Originally from Brussels, Belgium, Lea Georgoulis grew up in Auderghem, one of 19 municipalities spread throughout the Brussels-Capital Region in the Old Continent.
Now, and for the next nine months, she is a student at Bay Port High School.
A first time US visitor this year, Georgoulis arrived in Wisconsin in August, after a 3-day visit in New York City.
She has three brothers and one sister. “I am the last one,” Georgoulis said.
Apart from an older brother who lives and is raising a family in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or a cousin who lived in Denmark, nobody in her family was known to have lived abroad.
A nurse by profession, her mom was the one who gave her the last push to come live her exchange adventure in Wisconsin.
“In November [2024] she started talking to me again [about the possibility of coming]. Then we found a very strong organization that made it possible,” she said. “My mom told me this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Wisconsin was her third choice after California and Texas, she says, more so due to what she read on social media about those two destinations having warm climates.
However, she is very happy in the Dairy State because it is the one she had least heard of. “The director of the organization spoke greatly about my host family in Wisconsin,” Georgoulis said.
“I was not very good at English,” Georgoulis said when asked if she knew the language before. Besides her French mother tongue, Georgoulis can speak some Dutch as learned in school, plus “a word or two of her father’s (now deceased) language, Greek”
“It’s a big high school,” she said, soon learning that the warmth she missed in California or Texas was surpassed by a different type of warmth here in Suamico, Wisconsin.
When describing the crowds at high school football games she has attended, Georgoulis noticed that very thing.
“It’s very festive here, everyone is happy [during the games]. In Brussels, Friday evenings everyone is home tending to their chores,” she said.
The sports-driven culture in school is much richer in Wisconsin than back at home, where she was able to play tennis twice a week in the past few years — a sport she was able to compete in for Bayport until the season ended in early October.
Georgoulis described, and respects, how, unless you are very established in a certain sport, it is not easy to be in a team.
“It’s very selective,” Georgoulis says. She added she is okay with this as she is focused on her main goal, “being part of plenty of experiences here” — as was the case with a recent trip to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, which her host family kept as a last-minute surprise.
Georgoulis’ said her host parents, Travis and Emily Witter, lead a healthy eating lifestyle.
“From that standpoint, food choices are similar to what I was used to at home” she says, as opposed to some of her exchange friends whose families do not eat as healthy at times.
“I have my Bubbl’r and my Starbucks coffee every morning,” Georgoulis said when it comes to her favorite beverages here.
When asked if she cooks, she said she cooks pasta, particularly gnocchi, and can make delicious waffles, which her host parents anxiously await.
“I plan to make those for Christmas,” Georgoulis said.
Georgoulis highlighted and praised the three-person teamwork at her host home when it comes to cooking — “[My host dad] cooks the meat, [my host mom] prepares the veggies, I make pasta. I love it when all three of us cook,” she said.
Her host parents have no children, but they have two dogs, which she loves.
True, nice, spontaneous and empathetic, are some of the features she admires and appreciates in people she has crossed paths with in Wisconsin.
“People smile around here,” which she said also happens back at home in spite of being thousands of miles apart from Belgium.
On the down side, Georgoulis noticed one “cannot go many places unless you have a car and that one cannot see any people out on the streets in the evening. Everyone is in their cars. Houses are distant from one another,” she said, adding that back in Brussels it is “impossible” not to find at least two people walking on every street, “even at 3 a.m.”
“Introduction to Law”, “Chemistry” or “Child Development” are some of the subjects she loves at school this semester. Next semester, she is signed up for “Pottery”.
“My goal [in life] is to learn about new experiences, about people” and this mission statement applies well to her life in Wisconsin.
Of note, the homecoming festivities were something she enjoyed, the “gatherings” that happen outside of academic duties, for football or the dance.
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