setting sail

This coming month marks fifty years since I set off for the United States. I was going for a year, and had no idea where I would be for that year.
Let me explain. I had been accepted by an exchange programme run by American Mennonites, with whom I had had contact while at college via a number of summer work-camps in various parts of Europe. Thus it was, that after graduating, I was staring at a huge ship at Southampton docks, and thinking 'This is it! This will be the longest I have ever been away from home!'
On board I met the rest of the party from Europe who would also be away for a year- some twenty of us. And learned for the first time where I would be working and living- in a children's centre in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. 
The first two days out of Southampton brought us terrible weather- loose furniture was tied down in the public areas, and I brought back breakfast one of those days- after which I was right as nine pence. But the weather cleared after that, and we arrived in New York in heat and sunshine.

As I look back on this time, I see what has stayed, what remains in me. Not the avid love affair with America- its cars, its lifestyle, its optimism, its wide open spaces- which so consumed me at the time, but the values imparted by contact with Mennonites- their pursuit of peace, their concern for the earth, their emphasis on reconciliation, their embrace of pacifism. Like some deep underground stream, theses have nurtured and refreshed in the long years since that ship sailed under the Verrazano Narrows bridge, and I was eagerly on the lookout for our first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

If you look back over a similar time, what remains for you? What values have endured, and what has fallen away?