LAKE STEVENS – Life for the Keil family has taken its share of surprising turns since they became a Silvertips host family last year.
A week ago, the Keil family returned from the most elaborate of these surprising turns: a trip that took them more than 5,000 miles from home to a place they never thought they’d see.
“We never would have thought, ‘Oh, let’s plan our vacation to the Czech Republic,’” Barbra Keil said Friday. “Maybe a cruise. Or Hawaii. You don’t think about the Czech Republic.”
It all started late last summer when the Keil family, along with dozens of other local families, invited a Silvertip hockey player to live with them for the season.
A day before the players arrived in Everett, Barbra Keil got a call: Could her family host Karel Hromas, a player who spoke only a little English? Keil, her husband, Brian, and their children, Kayla, 13, and Brandon, 11, had an emergency family meeting. Afterward, they decided yes.
“There was such uncertainty in the beginning, but he’s fit in perfectly,” Barbra Keil said.
So perfectly that Brian, Barbra and Brandon Keil just spent two weeks visiting him in Beroun, Czech Republic.
About halfway into his eight-month stay, Hromas asked them if they would come see his country and meet his family and friends. Kayla couldn’t make it, but her parents and brother flew to Prague, the capital of the South Carolina-sized Czech Republic.
Karel Hromas, 19, picked them up, and they stayed with him in his family’s small apartment. During the stay, Hromas’s sister, Anna, and parents, Karel and Jana, relocated to their cottage 15 minutes away.
“He fit in with our family, and I think we fit in with his,” Brian Keil said.
This time it was the Keils who were strangers in a strange land.
“When he first came, there was so much he didn’t know or understand. There, we got the feeling of how he felt when he came over here,” Barbra Keil said. “How do you shower? How do you work this or that? The TV shows were all in Czech.”
Brandon, who thinks of Hromas as his big brother, missed his Xbox but was impressed with how “big and small” everything was in the Czech Republic. The castles and the meals were big, he said. The towns and the cars were small.
Hromas returns this fall to play for the Silvertips and plans to live with the Keils once again. Though he’s coming back at the end of August, the family still misses him. They phoned him Friday.
“Hi, it’s me,” said Barbra Keil, when Hromas answered.
After a short pause, she laughed and said, “I don’t care; pause it!” The call had interrupted Hromas while he was playing video games.
Even by phone, Hromas’s improvement with his English was clear.
Last year, he could only sum up his excitement at being in the United States by saying, “Good.”
On Friday, Hromas said: “In the beginning it was hard because everything was different, like food and everything. Everyone asked me what the big difference was and I say, ‘All stuff. Like, lifestyle.’”
Hromas went on to say that he and his host family made a remarkable connection.
“They were, for the whole season, great to take care about me,” Hromas said.
“We weren’t expecting the relationship we got,” Brian Keil said after they said goodbye and hung up the phone. “We wouldn’t change a thing now.”
“Oh, no!” Brandon said.
Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@heraldnet.com.
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