I never got into MySpace like some people did. It's like World of Warcraft: A web-based form of crack. I created a profile (which I haven't visited in weeks) for the sole purpose of reconnecting with my Paraguay cohort, Liz. She and I spent eight weeks in a little haven called Galeano Cue in the summer of 1997. Through Amigos de las Americas, we were paired up after a few days of orientation in Villarica and embarked on a community sanitation project that totally changed my life. The experience, among other things, whetted my appetite for all things Latin American. I spent the following three years longing to return, and my wish was granted at the millenium when I studied abroad in Chile and travelled on my own to Paraguay for Christmas vacation. Christmas in the summertime, sangria and discotecas on New Year's Eve. The stories I could tell! I nearly joined the Peace Corps in Guatemala after graduation before my parents talked me out of it and told me to get a real job, which turned out to be about as fun as it sounds.

Like so many of my peers, I now belong to several online networks: Mars Hill's The City, LinkedIn, MySpace, and most recently FaceBook. For better or for worse, FaceBook is drawing me into its net. It's a combination of finally obtaining my own laptop, my own digital camera (thanks folks!), and having people I never dreamed to hear from again finding me on the world wide web. The first blast from the past was Ash, an Aussie I met in Santiago, Chile. We went dancing in Bella Vista with a host of other international travellers from the hostel and got on so well that he extended his stay in the country and joined me in discovering Valdivia, Puerto Montt and Frutillar. We parted ways when I had to go back to la Universidad Austral de Chile. He headed south, literally to the end of the world in Tierra del Fuego--the land of fire. How haunting is a city by that name? I have a dream that involves seeing penguins up close, the towers of ice known as Torres del Paine, and drinking scotch with ice picked from a passing glacier. Ash would still be the perfect companion, but these dreams are ninety percent nostalgia, and I'm content with that. We lost touch, had an e-mail romance, lost touch again, and now here he is, back in my life, albeit in a FaceBook-sized capacity, and back in Oz. Until now I still had a picture in my head of him in Zurich. Funny how we've both ended up in commercial banking. Perhaps we had more in common than I thought. That's why the e-mail romance ended, by the way. I became a Christian after I met him and the hardest thing I ever did in favor of my love for Jesus Christ was ask him not to visit me when he offered. I reminded him that he didn't really like Americans and I'll never forget his response that they were "almost tolerable" in their own environment. It still makes me laugh out loud.

Just last night, I found another message in my FaceBook inbox from Pamela (Pame to me), asking me, in Spanish, if I had ever been in Chile. She is the sister of Patricio (Pato), a man I dated for some time while studying there. The last correspondence we had was when I sent her a stuffed Mickey Mouse doll from the Disney Store. I think she was twenty years old at the time.