MOORPARK : Youths Find Interests in Common With Swiss Students

Moorpark resident Jesse Ahearn, 15, said he’d expected the Swiss teen-ager he’s been spending time with this summer to be different than American youth.

Jesse is staying temporarily with the Stueck family in Moorpark while his mother is out of town.

The Stuecks are also hosting 18-year-old Dennis Zecevic, one of 33 Swiss teen-agers staying with Moorpark families during the month of July under a nonprofit program run by the Sweden-based Educational Foundation.

“I figured he was going to be like some alien,” Jesse said of Dennis. But the two boys quickly found that they shared common interests, namely basketball and girls.

Dennis, who has visited this country only once before, said he likes the United States, but only to visit.

He plans to attend university to become a dentist, and he’s afraid he wouldn’t get his studies done if he lived here.

“If I’m here, I know I’d think only of basketball and beach and girls,” Dennis said.

The Educational Foundation is also sponsoring five other groups of foreign youths in Ventura County this summer: a Danish group in Thousand Oaks; Dutch teen-agers in Oak Park; German youth in Oxnard; and both an Italian and Indonesian group in Simi Valley.

All of the program participants stay with local families. The youths attend English classes during the mornings and participate in various cultural activities during the afternoons, such as visiting the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Like the other 32 teens staying in Moorpark, Dennis is from the French-speaking southern part of Switzerland.

In Moorpark, the Swiss teen-agers spent Wednesday afternoon having informal discussions with a group of local youths about how their countries differ in attitudes toward sex, music and other issues.

One of the Swiss youths, Maryanne Zurcher, 17, commented that “people are very shocked when you kiss someone on the street here. In Switzerland, it’s normal.”

But Jesse Ahearn and two other local youths quickly assured Maryanne that, while a public display of affection may draw attention in a small city such as Moorpark, it wouldn’t even be noticed in Los Angeles.