Why Host? "Per Amore"

This month, we’re sharing a story from a host family in California whose introduction to AFS began back in the 1970s.

Matt Lewis met a young AFSer from Belgium named Geert back in 1973, sparking a lifelong friendship and a major ripple effect. From road trips in high school to Matt acting as a casual crew member on tour with Geert’s band in the South of France years later, this one connection changed everything. Decades after that initial meeting, it inspired Matt and his wife, Wendy, to open up their own doors as AFS host parents and volunteers in Southern California.

In this episode, we share Matt’s memories of Geert and the backstory that inspired their family to host, before jumping into the present day to hear from both Matt and Wendy about their own hosting adventures with their students from Germany and Italy. As you'll hear, hosting gave them a brand-new family on the other side of the planet - and connections that have taught them so much.

Meet the Guests:

• Matt Lewis, Greater Los Angeles Area Team
• Wendy Fletcher, Greater Los Angeles Area Team

In this episode, we discuss:

• Matt’s introduction to AFS via Belgian exchange student Geert in the 1970s.
• Matt’s continued relationship with Geert, including briefly joining him on tour in France with his ska band.
• Matt and Wendy's experiences welcoming Leo from Germany, and why they decided to host Fede from Italy right as the world was finding its footing during the pandemic. (Hint: it’s in the episode title)
• Their travels back to Europe - especially to a massive wedding in Italy- and the entirely new dimension that hosting adds to international travel.

More info:

• Matt’s blog for AFS-USA, “Geert’s Legacy: How One AFS Exchange Changed My Life Forever.”
• Learn more about hosting a student at afsusa.org/host.

More from AFS-USA: 🏠Host a Student | ✈️Study Abroad | 🤝Volunteer | 🏫For Educators | 📧Contact the Show | 🎧Collections

Transcript

Kate
Hello and welcome to The AFS Exchange. I'm Kate Mulvihill. On this podcast, we share real stories from the AFS community. We're here to explore how exchange programs change lives, one conversation at a time.

[70s Music]

Kate
Let’s pretend you’re just a normal American teenager in the 1970s. There’s bell bottoms, there’s tie dye. You have a pet rock. It’s groovy. You’re dating this girl, and her family is hosting an exchange student from Belgium. You naturally see him around, you become friends. Sure. Who would’ve thought that a few years later you’d end up being a crew member on tour with his band in the South of France? And then forty years after that, you’d be opening the doors to your own home to an exchange student?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to Matt Lewis. He met a young guy from Belgium named Geert back in 1973, and that friendship started a ripple effect. It eventually inspired Matt and his wife Wendy to host and volunteer with AFS in Southern California.

For the first part of the episode, I’m going to share Matt’s story about Geert, because it’s really the impetus for why they decided to host. Then, we’ll jump to the present day to hear from both Matt and Wendy about their own hosting experiences with their students from Germany and Italy.

Now, they were both already pretty well-traveled. But as you’ll hear, hosting gave them something that travel alone just couldn’t do. They’re no longer just visiting a place when they go to Europe. They’re visiting family.

Kate
Today, we’re sitting down with host parents…

Wendy F.   
My name is Wendy,

Matt L. 
And my name is Matt.

Kate
But to understand why they opened their home to students from Germany and Italy, we actually have to go back in time about five decades…

Matt   
So I'm in high school. I'm going to be a senior. My high school girlfriend had an AFS brother named Geert from Belgium, and Geert arrived and came off the plane, basically, and hit the ground running, ran with our pack of friends and became my brother. Geert and I formed a bond that went for the rest of his life. We lost him a few years ago, but the rest of his life.
That kind of bond is what we wanted for our sons when they got into high school, so they would have a brother and then a family as well, because I got to know Geert's family in Belgium, outside of Brussels, and his sister and her daughters are still friends of ours and still come to visit.

Kate   
When you and your high school friends would be running around California with Geert, what sorts of things would you do together as teenagers?

Matt   
Sure. So again, this is 1973 74 so a long time ago, but basically he fit in because he just had a warped sense of humor. He was really fast and really clever, and he was willing to do it. So we a lot of times hiking in the local mountains, Santa Gabriel Mountains, Altadena is right up against the mountains, so canyons, water slides, a lot of just goofing around. Things like going to the Renaissance Fair, you know, sort of weird, nerdy stuff. But he also played on our high school soccer team, which, as you can imagine, was the early days of soccer in high school. So he was a welcome addition, along with a couple of other exchange students as well. Again, not many folks played soccer back then, and so he became a very valued member of our soccer team.

Kate   
And as you've said, your relationship continued for decades after that. What did that look like?

Matt   
So it was back in the days where you wrote letters, writing those blue air mail letters back and forth, until I went and spent, basically, it was a gap year between undergraduate and graduate school. I spent a year in England working at a university, and Geert was going to be in London, and so, hey, he came down and stayed with me in Brighton, and we got to goof around in England.

[Ska music]

And then I spent two weeks with him over the summer, and Geert was leading a ska punk band which was very popular at the time, getting a lot of airplay. And so I got to be a roadie and go to his gigs and carry stuff. And also I made an appearance on a Belgian after school kids show when the band was the invited band, and played two tunes. And I got to dance on stage with The Employees. That was the name of his band. And just had an amazing summer ripping around and then south of France with the band. And it was just a magic time.

Kate
That’s great. And you know, who would have expected that right when your then high school girlfriend's family decided to host an exchange student that years later, you would be a roadie with a Belgian band in the south of France? You really can't make this stuff up.

Matt   
So that was followed then by him coming and visiting me in Los Angeles several times across the next few years. And he had ups and downs in his life, and supported him all along the way. And he always knew that he always had a key to my house, because he knew that he always had a place. My home was his home. I get a little choked up again because we lost him to an aneurysm, actually, a few years back, so still in our hearts that very strange guy.

Kate
It’s so clear that Geert made a huge impact on Matt's life. And looking back, Matt realized that the best way to honor Geert’s memory, and keep that whole 'my home is your home' philosophy alive- was just to pay it forward. Fortunately, his wife Wendy was already on board.

Wendy   
When I was a high school student, I just had a group of friends that were connected with various international students. And it was always something that I was looking forward to as a grown up, is bringing in foreign exchange student into my own family.

Matt   
Something that we have mutually agreed would be really good for our family in the future. So when our boys got old enough we wanted them to have an AFS sibling. So that's sort of the roots to how we got back involved in the organization after high school.

Matt
So you wanna talk about Leo, and getting Leo?

Wendy   
Yeah, we had decided that we wanted to bring in foreign exchange student for our sons to have a brother, and we went through an elaborate spreadsheet deciding, like older, younger, where in the world, what kind of attributes? And we ended up choosing Leo from Germany, and he was 15 at the time. And Matt, you want to talk about his arrival?

Matt
We pick him up at the airport. We got the big signs. We take pictures, we bring them home. We know he's been traveling, you know, from Stuttgart, and he is super jet lagged. He is super excited to be here. He's 15, and the boys are super excited. They've got their little, their little German brother now. And that night, they were going to go to the local county fair and do all the things that teenagers do at county fairs. And Leo's like, I'm going! He hit the ground running and just ran with the pack. And his English was, like Geert's, amazing English. Like amazing English.
He just continued throughout. He made good friends in high school, he played American football, actually, and made friends on the football team, and had a fantastic year as the little brother, as the sophomore with his two senior, identical twin senior brothers.

Kate   
Did anything surprise you?

Wendy   
I think his maturity, that he came here and he was just so outgoing and so mature and supportive and helpful, and he fit right in it. It was just seamless.

Matt   
And this is a classic Leo story, so he's been here now, in our house, you know, for about, maybe, I don't know, three, two or three weeks, we're going like, we have the liaison, and they're meeting. All the meetings are going. He seems to be doing well, but I'm, I'm up in the morning and talking to Wendy. And, you know, how do you think it's going like, he seems happy, and we actually hear from his back. Bathroom was actually adjacent to the kitchen, and through the bathroom door, we hear Christmas carols being sung in English, with the shower going like Leo singing!

Wendy
I think he’s okay!

Matt
I think he's doing okay. And this was probably, you know, this is in October or something, but for whatever reason, he was seeing Christmas carols in the shower. Happy boy, we're like, Okay, I think we're good here.

Kate   
We think he'll stay till Christmas, yep, at least till Christmas.

Matt   
Such an optimistic kid and such an outgoing, good hearted boy, really.
And again, Leo was just out visiting with his girlfriend last summer. I mean, we’re still very closely wed with Leo and his family. His older brother and his father were both AFS students as well to America. So they have a long tradition of sending their family members with AFS to the States.

Kate
A couple of years later, when the world looked a whole lot different, Wendy and Matt added another member to their family.

Kate   
And you know, you talked about wanting to host a student, and you hosted Leo. And then, you hosted Fede right after, well, after, after the height of the pandemic. How did that come about? Why? Why then specifically?

Wendy   
I mean, there was no lack of things to do. And, you know, people to care about in our lives. But an email came through from the president of AFS, saying that there were students that needed to be placed.

Matt   
It was 2021 and school systems weren't taking kids.

Wendy   
Yeah, and being a school teacher, I thought about how, if some of these kids don't get placed, and they probably couldn't get placed the prior year, that they're never going to be able to to fulfill their goals, that they if they wanted to go do an exchange program.

Matt   
and they said, You'll age out. There was a plea from look, we got all these kids that we can't place and they will age out they cannot. This is the last chance they're going to have.
And we got this email separately, right? She gets “ding” on her phone, “bing” on my phone.

Wendy   
So I said, Hey, Matt, did you get the email that was asking, you know, host families if they wanted to take on a student.

Matt   
Just note, our boys are sophomores in college, and we've had two years of basically having them come home for Christmas and summers, but we're pretty happy being empty nesters at the time. And so she says…

Wendy
I asked if you got the email.

Matt
And I said, Oh, yeah, isn't that a bummer that these kids aren't getting placed? And she said…

Wendy   
We should take one. We should take one, but if we take one, I want a girl.

Matt   
This would never have occurred to me, and it was so on brand for Wendy to say we should take one. There's a need here, and we should take one. And I'm like, Okay, we've never had a daughter. Let's do this. So we built spreadsheets with attributes, and wanted somebody that was also in Europe, because we could then go visit Leo and maybe visit this new daughter.

And found this pretty amazing, what I what I still refer to as my amazing Italian daughter, Feda, we found fed on the list, and she had been, she's really interesting and clearly really a good student, but she also had been a national champion field hockey player three different points in Italy during growing up as a youth, and Wendy was a professional athlete like, that's a good sign that she's sporty, right? She's tough and she's sporty, and there's a bunch of attributes on her spreadsheet that sort of fit in. So we say to AFS, you know, hey, we found one. We'd like to take Fede.

Three days later, we're having the Zoom call with her family to meet the family and to meet Fede for the first time. So we're sitting at our our peninsula, and we've got the laptop out, and we're really eager and and boop. Up comes the image from Italy. And we, oh, there's Fede. Hey, Fede. How's it going? Oh, that's her dad, Sabatino, and that's her mom, Rosella, and who are all those other people, it would turn out it was Antonio, her uncle and Maria, her aunt and her grandmother and grandfather and sister, and they're at this long table right, like, hi everybody. So they say, Everybody waves, and Fede is really the only one that speaks fluent English. So so we wave and say, Hi. How's it going?

And her dad turns to Fede and goes, in Italian, (fake Italian voice), Fede looks back at us and says, “My dad wants to know why you're doing this.” So hey, I've done a lot of public speaking. I'm a scientist by training, so I immediately have the three, three level answer, global community, personal answer, and I'm about to start. And Wendy, Wendy yells out…

Wendy
For love!

Matt
For love. Like, what? Yeah, what she said, and I get choked up because you can see Fede turn, you know, “per amore” to the family, and her dad just melted back. Like, why would we do this? There's no money involved. There's no quid pro quo. You're doing it per amore. And the family just leaned back and game on. I’m choked up. About 10 days later, she got off the plane at LAX and, like, it would happen really fast.

Wendy   
It was late August, and the sending date was two weeks later, or nine days later, or something.

Matt   
It was really fast. So we got a daughter, our first daughter ever. And it was amazing, amazing.

Kate   
Wow, wow. And as you mentioned, a lot of these kids in 2021, they were going to age out. And the gift that you gave to her and her family? I mean, that's something that if you two didn't do it, I mean, you guys could have been the last family to take a student that year.

Wendy   
And she gave us a beautiful gift as well.

Matt   
We got, we got an amazing Italian daughter, right?

Kate
Wendy and Matt were so excited to welcome Fede into their home, and Fede was thrilled to finally make it to the U.S. Now, some of the early challenges she faced were  things we hear about all the time from exchange students- like the struggle of making friends, or just the pure exhaustion of processing English all day. But on top of all that, she was doing it in the fall of 2021, right when everyone was trying to find their footing again after a completely backwards year and a half. But Fede figured it out.

Wendy
When she came in, it was still masked. So it was not an easy transition for her to come in during a senior year where most people already have their friendships, and she's speaking a foreign… Well, she speaks English, but it wasn't so easy for her to sit in a classroom and attend to lectures while taking notes and then having the bandwidth to also start fostering relationships with her classmates. So that was a little bit difficult for her, especially at the beginning, until she found a team, which ended up being the rugby team.

Matt   
There was a girls rugby team at her high school. Who knew?

Wendy   
There happened to be really strong sports programs at the high school she was at. So she wanted to try volleyball, but there was no opening for her to even try out. For soccer, not even a chance. So these are kids that have grown up training for these sports, and it just wasn't an option.
But the rugby program was open arms and welcoming of anybody. So it wasn't that she wanted to be a rugby player, but she made these amazing connections with the players through the rugby team. Both the boys team and the girls team, and they were just so wonderful.

Matt   
That team opened its arms up to her. And included South Pacific Islanders and some Hispanic kids and some African American kids. And this is a school where there aren't that many African American kids. So these became her peeps, right? The team became her peeps. And we would have these groups of girls singing karaoke and dancing on Friday nights and hanging out here, and it was just again, someone never had a daughter. It was so beautiful to have that in our home, and have all of that beautiful energy in our home.
She was so embraced by these communities and just brought into them and had an experience that not many American kids at that high school get to have.
And to have those kids and meet their families and host potlucks at our house was just awesome. Really awesome. A lot of singing and dancing.

Kate 
I mean, just getting you're getting involved in corners of your community that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten in touch with. Also, because your sons had left home, right? And so really, that's great.

Kate
Fede’s program ended in June of 2022, and she returned to Italy- but not before choosing two official theme songs for her AFS year. During her drives to and from school with Wendy and Matt, two songs were in heavy rotation. First, Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA,” which famously starts with, “Hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and my cardigan.” Fede flew into LAX. And second, Taylor Swift’s song “22,” since most of her exchange took place in 2022. In fact, Matt actually identifies as a Swiftie now, thanks to Fede’s influence.

But June 2022 wasn’t the end of her connection to Matt and Wendy. Just a few years later, the three of them were able to reconnect face-to-face- this time in Fede’s home in the northern part of Italy.

Matt
And so we finally get to Reggio Emilia which is the local train station, and we come off the train, and there they are, down that the train platform. And Fede and Wendy run up and hug, and Sabatino walks up to me, and we know we've seen each other a bunch now around calls, and he gave me the longest man hug I have ever had. Rocking me back and forth and like he really cared that we took care of his eldest daughter, right? His first daughter.

And then, all those people in that first zoom call, that was like midnight their time, because that's when the restaurant closed, and they all work in the restaurant, and it's the local fine dining seafood restaurant in the town. And he's also a sommelier. Sabatino is a sommelier. So they basically tried to kill us with food and wine, like really good food and wine, and more than more, like there was always more courses, somehow. Oh, you want to try Nonna’s gnocchi? You got to try.

Wendy
Like, never-ending.

Matt
Such a beautiful experience.

Kate
A few years later, they were invited to Fede’s cousin’s wedding. It turned out to be a real opportunity to experience Italian culture- not as tourists, but as participants.

Matt
So last June, we went to the wedding. Nobody speaks English, but hey, doesn't matter.

Wendy   
They involved us in every part. It was really beautiful, the experience really beautiful, the serenade all the way through, yes, really amazing and touching. And we just, we were in the family picture with fifty Italians. It was so beautiful and so sweet.

Matt   
Because we're family, remarkable, yeah, and I told Leo, and I told Fede, you know, look, this is not like we're just going to wave goodbye. This is your family, your art. You're my amazing German boy and my amazing Italian daughter. And I told them both that if they get married, I am going to come dance at their wedding.
And for me, the dance at the wedding is actually a threat, because I do not dance well, but I'm still going to dance at that wedding, when they ever get married.

Kate
As I keep saying,  the thing about hosting- it can transform you from a tourist into a member of the family. And this perspective is extra meaningful when you consider that Matt and Wendy were already pretty seasoned travelers long before they ever became AFS host parents. And I’m not just talking about Matt’s stint as a roadie in Geert’s band.

Wendy
I was playing professional beach volleyball, and I traveled around the world for beach volleyball. And then I was on an indoor team in Switzerland, and when I was on that team, we were part of the European Cup, and we traveled around Europe for that as well.

Matt
I worked for a job as a policy analyst/researcher for a nonprofit, called the RAND Corporation, rand.org. So I did a lot of international traveling. I'm a Million Miler guy with United Airlines, so I've traveled a lot, and got to go to a lot of interesting places around the world as part of that job as well.

Kate
But even with all those pro sports tours and a million airline miles, yeah, they had seen a lot of the world—but they still had so much more they could learn. Including the behind-the-scenes of food production in Italy.

Wendy
The Italians are extremely prideful people, and that's something that you learn, how much they control what items they can put “Product of Italy” on, versus here in the United States, we don't seem to be as concerned about every aspect of where our food comes from.

Matt   
We got a tour of one of his one of their friends Parmesan factories, and the amount of the grass has to be a certain kind of grass, and the cows have to be a certain kind of cow, and the milk then comes and has to be checked like everything is really carefully regulated so that you can set you get the stamp that says Reggiano Parmigiano. They're super serious about it. And again, having Sabatino, who is a restauranteur and a person that's really active in the Italian food community, we got to see that really close up.

I guess one of the other things is us being able to go and visit Leo's family and meet Leo's family’s friends and visit Fede’s family and meet all of her relatives and friends. They're really curious about America, right? They don't get to hang out with Americans very often, like ever. And so we're this sort of curious thing, which, with Fede translating, they could ask questions about and learn about the states, and I really view that as going back to some of the core tenants of AFS, right. AFS was started by these volunteers that drove ambulances in World War One and World War Two. The horror and the carnage that those men witnessed, basically are the foundations of what AFS is all about, which is building relationships, understanding each other, having that never happen again. Because we want to understand each other on a first person basis. And that's the core of AFS.
And so when we're over there, we're meeting these people and explaining it's like we're doing it, we're actually building those bonds. It's really when you make it personal, when you when people know that you're, hey, that's an American. They're not just the classic, you know, horrible American.

Wendy
Hah, “classic horrible.”

Matt
They're like, they seem to be caring. There's a lot of negative aspects of people's view of Americans around the world. And so a few people at a time, we can go, actually out and try to build this understanding. What do they say? Tear down the walls and build bridges, right? We got to go do some of that in person, on the ground in our various travels, especially to our families in Germany and in Italy.

Kate   
Absolutely. And you know, even the folks who you never meet in Germany and Italy. But just when Fede and Leo went back to Europe, right, and they were talking about their experiences in the US, even if they're just talking about it to their classmates or their friends or their cousin’s roommate’s brother, whatever, just, hey, I had this experience in the US. I lived with this great family, I went to school, I did all these things. And you know what? If that will change somebody's opinion about the United States, just 1% that's amazing.

Matt    
Because that social network is where you're going to get those second order effects and third order effects. Like, hey, Fede went and spent a school year in the States, and she really had a good time, and she really liked it, and liked the Americans, and wants to go back, and hosted them here. Like, there's second and third order effects of this kind of relationship building that you're right. It keeps expanding with social networks.

Kate
Finally, I asked Wendy and Matt if there was anything else they wanted to share about their experiences with AFS.

Matt   
Well, part of the pitch is that when everything works, you get this lifelong gift of another member of your family and then another family around the world. And again, it's not for tomorrow, it's forever.

Wendy   
It doesn’t end after 10 months, the relationship keeps going. And I'm I'm always trying to get people to to host, and I want them to know, like it is the most amazing thing you can do, and you don't have to change diapers, you know, you get them when they're fully formed and and it's, you know, it enhances your family. It's, I mean, we had two of our own boys, but now we've got a much bigger family unit with Leo and his family and Federica and her family. And it's priceless.

Matt   
Yeah, and the support that AFS provides you as a hosting family, and the amount of, again, rigor in the process to try to make sure that you get the right kids and the right hosting families, I think, really, really, really heightens the probability that everything's going to work out. And so we feel blessed. We know everything doesn't always work out for every family, but we just feel really blessed that we had the the two kids that we got, and we we again, we attribute that to the hard work on the Italian side and the German side of making sure that they get good candidates, that they're going to thrive once they get here, and then on the American side, that they do a really careful filtering of the hosting families to make sure that people are into it for the right reasons. And we've done a bunch of hosting family interviews as well, where you go to the house to meet the person and the family in their home, so you can see and ask questions and get everybody's input there.
There's a lot of time and energy that gets put into trying to get high-quality, highly-filtered folks that it's going to succeed for. That everyone's going to come out with a positive experience.       

Kate
And bringing it back to the beginning. 50 years ago some AFS volunteer in Southern California interviewed the family that ended up hosting Geert. Now, decades later, Matt and Wendy have the same role- interviewing potential host families. And they know what to look for, as they themselves have see firsthand what it looks like when a host student / host family relationship works so well. If you are interested in hosting a potential future rockstar from Belgium- or any other sort of teenager- head to afsusa.org/host.

Thank you to Matt Lewis and Wendy Fletcher for speaking with me for this episode. I actually first heard about their family because Matt wrote an article for AFS-USA’s blog! We covered a lot of ground in this interview, and I couldn’t include it all in the episode. You can learn more- and see some photos- by checking out the blog. The link is in the show notes.

Geert’s full name is Geert Vanroelen, and he was with the ska band The Employees. The band has been inactive since 1983 but their music is on Apple Music and Spotify!
Also, I did want to mention that ska music I have been using in this episode is not from The Employees. It is from pixabay.com, which is where I get most of the music for this show.

[Ska music]

Kate
Thank you for listening to The AFS Exchange! I’m Kate Mulvihill. Let us know what you thought of this episode by sending a message to podcast@afsusa.org. You can also rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe there as well so you don’t miss any episodes in this 6th season.

This podcast was created by Kate Mulvihill. Social media by Julie Ball and Nina Gaulin.