Victor Escamilla took liefs and values with specific religions. He took the test twice and each time, got different results. In one try, he scored 87% liberal Quaker. Another go at classifying his personal philosophy and ethics determined them to be 34% Muslim. One evaluation certified his ideology as 98% Unitarian-Universalist. The only constant in beliefnet.org’s analysis was Victor’s match with Catholicism which hovered around 7% each time. Strange for someone who was born in El Salvador, a primarily Catholic country. However, this exercise done for a lark proved to be prophetic.

Victor and his girlfriend Heather Floyd discovered All Souls on a leisurely Sunday morning walk four years ago. They met in 1999 on the Internet as pen pals. At first, they were attracted to the Church’s architecture. Architecture is a shared interest. After admiring the exterior of the church they decided to venture inside. Almost immediately, they felt very comfortable with the people they met at Coffee Hour and more particularly, they appreciated the quality of the sermons on Sunday and the remarkable range of outreach programs the church offered. Within a month, Heather and Victor became All Souls members and both are active participants in several church activities.

Concurrently, Victor was working full-time at Columbia University’s Undergraduate and Engineering Admissions office and was just completing undergraduate work himself through the university’s School of General Studies. He was about to enroll in the school’s Master’s degree program in American Studies. “I was always happy in a college setting—always in the bookstore; my favorite pastime is reading,” Victor said. “I decided to do my Master’s thesis on the architecture of All Souls Church. Everything was falling into place.”

“My study of All Souls includes the three buildings that preceded the church we have today. I relied greatly on the three-volume history of All Souls written by Walter Donald Kring,” Victor said. Dr. Kring was the predecessor of Forrest Church and Galen Guengerich as senior ministers. “The first church building was Georgian in style and was completed in 1821 and was known as the First Congregational Church. Henry Whitney Bellows became minister in 1839 and remained with the church until his death in 1882. The church was located at Chambers Street between Broadway and Church Street. The second building was Gothic in style and was constructed ten blocks north. It was named the Church of the Divine Unity. The third church structure was at Fourth Avenue and 20th Street. This structure was almost Byzantine in appearance borrowing the look of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with bold stripes of red and white on the façade. The current edifice on Lexington Avenue at 80th Street is considered neo-Colonial in design and was completed in 1931. Lorraine Allen was my guide through the church archives,” he stated. Lorraine is former chair of the All Souls Historical Society and is now the official Archivist.

Victor enrolled at Columbia after two years at Nassau Community College. “There was a marked difference academically,” he reports. “With more expected of me at school, it was not easy to do a full day’s work and go to classes at night. All in all, I spent nine years at Columbia, from 1997 to 2006. They were wonderful years!” In the summer of 1997, he took a Columbia trip to Paris to study conversational French and Phonetics. All through high school, Victor studied French and was determined to increase his fluency. His entrepreneurial talent emerged in an advertisement he wrote and posted offering a tutorial in Spanish or English. “A French businessman studied with me that summer and that paid for the trip,” he noted. Victor’s mother assumed he would pursue a career in medicine. An aunt was a doctor in El Salvador and now works as a nurse in New York. His sister is a physician’s assistant and his mother still works as an operating room nurse.

After receiving his MA at Columbia, Victor accepted an offer six months ago from MetLife to be a financial services representative. He advises clients how to manage financial risk, on investing, retirement planning, how to save for college, and insurance needs. “I love to help people, to show them how to look at the whole picture in financial planning. I really enjoy my work and I learn so much as I go along.”

Victor’s family left El Salvador in December of 1985 during a civil war. Numerous insurrections and revolutions mark this tiny, Central-American nation. Since 1524, when the indigenous people, many of them Mayan-speaking, defeated the Spanish conquistadors, there has been almost continuous strife. Independence from Spain, democratization of the government, the defeat of the ruling oligarchy and the overthrow of the country’s presidents, who were from the military establishment, were among the predominate issues.

Victor’s stepfather arrived first in the United States to find work and a place to live. When he was settled, he sent for his wife and children. Victor spent his early years in America mostly in Nassau County: in Jamaica, Westbury, Bellerose and Oceanside near large hospitals where his mother worked. When he came to America, Victor did not speak English. Rather than burdening him with an extra class in English-as-a-Second-Language, Mrs. Goldstein, whom he recalls as a short, blond teacher with very thick glasses, told him that she was going to experiment with the best way to teach him English quickly. She decided to put him in the regular class in English, thereby creating a need to abbreviate the process of learning the new language.

A habit Victor has kept since early childhood is writing in his journal, if not daily, at least once a week. He reads widely and particularly enjoys fiction centering on the immigrant experience. Although he reads the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, his preferred periodical is The Economist. At Columbia, he attended as many open lectures as possible particularly on the subject of urban planning for the 21st-century city. In high school, he excelled in math and science, played soccer and achieved a level of competence in karate. Track was always a favored sport and last year, he ran the New York City Marathon and came in in the top 20%, finishing in 3 hours and 34 minutes. (The first place runner came in at 2 hours 9 minutes.) He is registered for the Chicago Marathon scheduled for October 7. One year, he earned $4,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation at the Disney Triathlon in Florida. He remains periodically active in the organization’s fund-raising as a coach

While at Columbia, he was a “Stress Buster”—that is, he was available every Wednesday for students in the midst of exams or papers to give them a massage to relieve their stress so that they could work. His fee was a gift certificate to the Columbia University book store. The longest active member of the group, he did this from 1997 until he completed his Master’s degree last winter. He also interviewed Spanish-speaking neighbors of Columbia University for its Oral History Project. “It is amazing what you hear when you approach a stranger on the street—an ordinary person—to learn what they are thinking.” In January, Victor was one of eleven All Souls Young Adult volunteers accompanied by the Rev. Cheryl Walker who spent four days assisting Hurricane Katrina victims, who still have severe housing problems nearly two years after the storm. In that time, they managed to demolish three condemned houses and contributed to the economy by patronizing local restaurants. He describes what he saw, did and concluded in the Winter 2006-2007 (Vol. XII, Nº 1; “After Katrina”) issue of the Quarterly Review. Victor remains on the Young Adults Planning Committee and has been an usher at All Souls since 2004. Frequently, he volunteers for the Monday Night Hospitality program and is also a member of the All Souls Community Chorus.		Victor with Heather Floyd at his graduation from Columbia University.

What are Victor’s plans for the future? “If a good opportunity comes along, I’ll take it,” he replied.