Lilka Areton spent two years in the Peace Corps in Peru, then went to graduate school at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City and got a teaching job in Spanish Harlem - volunteering at the International Center.
Exchanging opportunities
By Beth Ashley, IJ senior feature writer
AS A YOUNG WOMAN, Lilka Areton was a great believer in the power of cross-cultural exchange to enhance people's lives.
That's why, in 1968, she became a volunteer at the International Center in New York City. There, the New Jersey resident met New York University student Tom Areton, who had recently arrived from Communist Czechoslovakia.
That's why, in 1980, Tom and Lilka Areton founded Cultural Homestay International, a student-exchange program that has since brought more than 250,000 foreign students to American shores.
Cultural Homestay International (CHI), which operates out of two adjoining houses on Butterfield Road in San Anselmo, is one of the largest exchange programs in the world - equal in size to the better-known American Field Service.
For Tom Areton, 57, a jovial bear of a man with a trace of Czech accent, CHI is an old dream come true.
"When I was a young man in Czechoslovakia, I would have loved to come here on a program like this," he says.
As an adult, Tom has traveled extensively, supervising the overseas end of several CHI programs, and networking at Federation of International Youth Organizations meetings in China, Portugal and elsewhere. This fall he and Lilka will be in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Begun to bring Japanese students to the United States for short summer stays, CHI now operates in 42 countries, and has a variety of programs serving young people from high school through post-college ages.
They include:
- Homestay programs in this country in which foreign students come to this country for two weeks or longer during summer months.
- Academic homestay programs in which students attend American high schools for as long as one year.
- Six-to-18-month internship programs in which graduate students from abroad are brought to the United States to work as interns in companies in the fields of their choice.
- A summer work and travel program for college students from abroad, who work in national parks, hotels and amusement parks, where summer jobs always abound. "Six Flags amusement park always wants hundreds," Lilka says.
"The students love to come here," Tom says. "They work hard, they learn English, and at the end of the summer they have a chance to travel."
In the 1990s, CHI took American students to such far-off destinations as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus in the old Soviet Union, and also brought Russian students here; CHI also ran an exchange with Vietnam. Both programs were exciting and rewarding while they lasted, Tom Areton says, but neither survived. "The paperwork on the Russia program was horrendous. And Moscow became a dangerous place to be."
Tom Harriman, a lawyer who lives in Sebastopol, helped set up the Vietnam exchange, traveling in 1995 to a high school for gifted students who later came to the United States. He has since taught six groups for CHI, and hosted interns from France and Spain. "I've dealt with a number of other (exchange) groups, and am impressed by CHI and the quality of what they do. They have a good, sensitive staff that knows how to hold the hands of both students and host families."
For a period, CHI dispatched groups of American students to teach conversational English to high school and college students in China.
Many CHI programs - e.g., the summer homestay, the academic year homestay - not only receive students here but send American students abroad as well.
The Aretons encourage participants to keep the cross-cultural contacts alive. They facilitate post-exchange visits between host families and students and they reward facilitators with trips to host countries they serve.
Jan King of Sebastopol puts great stock in the host family experience. She and her husband have hosted students on 50 occasions over 14 years, for a weekend or four months. The students have come from Spain, Brazil, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere. "It's been a wonderful experience," King says. "It puts a face and personality on a country. 'Oh, Brazil - where Gustavo lives.'"
King praises CHI. "They're terrific, so supportive," she says. "If any issues come up, there is always someone I can call, who will handle it on the phone or in person. They are right there, johnny on the spot ... a lot of fine people in the field."
Though now middle-aged (she is 64), the Aretons are at the top of their game and powered by youthful idealism.
Lilka Areton got her first taste of travel as a young woman. Her father thought she'd never go to college, so he sent her to Europe. Lilka spent her 20th birthday in Moscow.
Back home, "I decided that the thing that really changes life is going to other countries and experiencing the culture," she says. "I wanted to go everywhere, learn all the languages."
She enrolled at UC Berkeley, studying history French, German and Spanish. She spent two years in the Peace Corps in Peru, then went to graduate school at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City and got a teaching job in Spanish Harlem - volunteering at the International Center.
Tom Areton went to the center to make friends.
A native of Bratislava, Tom says he had known since the age of 13 or 14 that "I had been born in Czechoslovakia by cosmic error. I was really an American - and I knew that someday I would go there."
In his youth, Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule and residents received scant information about the U.S. Weekly articles in the Czech Pravda satirized America, but some of the stories had a double edge.
"I remember one story," Tom recalls. "Mrs. Smith's cat was stuck in a tree, and she called the fire department to get it down. That cat, it turned out, was wearing a diamond collar. Well, from reading that article we were supposed to think how decadent Americans are - a cat with a diamond collar! But we were amazed. Even a person named Smith can afford a diamond collar for her cat. She calls the fire department and the fire department actually comes. What a wonderful country!"
In the confusion of the Prague spring in 1968 (the unsuccessful revolt against Russian occupiers), Areton got a visa for a two-week trip to Paris.
He parlayed that visa into a trip to America, where he was accepted to film school at NYU. ("Martin Scorcese was my directing professor," Tom says.)
A year after they met, Lilka and Tom were married and moved to California, where her mother, Billie Woodward, was a teacher at Santa Margarita School.
Lilka began running a play school for kids ages 1 to 3 (they had three children of their own). Tom went to law school in San Francisco and studied economics at Golden Gate University, working at Safeway and "all kinds of odd jobs."
In 1976, Lilka - bored teaching play school - got a job with Interstudy, a for-profit exchange program placing students from Japan for summer home stays in this country. She became an area administrator, training people to supervise incoming groups and finding them homes.
"One summer, my wife needed someone to work with a group of Japanese students in Terra Linda," Tom says, "and guess what? I was it."
He fell in love with the program and with what happened to the students and to their host families. "I could see that lives had been transformed," he says. "When the students left, everyone was crying."
He realized that the exchange program "was doing a lot of good for world peace and understanding."
Both continued to work for Interstudy, but chafed at what they saw as its shortcomings. They decided to start their own program under the arm of their own nonprofit.
They took a mortgage against their house.
Believing they could piggyback on their contacts with exchange organizations in Japan, Tom Areton promptly took off for Tokyo, hoping to snag a share of the summer student trade. But every organization turned him away, citing his nonprofit's lack of experience.
"I thought we might lose our house," Tom remembers.
In despair, he took one last stab, this time with the largest exchange organization in Japan, and its manager was so delighted by Areton's proposal that he responded with "How many students do you want?"
Tom settled on 100 to 200. "At that point, we didn't even have an office typewriter," he says. Lilka quickly combed the Bay Area for host families while he covered Los Angeles.
By the next cycle, they could take 1,000 students. "And then the word got out that we really cared about our students and that our program was wonderful, and the other Japanese organizations came crawling back," Tom says.
By 1983, they brought 4,000 students here from Japan; in 1989, the number was 11,800.
But when the Gulf War broke out in 1990, the business collapsed. "In one week, 1,000 students canceled," Tom says. "I realized we needed more eggs in more baskets."
He went to Germany, seeking students. Three years later, CHI was working in 20 countries.
Through the Aretons' membership in the Federation of International Youth Organizations, programs multiplied, often at the behest of the U. S. State Department, which contracted with CHI to manage programs it conceived.
Under way this summer for the first time is a program to bring foreign youths here to serve as summer camp counselors all over the country.
Approved two months ago is an au pair progam that will send Americans overseas and bring foreigners here to be nannies; 250 will start in this country at the end of September.
Tom hopes to be selected to run a teacher program that would bring math, biology and physics teachers to this country to teach in rural and urban areas where qualified teachers are hard to find.
That, he says, should do it: his staff of 80 - 25 in San Anselmo, others spread out in 35 offices across the U.S., plus 750 independent contractors working all over the world - already has its hands full.
And Lilka is no longer as active in the business as she was. Four years ago, she received a Ph.D. from the Institute for Advanced Studies of Sexuality in San Francisco and plans either to counsel young adults or to write a book.
Not that Tom feels overworked. "I love what I'm doing," he says. "The response is awesome."
He loves passing on what he thinks is one of America's greatest strengths - the concept of volunteerism - and encourages foreign students to contribute to the communities where they study or work.
But his goal is never to make "little Americans" out of kids from other countries. "We just want them to become better citizens of their own countries when they go home," he says.
"And we want to enrich their lives."
bashley@marinij.com
Beth Ashley can be reached at
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