The Gringo: A Memoir (4 page)

CHAPTER
8

F
irst it’s the heat. The heat is what hits you first.

La Segua sits about an hour inland from the coastline and belongs to a large wasteland of sweaty, beaten terrain that gets pounded, in intervals, by heat and rain. Winkler had remarked that it was the Wild West of Ecuador. To me it felt like swamplands in the Deep South—the
antebellum
South.

The province of Manabí is the anti–bread basket of Ecuador. It’s low, if not the lowest, in all the statistics you want to be high in—literacy, production, health—and high in all the ones you want to be low in—poverty, domestic violence, hunger. The people there wake up every morning and get kicked in the face by life. Every day is a battle and they’re losing.

As a Peace Corps site, it was perfect. You name it—plumbing, running water, stable electricity, post–elementary school educations—and they didn’t have it. The bar was so low that the possibilities for improving the quality of life seemed endless.

Approaching La Segua from the north, you pass a giant landfill between the highway and the ocean. The toxic runoff from the fill drains down toward a shrimp farm leading out to sea. Wisps of smoke and sick-looking pelicans perch atop the mounds of smoldering gray waste in a postapocalyptic image.

The chief export of Manabí, technically speaking, is bananas. But if you ask anyone else in Ecuador, the chief export of Manabí is laziness. It’s the unique brand of stereotype that, if true, is at least forgivable. On either side of the highway, I saw an endless landscape of potbellied men swinging from hammocks, with a machete in one hand and a beer in the other. In the heat and with so little going on, their sloth is understandable—not to mention that with every meal being a variation on rice and plantain, there was literally a finite amount of energy your body could exert.

It is a strange place with strange stories. But mostly, it is a land of distrust.

BEFORE WE LEFT CAYAMBE FOR
our short visits, our program managers gave us a batch of information about our sites and the people we’d be teamed up with, known as our counterparts.

These locals were described as heads of organizations or the community. Among other things, they were in charge of finding us our initial housing for the first few months. In addition to working with us, they were, in a sense, responsible for our well-being. For instance, if we ever left our site—even for a day—we were supposed to notify them when we left and when we returned.

Throughout training, counterparts had been described to us as figures of authority, so you can imagine my surprise when my “boss” turned out to be a child.

I stood on the dirty sidewalk of the bus station and called my counterpart to tell him I’d arrived.

“Where are you?” he said.

I told him I was standing over in the corner of the parking lot.

There was a pause. “Oh, I see you,” he said. “I’m walking toward you now.”

“I don’t see you yet. Are you sure you see me?”

When I said this, he was standing about five yards away—directly in front of me. Expecting to see an adult, I’d been looking right past him.

He was twenty years old (and fresh off a university degree in tourism—a fact he wasn’t about to let me forget, ever), but he looked no more than fifteen.

He wore flip-flop sandals, short shorts that rose uncomfortably high on his thighs, a Fidel Castro–style green hat cocked to the side, and a green tank top that read in English, “Ca$h Rules Everything.”

He was about five foot six and 120 pounds. In addition to the initial shock that my boss was younger—and indeed
looked
so much younger—than I, his appearance startled me. Everything about him was grossly out of proportion.

His nose was enormous, and this is something I can say without feeling bad, because my own isn’t exactly petite. His, though, was crooked, leaning to one side just enough to make me wonder if it caused him respiratory problems. His nostrils, however, had a permanent flare to them that must have made up for any inhalation deficiencies caused by the crookedness. His neck was too big for his head—like a wrestler’s, but worse, since it wasn’t balanced out by large muscles elsewhere on his body.

He had easily the largest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen on a human being. It bobbed up and down enthusiastically, as if doing calisthenics, every time he spoke. And, because the picture just wouldn’t have been complete without them, he had a set of pointy elfin ears shooting out from his head.

When he removed his Fidel hat, he revealed a glistening helmet of hair slicked back with ungodly amounts of gel into an aggressive faux hawk. His hair and ears formed three towering, sinister peaks that all seemed to point directly at me no matter where I stood—like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.

When he spoke, every vein in his neck bulged out, causing a disturbance that made it seem as though talking even at an indoor volume caused him pain. He would tilt his head at an angle and the rope-like veins and hyperactive Adam’s apple caused a commotion. As for his voice, there may be an actual medical term for it, but the best I can do is say he sounded like Kermit the Frog. Along with the neck’s peculiar components, it all combined for a perfect storm of verbal and physical cacophony.

His feet were also large—noticeably larger than mine—particularly the toes, which is not insignificant since I was about half a foot taller. But it was his hands that got me the most. They were fit for a man twice his size. They were absolutely massive. Really—I can’t stress enough how truly gigantic and out of place his hands were. They were so disproportionately large for his body that, after a while, they were all I could look at. On top of their excessive size, he used them—in conjunction with his permanently puckered lips—in a manner that can only be described as effeminate. They were giant ogres of hands that moved daintily through the air and into pockets and across cell phone keypads as if they were scared of injuring the air around them.

The combination of all this would horrify me for weeks to come.

This was my boss. His name was Juan Mendoza.

JUAN AND I MET IN
the city of Chone, a place that—true to description—could have been one of those dusty old Western towns where the music stops when a stranger walks into the saloon. To get to where I was going to live, we hopped on a bus that took us about twenty-five minutes outside the city.

We got off and walked down a long driveway with rice fields on either side. It belonged to Juan’s family—a family that I would soon discover
was
this town. The Peace Corps information sheet I received for La Segua listed the population at a few hundred. It was actually quite a bit less than that where I lived because the documented figure included several surrounding communities. A more conservative estimate, according to the president of the community (a man who walked around barefoot and shirtless, even at town meetings) was 150. But still, it never felt like it, since everyone lived in small houses separated by acres of farmland.

The Mendoza family owned the majority of this land, which began as one giant farm that got divided up as the offspring multiplied. The farm I would live on was the original property settled by the now-deceased patriarch of the family who guaranteed future Mendoza dominance of the area by siring about twenty children with the same woman. About a dozen of these Mendozas, now ranging from their early thirties to late fifties, stuck around the area and spawned on average three kids each. So to say the Mendozas dominated the La Segua population is no exaggeration.

A hundred yards to the right of the farm sat a wooden house belonging to Juan’s uncle Homero, one of the many Mendoza brothers. To the left, at the end of the long mud driveway, was my new residence—an imposing three-story cinder-block structure surrounded by trash and chickens. Because the gaggle of aunts who worked around the clock in the second-story kitchen constantly dumped dirty water out the open windows, the swampy stench of moist chicken shit cocooned the house.

Juan walked me inside and began the not-so-easy task of introducing me to the Mendozas. It became clear that the answers he provided on my Peace Corps information sheet turned out to be half-truths that went well beyond just the town population. It said four other humans lived in the house I would sleep in. When I arrived, the actual figure hovered between a dozen and fifteen. I got the feeling there would be more, not fewer, as time went by.

There was the Mendoza family matriarch who was still going strong after spending the equivalent of fifteen years of her life pregnant. There were two of her daughters, who each had four toddlers. One of them also had a teenage girl with breasts so painfully enormous it’d be impossible not to mention them. There was another toddler in the mix and to this day I’m not sure whom he belonged to. And of course, there was Juan, who had moved into this same house—against Peace Corps regulations and the wishes of his extended family. His parents had their own farm in a nearby town but he apparently preferred it here.

Last but not least, there was a young mentally handicapped kid named Benicio. He wasn’t related to the Mendoza family and his origins only grew more mysterious to me over time. His main purpose around the house, it seemed, was to do chores. At first I found this endearing, until I realized that the family treated him more like an indentured servant. When I first met him, he seemed overly excited and stared at me—sometimes with intense curiosity, other times like he wanted to kill me. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out which room he slept in, a fact that was particularly disquieting because late at night, he took to hiding in dark corners of the house then popping out of the shadows as I passed by, scaring the living shit out of me. The first few times he did this, I nearly knocked him out cold out of reflex. Later my nerves calmed and it merely gave me the creeps.

When Benicio wasn’t stalking me, he continued doing chores around the house while dozens of Mendozas screamed at him. One night, when the grandmother was descaling fish in the kitchen, he crouched down and hit her legs with a cloth to keep the mosquitoes away; it reminded me of how farm animals line up and whip their tails to keep flies off one another.

Juan took me to the bottom floor to show me the room I’d be living in—a ten-by-fifteen-foot space enclosed by dungeon-like brick walls. The only window looked out to one of the puddles of chicken shit. The door was made from scrap plywood; it still had the spray-paint markings on it from the delivery crate it was pried from. I could have punched through it.

Juan iterated that this was the room that Pilar, Peace Corps Ecuador’s head of Safety and Security, had approved when she’d made a site-inspection visit months earlier.

“See,” Juan pointed, “we put netting over that window because she asked.”

He was right—no mosquitoes flew through the net he’d glued over the window; instead, they visibly swarmed through the ceiling gap between floors just a few feet away.

We turned around and Juan took me down the hall to the bathroom. It was a three-by-three-foot concrete basin with a bowl of water for pouring over yourself. There was no sink or running water.

If I needed a toilet, I had to use the outhouse. It was behind the house, through a maze of chickens, pigs, and used diapers strewn from the second-story windows. Between the hornet nest and the cockroaches and the spiders, the outhouse indeed scared the shit out of me. In addition to the other obstacles between the front door and outhouse, I had to cross through a labyrinth of barbed-wire clotheslines. The wire was at just above head level of my Ecuadorian housemates, meaning it was right at decapitation height for me if I wasn’t careful.

All of this—the room, the outhouse—excited me in a way.
If it weren’t so dreadful
, I thought,
it wouldn’t feel like the Peace Corps
.

Back inside, Juan handed me a lock for the plywood door that had the weight and girth of one normally used for luggage. He said good night. I crawled under the mosquito net, dripping in sweat, and read a biography of Jim Morrison by the light of my headlamp.