AFS Experience Has Long-Lasting Rewards

By Nancy K. Crevier

Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte Bouts lived with Shirley Smith and her family on The Boulevard in Newtown. Visiting this week from Rotterdam, Holland, with her 11-year-old son, Lars, Ms Bouts said it is “like coming home,” even though her former host “mother” now lives in Woodbury.

It has been 13 years since Ms Bouts has been in the United States, but this makes her fifth visit back since she was a 17-year-old AFS (formerly American Field Service) student at Newtown High School. One of those visits was as a postcollege graduate when she lived in Boston for a year, but the main draw back to America, said Ms Bouts, is the very special relationship she has with Shirley Smith and her children.

Originally housed with a family in Canaan when she arrived in Connecticut in 1980, Ms Bouts found that the area was too isolated for her, being used to the city bustle of Rotterdam. She asked to speak to the area AFS representative for northwestern Connecticut, who at the time was Shirley Smith. Ms Smith’s job was to assist AFS students in adjusting to their US homes away from home and to resettle students in situations that were not working out. But when she met Charlotte Bouts, “We hit it off from the start,” recalled Ms Smith. “So I called the New York AFS office and asked, ‘Can I keep her?’ I just loved her,” she said.

The AFS program enlightened Ms Smith and her family to the beauty in the differences of people around the world, she said, instead of noting the negatives about others. “As you live with someone, you see differences in cultures and lifestyles, but I always kept in mind the AFS adage, ‘There is no right or wrong; only different,’” Ms Smith said.

Even though Newtown was still a far cry from city life, there was a comfortable feel to the town for the young Netherlander. “Shirley’s family felt very accepting to me, and they lived in the center of Newtown, so I could walk places and do things that I couldn’t do at my hosts’ in Canaan,” Ms Bouts said of her AFS experience. “It was so great that Shirley and her family opened her home and took me in for all that time. It’s a big responsibility.”

Ms Smith’s three older children, Brooke, Gretchen, and Nathaniel, were on their own life adventures — armed services, college, and a Rotary trip in the Philippines — during Charlotte Bouts’ AFS visit, and Evan Smith was a freshman in high school. That left Ms Bouts to find her own way through the months of February to June 1981, and gave her the opportunity to bond with Ms Smith.

It is a bond that has served both of them well over the past years. “I have always stayed in contact with the Smith family,” said Ms Bouts, who is now the mother of 17-year-old Laura, 16-year-old Sophie, and 11-year-old Lars. Neither of her older children have taken part in the AFS program, but Ms Bouts thinks that it may be that with the Internet in particular, kids today are more worldly and more mature, and not needing the same world exposure she sought as a teenager. But her girls have had the opportunity to experience the Smith hospitality.

“During the last 28 years we have visited each other several times,” said Ms Bouts. Last summer Ms Smith provided the “base camp” for Ms Bouts’ daughters on a visit to the United States. They hung out with the Smith family, visited friends in New Hampshire, and ventured into New York City on their own. “They had such a good time and both want to have an apartment in New York City now some day,” Ms Bouts laughed.

This year, with Lars visiting America for the first time, Ms Bouts looked into activities he could do in the area while visiting, beyond the planned trips to New York City and Washington, D.C. “He likes to golf, so I e-mailed some golf clubs here and Rock Ridge Country Club invited him to join some young people at their club and golf on Monday. He had a great time and they took such good care of him. It was a good way for him to spend some time with some children his age for a little while and be on his own,” said Ms Bouts. Lars agreed that the golf trip had been a fun way to spend one of his first days in this country, even though a sudden downpour cut short the afternoon.

Other short-term AFS students had come and gone before, said Ms Smith, but “Charlotte is Miss Communicator,” and has kept the relationship on an even keel over the years. “It is always so good to see her and know how her life is,” Ms Smith said.

The women keep in touch mainly through phone calls, and more recently through e-mails. “But we can not talk to each other for six months and then when we do talk it’s like it was yesterday,” Ms Bouts said. “And the longer I am here, the more intimate our talks become. It is wonderful to just visit Shirley’s family and friends. It really is like home.”

While there has been little change in the loving relationship she shares with the Smiths, Ms Bouts was wondering about the physical changes to the area in which she spent so many months long ago. It had been 13 years since her last visit to Connecticut, so she was happy to see this past week that many familiar landmarks in Newtown still existed, like the Ice Cream Shop, Edmond Town Hall Theater, the Smoke Shop, and the flagpole in the center of Main Street. “It was good to see the house on Boulevard, too. We drove by the high school and it is much bigger now than when I was living in Newtown,” said Ms Bouts. What really caught her off guard was the amount of new building in Newtown, particularly along Church Hill Road.

“All of the new buildings were quite a surprise to Charlotte,” said Ms Smith.

Even though her AFS experience happened years ago, Ms Bouts continues to praise the program. “Look what AFS gave me, and what a rich feeling it has given me. I would recommend all children, one way or another, to have a foreign experience of some sort,” Ms Bouts stressed. “Through long-term international exchanges and relationships something more important happens. When there is something on the news, [people who have visited a foreign country] have a connection. When the towers went down on 9/11 in New York City, I called Shirley, because I could really feel the connection. The children in our school in Netherlands prayed for the Americans,” she said.

Living in a different country changes a person, Ms Bouts said, pointing out that the special love she has for her American family has been a benefit to her own children, now, as well.

“I will always have your country in my heart because of the people that I have had the privilege to come into my life,” she said. “These kind of people are, for me, the real ambassadors of your country, that leave a lifelong, wonderful impression.”