A home for helpers

Mexico's base camp for volunteers

By Joy Hepp Original Print Publication: December, 2008

Sunday is pot-luck night at the Casa de los Amigos, and the company is as diverse as the food. Sitting down for roasted chicken, rice soup, and strawberry tamales are Casa volunteers from Mexico and the US, a reporter from California, an Alaskan English teacher, a Japanese boarder, and a local Greek dancer. The conversation shifts to personal philosophic revelations: “I’ve been learning that you have to live in the moment,” says Cassandra, the dancer, picking out a piece of chicken. “…I mean like appreciating the friends that are with you right here and right now.”

Image:Luz Montero

The meeting room at Casa de los Amigos is a gathering spot for Quakers and hostel guests.

Many who come to the Casa de los Amigos Center for Peace and International Understanding stay only for a short while, but they have left behind a priceless legacy of volunteerism.

The seeds were planted in the late 1930s, when Mexico City’s Quakers began to organize rural work camps. Volunteers from the US and Mexico built schools, drained mosquito-ridden marshes, and repaired hurricane damage. The camps became popular with American conscientious objectors escaping World War II.

The Quakers, a religious group known for pacifi sm and emphasis on a personal relationship with God, continued their work in Mexico throughout the 1940s and 50s, adding programs assisting Spanish Civil War refugees. Thousands of volunteers came through Mexico City every year. In 1956, the American Friends Service Committee acquired the Casa’s building from the family of the late Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. The three-story purple house in Colonia Tabacalera became a clearinghouse for Quaker volunteers, and “…at some point they started letting people stay who weren’t directly involved with the work camps,” explains manager Nicholas Wright.

Nowadays NGOs from Acapulco to Zimbabwe have websites, but before the Internet, would-be volunteers started their Latin American quests in the library of the guesthouse. One of the Casa’s greatest treasures is a huge collection of notebooks recounting volunteer experiences: they contain details about which programs feed their volunteers, which expect them to fend for themselves, and what a visitor should expect in the Chiapas jungle. Altruists are still drawn here, stopping on their way to work on organic farms, teach English to rural schoolchildren, or help women set up small businesses.

“People who are doing volunteer work still stay here because…it’s known as the place to start out because you have information from ten thousand people,” Wright says.

The Casa is run by a dynamic volunteer staff, doing everything from greeting guests and organizing activities to cleaning and preparing meals.

“Some people think volunteering is something you do if you don’t have any skills,” says volunteer Ali Packard. “I think volunteering is something you should do if you have a lot of skills.”

In addition to her talents as a sous-chef, Packard is also a skilled tango dancer and welder. “I work at the Casa, I’m unpaid… My parents have spent twenty years trying to come to terms with the fact that I don’t have a career or a mortgage or a car or children. I think they fi nally realize that what I do is actually quite cool.”

“Our…challenge is maintaining the peace of the guest house while coping with the quantity of human traffi c,” says Wright, a former backpacker who now lives in the Casa with partner and fellow volunteer Jill Anderson, and their one-year-old daughter Agnita, who was delivered by a midwife in one of the Casa’s apartments.

Although not a hotel or hostel, the Casa ends up in travel guides, which is part of the challenge.

“As long as [the books] say we’re a Quaker-run place with something to do with international understanding, then it’s fine," Wright says. “But sometimes when people come here who meant to go to Hostel Amigo, then we end up having an effect on them.” Guests who may have never considered volunteering find themselves sharing a dinner table with someone who spends their life helping others, and many end up searching for their own opportunities to help.

Visit Casa de los Amigos on the web at casadelosamigos.org.

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