AFS Intercultural Programs
 |
|
| Founded | 1915 |
|---|---|
| Focus | Intercultural learning |
| Location | |
|
Area served
|
Global |
| Method | International exchange programs |
| Website | http://www.afs.org, http://www.afsusa.org, country websites |
AFS Intercultural Programs (or AFS, originally the American Field Service) is an international youth exchange organization. Worldwide, AFS is a group of over 50 independent, not-for-profit organizations called partners, each with its own network of volunteers, professionally staffed office(s), volunteer board of directors and website. In 2007, almost 13,000 participants traveled abroad on AFS cultural exchanges between 65 countries, as supported by 44,000 active volunteers. The U.S.-based partner, AFS-USA, sends more than 1,100 U.S. students abroad and places international students with more than 2,300 U.S. families each year. More than 424,000 people have gone abroad with AFS and over 100,000 former AFS students live in the U.S.
When war broke out in 1914, the American Colony of Paris organized an "ambulance"—the French term for a temporary military hospital—just as it had done in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when the "American Ambulance" had been under tents set up near the Paris home of its founder, the celebrated Paris-American dentist, Dr. Thomas W. Evans. The "American Ambulance" of 1914 took over the premises of the unfinished Lycée Pasteur in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine—and was run by the nearby American Hospital of Paris.
The volunteer drivers of 1914 found themselves behind the wheels of motorized, not horse-driven, vehicles: Model-Ts, purchased from the nearby Ford plant in Levallois-Perret.
In the fall of 1914, when the war front moved away from Paris, the American Ambulance set up an outpost in Juilly and sent out detached units of volunteer drivers to serve informally with the British and Belgian armies in the north. In early 1915, one of those drivers, A. Piatt Andrew, was appointed “Inspector of Ambulances” by Robert Bacon, head of the American Ambulance and one of Andrew's colleagues from the Taft Administration.
The newly appointed inspector toured the ambulance sections of Northern France and learned that the American volunteers were bored with so-called "jitney work," transporting wounded soldiers from railheads to hospitals far back from the front lines. French army policy prohibited foreign nationals from traveling into battle zones.
In March 1915, Andrew met with Captain Aime Doumenc, head of the French Army Automobile Service and pleaded his case for the American volunteers. They desired above all, he said, "to pick up the wounded from the front lines…, to look danger squarely in the face; in a word, to mingle with the soldiers of France and to share their fate!" Doumenc agreed to give Andrew a trial. The success of Section Z was immediate and overwhelming, and by April 15, 1915, the French created American Ambulance Field Service operating under French Army command.
...
Wikipedia