LA HABRA : Mexican Students Complete Exchange

Jesse Ledesma came to La Habra from Mexico last week thinking people here were different. But he was wrong.

“I never imagined it,” the 16-year-old said in Spanish. “Customs may be different, but the people are the same.”

Ledesma and 13 other ninth-grade students from San Miguel de Allende, in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, are living with La Habra High School 10th-grade students as part of an exchange program created to cultivate relations between the two cities.

Fifteen La Habra sophomores traveled to San Miguel last month, where they lived with their Mexican counterparts, attended school with them and became friends.

They gathered Wednesday in an art class at the school where they made clay pendants.

Etching a picture of an eagle in his pendant, Ledesma said he’s learned some valuable lessons from the exchange program. “Things are very advanced here,” he said. “When I go back to Mexico, I’m going to tell kids to stay in school so our country can prosper.”

The students’ families, local businesses and the La Habra and San Miguel de Allende Sister City associations paid for the trips.

Each of the 29 students who participated in the exchange program are enrolled in foreign language courses and maintain average to high grades at their schools.

While the La Habra students were in San Miguel, they visited historical sites including the silver mines and the city of Dolores, where the Mexican Revolution in 1810 was declared.

“It was a great experience,” said Beatris Diaz, 15, of La Habra. “We learned more Spanish and lived the way the kids live there. They really respect their parents and their teachers.”

Joe Zizi, 15, agreed. “I learned that we’re really not all that different,” he said.

The most important lesson learned, according to 16-year-old Roxanne Barba, of La Habra, was about compassion and understanding.

“We shouldn’t prejudge people because of how they live,” she said. “We all think alike. We all go to school. We all work. We’re all human beings. We just live differently, and if we had more communication between cultures we’d all be closer.”

Lessons like that can’t be learned from a textbook, said Gabriella Rocha de Bribiesca, president of the San Miguel de Allende Sister City Assn. Bribiesca and two teachers from Fray Pedro de Gante and Jose Vasconcelos schools in San Miguel accompanied the exchange students.

The Mexican students have toured several Orange County cities and visited Disneyland, the beaches and the malls. Today, they will be in Sea World in San Diego and will spend the rest of the week touring other Southern California locations.

“Es muy padre aqui (It’s really cool here),” said Claudia Villafranco, 15, of San Miguel.