Armand Melk-Johnson gives me a tour of his host family’s home, a one-and-a-half story bungalow in Minneapolis.
He’s staying with his host mom Alicia and her two young kids, Mariel and Thomas.
Melk-Johnson is 15 and a ninth-grader at Minnehaha Academy, a private school in Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota, that's doing something different. It’s running a program called City Stay, which offers students the chance to immerse in a new culture for one week. Currently, the program places students with Latino, Somali and Hmong host families.
Melk-Johnson chose to stay with this family, with roots in Peru. “My mom was