Students from around the world are returning to Northampton.

They are coming from countries including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Peru and Japan. They are coming in numbers higher than anticipated by the mighty little school that attracts them to our city.

Through one lens, the International Language Institute (ILI), housed in the DA Sullivan Building on New South Street, has a problem: too many students without places to live.

Crane your neck, tilt your head, look from a different angle, and ILI’s student housing problem becomes an opportunity for some of us.

If you live close enough to downtown Northampton, or close enough to a bus route, you could host a student for a month, or even longer. I don’t mean this to be a sales job. I cannot convince anyone to open a spare bedroom to someone studying English who comes from another country. It’s a difficult ask.

What I can say is that my wife and I let two men stay for a month in the vacant bedrooms of our moved-out children, and the real experience was superior to my imagined one.

Still, it was not easy to say yes. We were going to allow strangers in our house? They would be bringing different ideas and customs to our kitchen table. They would be taking up room in a house that through most of the COVID-19 pandemic we had grown used to being empty. We are empty nesters and love it.

Janet and I talked about the possibility for days. We settled on a limited engagement. One month.

First Mustafa moved in. The 20-year-old had me eating cheese from his native Turkey within a day. His English was fair, but his ear for picking up American slang was keen. We were soon talking about cars, friendships, politics and movies.

One morning, Mustafa got up early with me before his 9 a.m. class started at ILI, and I made him coffee, strong and hot. I was standing at the kitchen sink. He was sitting at the table. He looked up at me, and said, “This is like what my dad and me do back home.”

“What is?” I said.

“Drinking coffee and talking in the morning.”

A few days later, Naif moved in to the other spare room, and soon our dinners were affairs for four people again, the talk bouncing back and forth between food from Saudi Arabia, the geography of the Middle East, and slang from around the United States.

Caroline Gear, the executive director of ILI, talks about hosting students as an opportunity for a cross-cultural experience at the kitchen table. She does not exaggerate. That is exactly what happens.

Naif brought Saudi Arabia into our home and sat it down at our table. Mustafa came alone, but we felt like he brought his Turkish family and friends and we all sat around the table together.

In fact, I had a video call with Mustafa’s father in Turkey and another with Naif’s best friend in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. My world expanded and I didn’t leave 46 Bradford St.

Naif was particularly interested in how we cooked. He filmed me grilling chicken. He filmed me making Jamaican stew, and even frying eggs in the morning. Then one day, after Mustafa had to leave, Naif decided that he would cook. All we had to do was buy the ingredients.

I drove over to Hadley to buy Halal chicken at Maple Farms Foods. We had to make sure we had saffron. The rest was up to him.

He spent a couple of hours making a classic chicken and rice dish. during which time he called his friends back in Saudi Arabia to confirm the finer points of how to make the meal. I watched my wife offering advice and negotiating the kitchen space with Naif, who was at the same time on the phone with his Saudi friends. Two cultures conferring over best kitchen practices.

And we almost said no to this.

I knew we had made the right decision to host Mustafa and Naif after they had left. In the vacuum of their departures, I kept hearing their voices, their particular accents — the way Naif would say “maybe” when he absolutely intended to do something. They both left something behind at our kitchen table, though it saddens me that even now their voices grow dim in my memory.

They’ve both stayed in touch after they had to leave. Mustafa texted me asking if I wanted to go to a Metallica concert in New Jersey. After I declined, he sent me audio from the concert. Naif sent us pictures from the High Line in New York City, where he was visiting with his sister before returning to Riyadh.

ILI has been around since 1984, bringing students here from around the world. Many of us faintly know that there’s an international language school somewhere downtown. What many of us don’t know is the opportunity hidden there.

If you live in Northampton close to downtown or near a bus route and want to talk about hosting a student, get in touch with Amy Ben-Ezra, ILI’s homestay and transportation coordinator, at amy@ili.edu. 

Greg Kerstetter is a retired elementary school teacher, who now teaches English part time with the International Language Institute. 

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