Local couple hosts Bulgarian
exchange student
An international friendship between an American businessman and a citizen of Bulgaria that began nearly 30 years ago after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe was extended to a third generation recently, and it happened right here in Hamilton County.
In late May, Thomas and Fawn Goetz of Aurora hosted a visit by the granddaughter of a woman who had been like a mother to Thomas when he worked for an international corporation in Bulgaria in the mid ‘90s. In the process they made one Bulgarian grandmother happy and repaid kindnesses she had shown to him three decades earlier. Here’s the story of how that came to be.
Thomas Goetz is a farmer and also works in customer service with Aurora Cooperative, but for many years he was employed by Land O’ Lakes and in 1995 he worked in the company’s International Development Division and was sent to Bulgaria as part of the Bulgaria Dairy Reform project. Goetz’s job was to work in the diary farm and dairy processing plant program, helping that nation to rebuild its system after the fall of communism.
“I worked there in an office in Sofia,” said Goetz, “and I worked with dairy farmers and milk plant processors through interpreters.”
Goetz says Manuela Russeva (the grandmother of the girl they recently hosted) was the lead person in the Bulgarian office and the two became good friends.
“She was almost like my mother when I got there,” said Goetz. “She took care of me, she helped me find a place to rent and she took care of everything and she was the main coordinator and had a lot of the contacts there in Bulgaria.”
In the years since coming back to the U.S., Goetz has stayed in contact with Russeva and also with several of the other people he worked with in Bulgaria, including some of his interpreters. For about a month several years ago he and Fawn hosted a set of twin boys who were the sons of one of those interpreters.
“Manuela called about a year ago and sent an email to my wife and I and asked for our help because her granddaughter was coming to America and she wanted to know if there would be anybody there to help in case there was a problem,” said Goetz.
The Goetzes promised Russeva they would be available to help if needed.
“Manuela has friends all over the world and I think she had 10 or 15 other fellow Land O’ Lakes ex-employees who used to work with her over there who came and said yes,” noted Goetz. However, he says the granddaughter, 17-year old Asya Shendag, turned out to be quite capable of taking care of herself.
“I’ve grown up mostly with my grandma and listening to all these stories about this person from Land O’ Lakes,” said Shendag during her Nebraska visit, “and this person and this person where they went and Minnesota and Minneapolis and all these places. And I just wanted to go. It sparked an interest in me to do something like this.”
So, when an opportunity to apply to be an exchange student came up, she asked her mother, Vladislava, if she could apply.
“She was, like, yeah, do whatever you want,” said Shendag, who knows now that Vladislava thought the chances were not good that her daughter would be chosen from a field of over 2,000 applicants as one of the 15 students to actually go overseas.
However, after surviving three rounds of essays, interviews and English tests (through which her mother remained passive), Shendag one day received an email from the program while she was out with friends.
“I get an email that I’m going to America,” said Shendag, “and I sent her a screenshot of that email and she goes, ‘What? Come home right now!.’ She was like ‘You’re not going anywhere!’ Yeah, she was freaking out.”
After Vladislava relented and decided to allow Asya to spend the 2022/23 school year in the U.S., Grandma Manuela got busy making arrangements for Asya’s American experience with her Land O’ Lakes contacts and sending the aforementioned email to the Goetzes. However, when Shendag got her assigned location it was 660 miles away from Aurora in the small West Texas town of Abernathy, population 3,000.
Coming from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria – a city of over 1.2 million in population -- the culture shock for Shendag was profound. She said one of her biggest adjustments came in learning to speak English like an American.
“In other countries around the world they usually teach British English,” said Shendag, “and first going to America I experienced American English. I had heard some from movies and social media so mine’s kind of mixed.”
However, she was totally unprepared for the Texas version of the English language.
“I’m sitting there and people are saying big ol’ and stuff,” she laughed. “Goal? What’s the goal? What is he saying? That would have probably been my biggest culture shock.”
Despite the language barriers and the struggle of adjusting to small town life, Shendag excelled in her year at Abernathy High School, even making some friendships she hopes will be lifelong. She also did well in her school work and won an award for getting the best grade in English and American History. (It’s no wonder she did well in English because she speaks a total of four languages. In addition to her native Bulgarian, she also speaks German and Turkish because that’s where her father is from.)
But most of all she enjoyed the opportunity she had on several occasions to visit places in the U.S. she had only heard about or seen on TV. Besides trips to Houston and Dallas in Texas, she had the opportunity to travel to New Mexico on a ski trip, San Francisco and was even able to fulfill her dream of visiting the Big Apple, New York City.
When the school year was over, Shendag was finally able to get on a plane in late May and fly to Omaha to visit her grandmother’s longtime friends, the Goetzes. They went and picked her up at the airport and realizing that she would be ready to see some different scenery after spending nine months in the flatlands of Texas, Goetz says they got in the car and headed for the Black Hills of South Dakota for a few days.
While there Shendag got to see Mt. Rushmore, Bear Country and the buffalo in Custer State Park. Coming back to Aurora, Shendag had a day or two to catch her breath before flying back to Texas and then making the 55-hundred mile trip back home to Bulgaria.
She said she hopes to come back to the U.S. someday, but two (or possibly three) years from now when she completes high school she hopes to study somewhere in Europe and is looking at either Germany or Great Britain.
For Goetz, the visit was an opportunity to reconnect with his old friend in Bulgaria through showing kindness to her granddaughter. He said he was glad for the opportunity to host her and show her a bit of the region he calls home. For Shendag, it was a chance to meet and spend time with people she had heard about all her life and to experience some Nebraska hospitality as well.
After living for a number of years in the Pacific Northwest, the Goetzes are also glad to be back in Nebraska. Thomas worked for several years in the St. Paul, Dannebrog and Clarks areas for Land O’ Lakes and Fawn is originally from Phillips.
“We just decided we’re going back to our roots, back to our family,” said Goetz. “We moved back here about a year and a half ago and we’re renting a place right now but we just bought a house. So, we just couldn’t be happier. We’re home and it’s just like peace of mind. We just love it back here in the Midwest and the people back here don’t know how good they’ve got it!”