I started writing about this several weeks ago, but dropped the ball.
30 years ago, in March, 1986, I started my job at the Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City. This was a transformative experience for me, in several ways.
The Casa de los Amigos is a kind of hybrid between a Quaker meetinghouse, a social services organization, and a hostel for travelers. It's all of those things. It has been all of those things for 70 or 80 years now – my uncle (my father's older brother) worked with projects affiliated with the Casa in the 1950s. I worked there in the 1980s. And the Casa still exists and is quite active. The "Amigos" of the name refers to the "Friends" i.e. Quakers AKA Society of Friends. The Mexico City meeting also maintains a tight connection with the Orange Grove Friends Meeeting of Pasadena, California, which was the community my grandparents were members of when my father was born, and of which, in a kind of biographical full circle, my father is now once again an active member, 76 years later.
That period was the time in my life when I came closest to adopting the Quakerism that was my "birthright." Ultimately, my year of working for the Quakers in Mexico City was a positive experience, but it also mostly convinced me that I could never be a "true" Quaker, because I was forced for the first time to face my fundamental atheism, and for me to have become a "social" Quaker (as is true of so many Quakers, who are active but who are not religious or spiritual) struck me as hypocritical. It would take more than a decade more before my reluctant acceptance of my own atheism gelled into a kind of "faith," but I suppose that year of attending Sunday meeting and interacting with Quakers was the beginning. My more recent flirtation with Buddhism is likely also ultimately enabled by that experience, too – it differs from my early attempt at Quakerism only in that Buddhism, unlike even the most unconventianal forms of Christianity such as Quakerism, neither presumes nor requires any doctrinal belief, and thus remains available to atheists such as myself.
Another seed that was planted in Mexico City was that that was my first experience as a teacher, and it was as an EFL teacher, at that. Which is my current career.
That was also where I learned (truly learned) Spanish, which facilitated my later studies in linguistics and literature, and which enriched my "life of the mind" substantially. Even today, after 8 years resident in Korea, I still speak or read or write something in Spanish every day, if only a fragment here or there.
For all these reasons, my year at the Casa de los Amigos was formative, and transformative, and 30 years later, I remember my time there vividly and proudly.
At right, above, is a picture I took of the front of the Casa when I visited there in 2007. Below is a view out the back window of the conference room, toward the hulking form of the Monumento de la Revolución a few blocks south, also taken in 2007.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]