I am one of those people who’s a little bit distrustful of facebook. I worry about how it “owns” my social network. It’s partly why I mostly stick to posting and maintaining this blog, instead, where I more explicitly control the content and can curate its exposure to the world.
Having said that, facebook has proved an amazing experience from the standpoint of how it makes possible the renovation of old friendships, the rediscovery of long-lost friends and acquaintances. The other day I got a message and a “friend request” from someone I hadn’t heard from in 25 years – she’d been a good friend of mine when I lived in Mexico City. She’d invited me to meet her family and relatives in El Salvador, too, and I had gone in early September, 1986 – at the height of the civil war there. I remember going through army and guerrilla checkpoints, and the eerie normalcy of helicopter gunships flying overhead and truckloads of armed men racing down the highways.
She’d been a student of mine (although older than me) in my volunteer English class (that I gave at my workplace), but because of our friendship, she ultimately became one of my most important Spanish teachers. Even today, I would say some of the verbal “tics” of my colloquial Spanish have recognizable echoes of her use of the language.
I suppose I’m thinking of this in part because that summer and fall in Mexico City were the point in time when I feel I reached that “critical mass” of linguistic fluency. And it happened so quickly. And my current efforts to learn Korean are clearly hampered in part by the lack of any such parallel “teaching” friendship in my current life’s constellations.
Here is a picture, which I scanned some years ago, showing me and her and some of her relatives on the pier in La Libertad, El Salvador. I am standing a bit off to the side on the left, looking a little bit dazed (which was a frequent expression for me during that strange, immersive, whirlwind trip). I think it’s funny that my hairstyle looks like a Korean pop-star’s or something. Sorry that the picture is pretty poor resolution – it is ancient and scanned.
