Decades later, onetime exchange students revisit Mich.

Royal Oak — Oscar Ramon Cabrera reaches into his duffel bag and gently pulls out a blue mortarboard, a faded commencement announcement and a diploma from the Dondero High School class of 1971.

“These are my treasures,” said Cabrera, 62, seated in a classroom dubbed “The Roost” inside Royal Oak High School. “I even still have my yearbook, but I didn’t want to bring it on this trip.”

“This trip,” is from his home in the province of Tucumán, in Argentina — 44 years after he graduated from what was then Dondero High School as an exchange student.

Tucumán, a small province in northwestern Argentina with a population of about 1.6 million, is near the western Andes Mountains. San Miguel de Tucumán, the capital, is considered the nation’s birthplace, where independence from Spain was declared in 1816.

Cabrera visited the school last week with his wife, Indiana Daneri, who did not go to school, and eight other former exchange students from Argentina who attended high schools in Michigan and Ohio in the 1970s. The group is visiting Metro Detroit through Wednesday, returning to the places they experienced for the first time as teenage visitors.

Cabrera was the only one in the group who attended Dondero, which became a middle school in 2007 due to declining enrollment.

Juan Carlos De Marco, 62, graduated from Roosevelt High School in Wyandotte in 1971.

While visiting a Spanish class at Royal Oak High School with the other former exchange students, De Marco encouraged the teenagers to consider becoming exchange students themselves.

“How many of you in here speak another langauge?” he asked the students. One young man said he spoke Albanian.

“You can gain so much by visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and other places — learning the culture, the language — you gain experiences you’ll remember for the rest of your life,” De Marco told the class.

DeMarco, who now is a lawyer, and the other former exchange students came to the U.S. through the Youth for Understanding program, which, according to its website, advances intercultural understanding, mutual respect and social responsibility through educational exchanges for youths, families and communities. The global YFU network has partners in more than 50 countries.

Cabrera presented Royal Oak High Principal Mike Giromini with a crystal plaque engraved with words that read in part, “Our gratitude for helping our dream become a reality.” It was from the “Vintage Magical Tour Argentina YFU exchange students 1971.”

Asked what it meant for the school to have the group visit 44 years after their first visit to schools in Michigan and Ohio, Giromini talked about the value of hearing from them.

“It’s a really remarkable experience for us to connect with them, and to hear the impact of their experience on their lives and the influence they had on the schools they’ve visited,” said Giromini. “It’s really wonderful for our kids to see a big world made smaller.”

Cabrera said he had lasting, fond memories of his host family, but would rather forget his first experience with Michigan’s wintertime snow and freezing temperatures.

“When I left Argentina back then, the temperature was around 113 degrees, and I arrived here and snow was up to my waist, and no, I was not dressed for that kind of weather,” he said.

Cabrera studied English in college in Argentina, and retired from the banking world after more than 20 years.

Last week, the group met with Detroit City Councilwoman Raquel Castañeda-López, returned to a school in Ohio where exchange student Fabio Milner attended and visited other schools in Michigan.

The group will head to Washington, D.C., for an alumni celebration Thursday and spend a few days there before heading home to Argentina.

Milner, who returned to the U.S. in 1977, now lives in Phoenix and is a professor at Arizona State University. He urged students in the Spanish class at Royal Oak High to consider studying abroad.

“I want to encourage you to think about becoming an exchange student,” he told the class. “You could go for three months, six months or a year. Just go ahead and go.”

Albert Carter, 16, a junior at Royal Oak High, described meeting the exchange students as “a really amazing experience.”

“It’s like getting a more global view of the world, and I would love to travel to Argentina one day,” he said.

SLewis@detroitnews.com

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