Traveling to another country may fulfill the drams of many Americans on a yearly basis, but how many people could actually pick up their lives and move to a country that they have never been to before?

That is exactly what 17-year-old Rita Balkova did this past August. The high school senior is a foreign exchange student from the Ukraine living in Warwick and attending Pilgrim High School. She is a student in the American Field Service program, or AFS.

“I am almost happy, I have been here eight months,” said Balkova in perfect English.

Balkova, who is on the cheerleading squad and swimming team at Pilgrim, believes that if her family could be here with her, it would complete her happiness.

“Meeting her [Balkova] was life-changing, I have never known about other countries and cultures and now she is like a sister to me,” said Gianna Pecchia, a senior at Pilgrim.

Balkova, along with 11 other AFS students, was attending an event at Pilgrim on Friday aimed at educating local students about different cultures across the world and the benefits of becoming an AFS member or host family.

“The Rhode Island AFS chapter always has a host weekend and because we want Pilgrim kids to host and become [AFS] students this was our publicity,” said Heidi Bennett, a Spanish teacher at Pilgrim and head of the school’s AFS chapter.

Bennett feels that America is such a huge country and the borders are so far away from each other many students and adults for that matter, are not cognizant of the rest of the world.

“I think I’ve reached a fair amount of people through the program,” said Bennett.

Bennett is a 1976 AFS returnee from Argentina and says she wants to give back everything that she was able to gain from her experience. She served as a host mom for a German student and is currently a liaison for the AFS.

The AFS students spent their weekend in Rhode Island emulating the behaviors of most local teenagers. They went ice-skating in Providence on Saturday and then some went to see the Brown University versus Columbia basketball game and others went to watch the Pilgrim hockey game.

“The weekend was crazy, everyone had the sport [ice-skating] down by the end of the day,” said Bennett.

The 12 students represented 10 different countries: Thailand, Malaysia, Moldavia, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Czech Republic and Norway.

Bennett believes that the event was a success because she already had a student approach her yesterday wanting to initiate her paperwork to become an AFS student in the fall.

“I had kids coming in all day asking me when the next AFS meeting is,” said Bennett.

Balkovia said that while missing her family is the biggest difficulty for her, it has actually brought her and her younger sister closer.

“Before I left she was very excited because she thought it would be easier for her, now she is excited because she misses me, now she loves me like a sister,” said Balkovia.

Having someone their age from a foreign country around seems to have stirred up the inner travelers in many of the Pilgrim students. One student expressed her interest in traveling to Egypt as an AFS student.

“Being able to experience their language, Arabic, would be a really cool language to learn,” said Victoria Serra, a junior at Pilgrim.

The AFS was founded in 1914 as a volunteer ambulance corps, whose mission was to transport wounded French soldiers. Founder, A. Piatt Andrew, and Stephen Galatti helped create AFS fellowships in French Universities, which sent 222 college students both to and from the United States between 1919 and 1952. Today 350,000 participants and host families have taken part in AFS exchanges facilitated by 100,000 volunteers.

“All the students were ambassadors to their countries while they were here, I would be interested to see how my students would respond in that situation,” said Bennett.