Eliot List (seated) of Bethel with his Italian host family. Submitted Photo

BETHEL — Eliot List grew up on Morning Glory Farm on the Flat Road in West Bethel.  Starting in 2015, his parents invited WWOOFER’s (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) to stay with them each summer.

Two or three people at a time work 25 hours a week in exchange for room and board.

“I’m used to living in community,” List said of the Bethel lodgers and his own homestays abroad. “It wasn’t an adjustment at all. I really enjoy it.”

When he was not at home with his father, Eric, his mother Christine, and his sister, Sophie, he lived with host families in Costa Rica, Chile and Italy.

Seeking to share his experiences with others, he and a partner started a program called You Travel and Teach. The goal of his program is to bring young people, 18 or older, but preferably in their 20s, to Italy to spend six weeks, living with host families, learning the language, teaching English, and traveling around the country.

“Mostly, I am trying to tailor it to underserved populations and communities in the U.S., particularly rural areas, thinking about Bethel,” List said. “This year we are trying to target Telstar (High School) kids, recent grads. We’re reaching out to areas that might not otherwise have gotten this opportunity,” he said of the scholarships he hopes to award.

Lucy Abbott of Bethel, a career foreign service officer, has offered her help. List has reached out to Project Opportunity and met with Telstar Principal Mark Kenney. He said he hopes to find a local participant who would connect You Travel and Teach to local potential contributors and young people.

List began his love of language not with Italian, but with Spanish, a language he has been studying since he was 8. A native Spanish speaker, Dareth Law, volunteered at List’s elementary school and gave him his first taste of a foreign language. Later, while at Hebron Academy, he and his father continued to study privately with Law.

He went to Spanish-speaking Costa Rica for five months during high school, and by junior year of college he was fluent. In his senior year, his uncle married an Italian woman, and he thought it would be fun to learn Italian, too, so went to the Lombardi region of Italy with a program called SITE (Studying Intercultural Teaching Exchange). That was the fall of 2019.

“I had such a wonderful connection with (my host family), I ended up staying through the whole beginning of the pandemic until July 30 (2020). There were three months that I didn’t leave my house, quite literally, because it was a police lockdown.”

Patrizia and Antonino Bai and their three children were List’s host family. “There is an Italian pride in living where you grew up,” he said of the house they own that belonged to Antonino’s parents. “In the adjoining house are Patrizia’s parents and great aunt. That’s the dynamic. It is very family-oriented,” List said.

The host families are all people he knows who live near each other and the Bais in Gavirate, near Varese, 15 minutes from the Swiss border.

People who sign up for his program will teach class four and a half to six hours a day for four weeks. List provides the curriculum, but they are independently in charge of their classrooms.

“Being at the front of the classroom is a really empowering experience,” he siad. “A couple of folks left way more sure-footed,” he said of last year’s participants.

Upon arriving in Italy and for the first four or five days of the program they go on various trips. A typical day might be a train trip to Milan, one hour southeast from the host families’ town of Gavirate.

At night they would return to dinners with their host families, perhaps watching the family’s children play sports in the June sports league, as List did. Hundreds of children from surrounding towns play in round-robin tournaments of basketball, pickleball, soccer and volleyball.

“All the community will come out and watch the games,” List said. “I want to be able to share this with people.”

He said Italy offered him a lot of serendipitous moments. For example, he was looking for an Italian class when he was asked to teach English at Experience Summer Camp, the camp with whom he now partners.

On the advice of his host family, he traveled to Bogata, Columbia, South America, to work on a Catholic community service project. While there he met Cora Villarreal.

They were married about five weeks ago.

More serendipity.