Recently while cleaning off my desk, I came across an email from Vashon High School principal Danny Rock that I had printed out last spring. Across the top of the page I had scrawled several question marks and a reminder to myself: “Discuss with kids.”

I continued with my cleanup, but I carefully set the paper aside. I couldn’t toss it — it’s an artifact of something big that happened to our family.

That email, sent to all the parents of the school, shared information about Ergon, a company that places Italian exchange students in the Pacific Northwest. The letter was informing families about hosting a student and asking families if they would consider doing so.

We wound up saying “yes,” of course, and signing up to host an exchange student from Milan. We did this despite the fact that our house is very small and despite the fact that my husband and I fretted about taking on the responsibility of caring for a teenager from another country. We wondered what it would mean for our family dynamic — defined by our own intense mix of squabbling about little things, having endless discussions about bigger ones, and laughing at things only we think are funny — to add a third teenager to the mix.

Our 16-year-old twins didn’t have any trepidation at all, especially after Ergon expertly matched us with a prospective student, Gabriele, who turned out to love cross country and theater as much as they do. And they were also excited by Ergon’s promise to provide a stipend for them to spend a few weeks in Italy with Gabriele, after he returned home. They were ready to pack their bags and go.

The twins’ new Italian “brother” arrived at the end of August — a tall (well, taller than any of us), dark-haired, ravenously hungry 17 year old.

It’s been exciting to see our world, and island, through a new set of eyes. He’s an outgoing, charming and hardworking young man who, from the start, has been eager to make the most of his time on Vashon. His curiosity and enthusiasm for all things American is infectious. His chutzpah in striking out on his own to experience a new culture is inspiring.

Gabriele has widened our window to the world beyond our shores, something I think is very important in the rapidly changing, and often disturbing, times in which we live.

World news last week was awful, with attacks in Paris, Beirut and Kenya. Now more than ever, it’s important to know more about the problems that rock and roil the globe. We need to develop an understanding of other cultures. We mustn’t turn in. We can’t.

Our tight-knit community provides many advantages for its children and teens, including good schools and robust after-school arts and sports programs, but it lacks diversity. The vast majority of our schoolchildren are Caucasian. Increasingly, many are upper middle class, over-privileged but underexposed to other ways of life.

It’s easy to ignore that so many of our kids are growing up inside the bubble of our West Coast, island mentality and perhaps failing to gain a meaningful understanding of global issues.

Our town can be kind of like the way I described our family, inside our small house — we’ve gotten used to bickering, being wrapped up in our own dramas and laughing at our own inside jokes. Life is pretty good here, but too often we don’t see the bigger picture.

The truth is, island youth, and adults as well, can greatly benefit from the lessons taught to us by international students. In a small but important way, welcoming young people from other countries into our island life will make us all better citizens of the world.

The perspective we have gained from Gabriele has taught us things both big and small — from his tales of riding a train through Italy that suddenly filled up with migrants from the Middle East, to his extravagant use of saffron while cooking, to his observations about the differences between his private school education in Italy and the public school one he is getting here. Life with Gabriele is always full of useful information, interesting surprises and fresh points of view.

He also does things that we think are very strange, like meticulously ironing his clothes and carrying an umbrella when it rains. Come to think of it, if our kids come away with nothing else from this experience, perhaps they’ll figure out how to stay dry and not look quite so Vashonably crumpled. Those will be handy skills to have when they too strike out to explore the world, and hopefully, make it a better place.

To find out more about hosting an Italian exchange student, visit www.ergon-se.org.

— Elizabeth Shepherd is the former arts editor of The Beachcomber and is currently the director of youth programs at Northwest Film Forum.