Sleepy and groggy, Ethan Tilly, senior, steps off the train after three flights and a train ride from Paris. He looks out to see a city nestled between two rivers with yellow and beige houses packed one after the other. He’s reached the hilly city of Lyon, home to his French exchange partner, Adel Antoni, who he’s gotten to know over the last six months.
In the summer of 2017, French teachers Anna Kalfus and Cindy Koehler wanted to create an exchange program for the French students. After a month-long search, they found a partner school in the suburbs of Lyon, Notre Dame de Bellegarde. Koehler said she and Kalfus wanted to give their students an experience the KHS French Department had never had before.
“Both of us took kids to France [before], but it was not an exchange scenario,” Koehler said. “We wanted our students to be able to have the opportunity to live with a French family and to experience France as someone who lives there, not just a tourist.”
Ethan Tilly, senior, said he first heard about signing up for the exchange program last September. He said he was first put in contact with Adel in November, but that it was hard to gauge his personality at first over Instagram.
“You get their interests and what not, but really, their personality is hard to [tell] when I’m speaking French and he’s trying to speak English over text,” Tilly said. “He seemed very chill, but I really [only] knew what his interests were. Then when he came [to Kirkwood], I realized he was kind of crazy to be honest. He [was] a rebel. He wanted the complete American experience, [and] he was willing to do whatever seemed high energy and high octane.”
Typically, while the French students are in Kirkwood, students in the exchange program take their partners around to experience St. Louis. Linden Burba, senior, said her life got a lot busier during that time.
“We were out every night, [and] every weekend, we did stuff,” Burba said. “We did three activities a day sometimes. I [was] running around a lot more than I usually do, but I was trying to give him the most experiences [he] could get.”
After two weeks here, the French students went back home. Meanwhile, KHS exchange students would have to wait until the end of the school year to see their partner in person again. Burba said her life felt very different without them.
“I knew I was going to see them again, so I wasn’t a complete wreck, but I definitely felt like a piece was missing,” Burba said. “My house felt quieter, and I felt like I had nothing to do because I wasn’t running around Kirkwood [with them].”
After two months, the students got to make the trip halfway across the world to Lyon, France, at the start of the summer for a two-week stay there, along with an additional week in Paris afterwards. Tilly said when he got to Lyon after an over 24-hour trip, Adel got him to go on a seven-mile bike trip. Then, after eating his first dinner with his host family and getting a good night’s sleep, he went with Adel and his family to Nice.
“We got on a train at 7:10 in the morning to go to Nice,” Tilly said. “It was me, Adel and his mom visiting his uncle who has a house in Nice right near the ocean. We went to the beach that day and had a chill day on the beach.
“It was beautiful. It was awesome.”
In France, some time is spent together as a group, while some is spent on your own with your exchange partner. While students are with their host families, French teachers Kalfus and Koehler were also with a host family.
“As an adult, I don’t feel like we do as much traveling as the kids do with their host families on the weekend,” Koehler said. “But I will say, this time was exceptional, because Madame Kalfus and I got to spend one of our weekends at Madame Mouton’s country house and it was amazing. I didn’t want to come home.”
The French exchange program happens every two years, and the next one is in 2025. It’s available to students in French III, French IV and AP French. This means students will begin applying to the program as early as September 2024. Burba said all the work she put into the program was worth the trip.
“My French improved, and I got to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience with a really cool group of people,” Burba said. “I got to get close to my friends, and while it was hard at times and there was a lot of preparation that went into it, it was very worth it and I would do it all again.”
