip ticket to Japan, they can't afford to stay in Japan now -- they were depending on staying in family homes, as guests. The other three, and their adult supervisor for the trip, are struggling to raise money so that they can afford accommodation during nights they thought they'd be staying with Japanese families for free. The deadline is close: the tickets are for a July 13th departure.

Contributions

You can make donation through Rod Smith's Healthy Coffee. (Scroll down for "Cash Donation", at the bottom.) Tama Ryokan is offering a 50% discount on all nights these students stay beyond their original July three-night reservation. (Approximately a $400 value, at this point, subject to exchange rate fluctuations. July is usually our busiest month, we get many times more reservation requests than we can satisfy, so this discount rate represents a significant concession.) If more of these Longmont students re-commit to the trip, the same discount terms will be extended to them.

Press:

5/11/2009 Denver Post
"Students seeing Japan trip stall over flu concern"

6/9/2009 CBS4 Denver Sports
"Rod Smith Helps Out Students Who Lost Japan Trip"

6/11/2009 The Longmont Times-Call
"Former Bronco helps teens trying to travel to Japan"

6/11/2009 The Longmont Times-Call
"Options limited for teens' trip to sister city Chino"

Longmont Japan Summer '09 Homestay Fundraising Student Blog

The students are keeping a blog, Trip to Japan '09, of their fundraising efforts.


Michael Turner
Co-manager
Tama Ryokan

Last modified: 27 June 2009