I grew up in red state poverty, moved to the west coast, and people up here genuinely do not understand what it’s like to live somewhere that sees travel as a bougie thing. I talk about how my parents couldn’t afford to send me with my class on the senior trip to europe, the first question that gets asked is why I couldn’t get a job and save up, not understanding I was childcare and housekeeping for my family while the adults worked. It’s not just coming up with the travel costs, it’s also coming up with the money to hire out replacements for the services I provided for free.

I’m privileged I could test high enough to get into a school that had a senior trip to europe, the public school barely got normal field trips. It’s not hard to understand why the person in OP would assume exchange students have access to a higher quality of life than them, they can clearly already afford to travel.

God bless the grass that grows through the crack, they roll the concrete over it and try to keep it back. The concrete gets tired of what it has to do, it breaks and it buckles, and the grass grows through.

-Malvina Reynolds