Tour of Madison!
PHOTO ABOVE - New international students and visiting professors getting oriented before their free tour of our city!
Imagine you have just left your home, family, and culture. You are culture-shocked in a strange place. You need to figure out where to live, how to grocery shop, how to find community - and all in your second or third language! You have no friends or family nearby. One day some friendly local volunteers give you a free tour of your new city and welcome you into a local home for free food and great conversation! You make your first local friends, and it doesn’t end there – they invite you to other fun activities and continue to befriend and serve you in the following weeks…
Our Badger Internationals team recently organized the 74th annual Tour of Madison, a long and wonderful tradition of outreach by volunteers, mostly from local churches, to new international students in our city ( badgerinternationals.org/tour/ ). Although it was a ton of work and pushed me to the limits of my tech and admin skills due to my role in serving as the volunteer coordinator, it was so worth the effort. We invited roughly 2,000 brand new international students, had about 343 register, and about 253 showed up to go on the Tour. We were blessed with just the right number of drivers, ‘tour guides,’ and host homes to match the number of students who came, right down to the very last carload!
PHOTO ABOVE – Jesse training volunteers for the Tour of Madison. About 160 volunteers served, mostly from 27 local churches! His role as the volunteer coordinator this year caused him to never want to see another spreadsheet in his life! But the tech and administrative difficulties were so worth it to see The Body working together in unity and reaching out to the new international students from about 40 nations!
PHOTO ABOVE – Most of the local volunteers who made the Tour of Madison happen (some are not pictured because they were already serving as registration assistants). What a blessing for the local churches to serve together in unity – “How good and pleasant it is…” (Psalm 133:1)!
PHOTO ABOVE – The 74th annual Tour of Madison: international students and local volunteers checking in to either serve as volunteers or receive their free tour of our city. We were able to welcome and demonstrate divine love to about 250 brand new international students to Madison!
LOVED AND ADOPTED!
The best part of the Tour is hearing all the testimonies of local volunteers who ‘adopt’ their carload of international students and continue to reach out in the months and even years after the Tour is over. So many friends have nurtured and loved their students for years afterwards through meals in their homes, kayaking, taking them to local cultural events, and more. One couple even hosted their two students and a friend at their house for several weeks when the students were in between apartment leases and desperately needed housing! This tangible love demonstrated for unreached students has led to great spiritual conversations and even attendance at local fellowships and small group discussions.