I lived with my host family outside of Namur in a rural area surrounded by beautiful trees, a trail to run on, and to my delight, a basketball net. Being the daughter of a high school gym teacher and a running fanatic, this came in handy.

The family lived in a complex that housed a few other families, everyone in their own unit. Within minutes of my arrival, I met Ethel who was my age and lived in one of the units beside us. My first impression of Ethel was that she was very tall, her name was beautiful (it is pronounced Eh-Telle in French, emphasis on the second syllable), and she had a mischievous but warm sparkle in her eyes.

Despite our language barrier, Ethel and I became inseparable within days. She spoke very little English (although her efforts were beyond entertaining), and my French was not too bad but I certainly wasn’t fluent. It didn’t matter. We had a kindred connection. We had constant laughs and adventures, and I learned most of my French and my fancy Belgian accent from her.

We spent so much time together that one night there was an intervention with my host family and Ethel’s family, as people were concerned that I didn’t realize who I was actually staying with. It didn’t work. We couldn’t be apart, and finally everyone just accepted it. When it was time to come back to Canada, our goodbye was as dramatic as one would expect for two sixteen year-old girls who had been joined at the hip for months.

Almost thirty years later, I was travelling around Europe for a couple of weeks in the summer and planned to see Ethel. We had not seen each other since that teary night a million years ago. We met at a time when the internet was not even a figment of the imagination. Writing letters, making cassette tapes of our voices and having awkward phone calls eventually faded away. Love it or hate it, Facebook brought us back together many years later.