This week, we welcome our new reporter, Allyce Andrew, to the Valley Record. She is a freelance photographer, and graduated in 2013 with a journalism degree from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and she has already begun my re-education.

The first thing I had to learn when I met her was how to pronounce her name — it’s “Ah-leess” not “Al-iss” — and the second thing, which I’m still working on, was to choose my words carefully. For instance, that big divided highway cutting across the bottom of the Valley, is, to me, a “freeway,” or, when I go back to Minnesota, an “interstate.”

It’s not just a regional thing either, since Allyce has been living in Seattle for more than a year. There’s also newspaper jargon that doesn’t translate; the front page of the newspaper is “outside,” and those selected quotes you sometimes see highlighted in a different font (or typeface) and size in the paper are either “drop quotes” or “pull quotes.”

With the arrivals of two groups of exchange students in January — Gangjin students visited for most of January, and Chaclacayo students, here now, will stay through February 22 — I got another reminder about communication.

Although many of the students knew English, they often don’t know American expressions, which are ever-present and sometimes subtle. And I apparently use a lot of them, or used to.

Years ago, I worked with a Filipino man anxious to learn all of the nuances of certain American expressions. It was exhausting but it showed me that in our multicultural world, we still used an insider’s language, both to include people, and to exclude them.

Snoqualmie Mayor Matt Larson, in his welcome to the Chaclacayo students, talked about how the sister cities program was formed, by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, in an effort to spread culture and understanding in a world still recovering from two global wars.

Larson charged the students and their hosts with that work, also urging them to be open minded, “push through” the days when everything seems weird and just have fun during their stay.

It’s a big responsibility to settle on the group of teens, even ones who seem more mature and self-possessed than the average 14-to-16 year-olds, so I think we should all help them out.

Our Valley has its share of challenges, as you see when you read the letters to the editor. The problem of homelessness is not going to solve itself, nor do our issues with drug abuse, school crowding, traffic backups, or empty storefronts have simple solutions.

No one person can solve the world’s, or even the Valley’s, problems, but no one person should have to try.