The Gringo: A Memoir (5 page)

At about 5 a.m., I heard Juan pawing at the door. He wanted to take me out onto the wetland and see what we’d be transforming into an ecotourism paradise during my two years. The wetland was just on the other side of the road from the Mendoza farm. It was the only road in La Segua and doubled as a highway connecting the major inland city of Santo Domingo to the coastline. Every so often, amid the cow herds, snakes, and school children on rusty bicycles, a bus would speed through town at seventy miles an hour, kicking up a cloud of dust that barely settled before the next one screamed past. At the first and only town meeting I ever attended, one parent stood up and suggested they buy concrete mix and lay down a few extra speed bumps on the mile of road stretching through La Segua.

“Our kids are in danger,” he shouted above a crowd that was murmuring disapproval. “I’ll buy the concrete myself if it makes our kids safer.” Others in the room shouted him down. Another person said, “Yeah, but then we’d have to slow down our trucks every time we pass over the bumps.” (The word they used for speed bump,
chapa muerto
, translated to “dead cop.”)

This morning, Juan and I crossed the highway, ducked under a barbed-wire fence, then walked another hundred yards through tall dry grass toward the water. The entire time, he explained his vision for the wetland. He had already secured funding from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. He was quite proud of this, despite having no idea that USAID was associated with the U.S. government. It actually took me several minutes to figure out what he was talking about because acronyms are customarily sounded out in the Spanish language, so he was referring to it as
ooh-sigh-eed
.

In short, he wanted to get a long dock built, extending from the road out to the water, complemented by a three-story bird-watching tower. He wanted several canoes to take the tourists around the lake. He kept referring to “the tourists” as if they were some giant, all-powerful, all-knowing bloc of white people who would come en masse to spend money there. A couple of times, he referred to them as “your people.”

“Then the tourists will walk down this way, following me,” he would say, or “Then the tourists will stand here and listen to me . . .” It always ended with said tourists handing over money to Juan and heading on their merry way. For the most part, he had a point: White people from rich countries do like to spend lots of money to visit poorer countries, where they stare at things and climb to the tops of places and wear fanny packs and overpay for stuff, and then return home and tell all their friends so they can do the same. I’ve been to many of those places.

But this was not one of them.

The wetland was indeed beautiful. There were birds (Juan’s uncles used to shoot them) and fish (Juan could tell you exactly how many species) and the biggest iguanas I’d ever seen (Juan said they’re delicious). The water was shallow and calm, and the scene of the wetland in the early mornings when fishermen were out with their nets was tailor-made for those coffee-table books of gritty, yet beautiful images of South America. But as a tourist attraction, it was underwhelming. No one would fly all the way down to Ecuador just to see it. I’m not sure what the hell else I was expecting to find. I was a volunteer, and this was what I was there to do.

Juan, in his cartoonish voice, began rattling off facts about the area, which sometime in the last decade they’d—quite wisely—gone from calling a “swamp” to a “wetland.”

Fact: At an international conference on wetlands in Iraq some years earlier, this—
our
—wetland, Humedal La Segua, was included, making it one of the top 4,000 wetlands in the world.

Fact: Raúl Sanchez, their connection to USAID, had worked in the United States and spoke English. This made him somewhat of a deity figure in the world of ecotourism and grant siphoning.

Fact: This wetland—all of it—belonged to his family, meaning it was no problem whatsoever that it was being usurped for ecotourism purposes.

This last fact turned out to be not much of a fact at all. You might even categorize it as a lie, given that it was completely false. The truth would reveal itself with time.

For now, I was the first of what they fantasized would be many gringos to be canoed around the waters by a certified ecotourism guide of Humedal La Segua. Juan continued to point out different sights with his ginormous hands and then turn to me, eyes bulging, with a look that said,
Did you get a load of that? Huh?

It all seemed so easy the way he explained it that I wondered for a moment why they even needed a Peace Corps volunteer. They would build a little of this infrastructure stuff, tourists would migrate in, and the financial windfall would heal all the economic and social woes of the surrounding town. This latter point was sold heavily on his application materials to the Peace Corps.

The rest of my short visit was mostly gringo show-and-tell with various other people around town. On my second evening there, an uncle of Juan’s invited us into the back of his pickup truck for a “short ride” to his farm and back. More than an hour passed and we were still in the truck, driving down a dirt road in the dark at what felt like ninety miles an hour while I ducked my head to dodge overhanging tree limbs. The uncle at one point asked me if I wanted to drive. I said I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift; plus, I said, it was against Peace Corps rules. A smile crept to his face as he said, “There are no rules here.”

Later that same night, Juan and I were invited to dinner at his uncle Roger’s home. The house perched on stilts halfway out into the wetland. When we arrived, Roger’s wife, Veronica, suggested to me that we “get dinner.” I agreed. She led me out the front door and down the ladder where she picked up a live chicken and handed me a machete. “Kill it,” she said. I stalled for a bit with the machete in my hand. The aunt told me to stop being such a faggot, at which point I realized I’d eaten tons of chicken in my life and had no business eating it if I couldn’t kill it myself. I sliced the chicken’s throat with the machete and we ate it an hour later.

On the final night of my visit, Juan and I walked a mile down the road to eat at a neighbor’s house. This neighbor, a mother of two in her early thirties, was the oldest in Juan’s group of ecotourism guides. She gave me some hope that the show wasn’t just being run by kids. We drank freshly squeezed orange juice and ate crackers.

In the background, a grainy TV played the nightly Ecuadorian news.

“Ah, President Correa,” I said. “You guys fans?”

“Oh yes, he’s the best,” they both said, nearly in unison.

“What about you?” Juan said. “Do you like him?”

I smiled. “Well, a few days ago, a group of us were in Quito down around the main square, and the president drove by hanging his head out the window and he saw me and a friend of mine standing there. He yelled, ‘Where are you from?’ So I yelled back, ‘Los Estados Unidos!’ and he gave me the thumbs up. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to any president, now that I think about it. So I guess I like him.”

They stared blankly.

“What about your president?” said Juan. “What’s your opinion of . . . what’s his name—?”

“Obama. Barack Obama.”

“Yes, Barack Obama,” he said, pronouncing it unrecognizably.

“Well, we’re not allowed to express political opinions at all, so—”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “You can say anything in front of us. We work together now, so it’s, you know, total trust.”

“Right. Well I voted for him, but we’ll see. It’s a little too soon to start saying whether I think he’s a good president.”

They both nodded in satisfaction with my answer. On the television, there was a story about a protest of sorts involving people in the sierra, near Quito. Seeing it, Juan launched into a monologue on how terrible the people from the sierra were. There are, you know, more indigenous people up there, he said. The
serranos
with all their greed and sneaky ways were the reason people like him and his community on the coast were poor.

I nodded.

His monologue wound down and he ended it with, “At least there’s no racism in this country. Zero. The U.S., you know, is very racist. Very.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“It is. It just is. You know. We’ve seen the pictures.”

Yes, there’s racism in the United States—there is everywhere—but I decided I’d defend my country against someone who’d never left the town he was born in.

“You know we just elected a black president, right?” I said. The fact that Obama is half-white was a detail I’d skip in this conversation.

“Obama is black?” he said.

“Yeah, have you seen any pictures of him on the news or anything?”

“Yes, sure. Obviously,” he said.

“So then you already knew that he’s black.”

We looked at each other.

“What’s your point?” he finally said.

“If our country just elected a black person, we can’t be
that
racist, right?”

He stared at me blankly.

“Okay, never mind.”

I woke up early the next morning hoping to get into Chone in time to connect to a bus leaving for Quito by 7 a.m. From Chone, it would be a six- or seven-hour ride to Quito (and then another two from there to Cayambe, and yet another hour from Cayambe to Olmedo). When I told Juan 7 a.m., he thought I meant 9 a.m., so I got off to a late start, since he insisted on taking the bus with me into Chone. Soon we gave up on waiting for a bus in La Segua and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. At the Chone terminal I got on a bus headed for Quito.

Everything was normal inside the air-conditioned bus except for two things: The
ayudante
, or bus steward, seemed to be in an especially foul mood, and the bathroom in the back of the bus, near where I was sitting, had a sign on the door saying it was for women and for urination only. Early into the ride I noticed that when women went to the bathroom, the
ayudante
would stand right outside the door. When they finished and walked out, he immediately stepped in the lavatory and inspected it.

When we stopped for lunch an hour later, I made sure to force out a piss so I wouldn’t have to break the rules. I grabbed some yogurt, a bag of chips, and a soda, and got back on the bus. About an hour after that, just after we passed through Santo Domingo, a churning pain seized my midsection. A hurricane was brewing in my bowels. It hurt so bad I couldn’t hold it in. I was about to experience the hottest and heaviest case of the runs of my life and there was nothing I could do about it.

The bus was winding up into the cloud forest, through what is widely considered the most dangerous road in the country, climbing roughly 9,000 feet of the elevation between the coast and Quito in a series of sharp turns. I stood up, hunched over from the pain, and walked a few rows back to the bathroom door. It was locked. I shook it and rattled it and banged it until a little kid a few rows up saw me and wagged his finger. “You have to go up to the front and ask the
ayudante
to open it for you,” he said.

I walked to the front, still hunched over and bumping into every seat on the way, and asked the ill-tempered
ayudante
if I could use the facilities. He asked why the hell I didn’t use the bathroom back at the pit stop. I looked him in the eye and just said, “It’s an emergency.” I don’t know if it was the urgency in my voice or the fact that I was now sweating bullets, but he pitied me and led me back to the female-urination-only bathroom, where once inside, I could barely drop my drawers fast enough before my ass exploded into a dark Jackson Pollock all over the metallic airplane-style toilet bowl. The stench was so foul I pried open a window that was partially welded shut to get some fresh air.

The sweating subsided and the feeling of relief was almost orgasmic. I looked to my left and found that the toilet paper dispenser was . . . empty. The thought of a very squishy four more hours on the bus crossed my mind, so I started searching frantically all over the place. Nothing. Back pockets? Nothing. Left pocket? Just my ID and ATM card. No. Right pocket? Something felt like paper. I pulled it out. It was not paper. It was an old one-dollar bill, filthy to the point that it was no longer green—so flimsy you could have blown your nose into it. I unfolded the bill and apologized to George Washington.

I walked out of the lavatory and returned to my seat. Either the
ayudante
knew what was going on in there or he got hit with my aroma right when I exited. Whichever the case, he didn’t have the nerve to go in and inspect after I was done.

I soon fell into a minor panic thinking that with the dollar-bill wipe, I had risked an exposure to hepatitis or something as serious, but my nerves calmed when I remembered that in our first week there, we got hit with what seemed like a dozen shots and vaccinations. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I was
over
-vaccinated for Hep A because the doctors were pumping me with another dose every time I saw them—despite my protests that I’d been to Africa and done it all before.)

Later in the ride, I had to pee badly, but feeling I’d already pressed my luck with the bathroom facilities, I aimed into an empty 7Up bottle. It promptly gushed up over the opening like a geyser and overflowed into my lap.

CHAPTER
9

T
he last half of training was a downer. By then, all the trainees had formed high-schoolish cliques with the others whose sites would be nearby. This put me in an awkward position because no one would be sharing my site or living very close to La Segua.

Our last big hurrah in training was our technical trip—basically a field trip for all the staff and trainees to a resort in the cloud forest a few hours west of Quito. In the mornings, we went to an “integrated farm” and, in small groups moving around from station to station, received speed lessons on things like digging irrigation ditches and cultivating tilapia farms.

One afternoon, we gathered for a special session conducted by an American psychologist, or Larry the Therapist—an older guy with a thick northeastern accent. He showed up with his wife, who wasn’t a therapist but sat barefoot on the floor in loose-fitting yoga pants while Larry did the talking.

I admit I was excited. I thought we all could benefit from some group therapy and was interested to see what direction it took.

Larry the Therapist introduced himself and his wife and told us all about their lives there in Ecuador and how great it was to be semiretired, living in the tropics, enjoying the occasional therapeutic seminar for great organizations like the United States Peace Corps, and basically how absolutely fantastic it was to be Larry the Therapist. And since we were already there—also sitting on the floor barefooted, while Larry sat high in a chair looking out over us—he thought he might as well tell us about the beautiful son he and his wife had raised and how that son was now facing the terrors of indecision over whether to attend law school at NYU or the University of Michigan.

Larry the Therapist’s wife interrupted him midsentence several times, once to share an anecdote about their dog eating the next-door neighbor’s chicken. Larry got back on track to finish, saying that he was sure his son would make the right decision by “listening to the voice inside his head.” And that, he said, was what we volunteers should do during our once-in-a-lifetime experience in Ecuador—we should “listen to the voice inside our head, because it’s usually right.”

Larry the Therapist’s session came to a climax with an activity in which we broke up into pairs and talked about our reasons for joining the Peace Corps. The goal of the activity, said Larry, was not to just listen but to
actually listen
. He pointed out—and I couldn’t have agreed more—that most of the time when we listen to someone talk, we’re not really listening at all to the actual words, but thinking instead about other things, like what we’re going to say next.

We went around the room one at a time and shared the answer our partner had given. One of the two married men in the group joked that he was there because his wife had made him. Everyone laughed except the wife. (They ended up quitting after seven weeks in site.)

Larry announced that we’d run out of time, and the session broke up.

That night after dinner we had a talent show and I played Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on the guitar.

IN THE WANING DAYS OF
training, we came across so many new acronyms and manuals that we needed
other
acronyms and manuals to explain what was going on in the original ones. Several training sessions were dedicated to introducing CAT, or Community Assessment Tools. It was a project we needed to complete in our first few months at site. We would have to interview every household in our village to see what the community had (or lacked) in terms of resources. Busy work, said some; essential for community integration, said others. After putting it together, we were supposed to present our findings, preferably in a PowerPoint presentation, at a conference of volunteers and counterparts five months hence. Even though we had already been assigned to communities with counterparts who had requested us for specific jobs, this was aimed toward helping us figure out what other projects we could do. I imagined how strange a “needs assessment” was going to look in my community, where people lacked running water but had TV sets and cell phones that played MP3s.

All of this was explained in a PowerPoint presentation that demonstrated what our own PowerPoint presentations should resemble. In conclusion, said the program officer, CAT was designed to give us “structure in an unstructured environment.”

We were told about our quarterly VRFs, or Volunteer Report Files, which tracked the progress of our program objectives. We spent more time being taught how to log in and fill out the Excel spreadsheet for our VRFs than we did learning about compost the day we took a field trip to the integrated farm.

If any of us failed to remember that this was the twenty-first century Peace Corps, we were sadly mistaken.

I also spent those final weeks of training living in utter fear of the medical office. A young woman in our training group I’d made friends with was abruptly kicked out when Nurse Nancy discovered that she had been taking an antianxiety medication the Peace Corps didn’t know about. My friend had told the Peace Corps—during the same hellish medical clearance process I navigated—that she used to take the drug; she just hadn’t told them she was now back on it. She divulged this offhand during the same type of meet-and-greet that I’d had with Nurse Nancy. When the medical staff found out about it, my friend was sent home less than forty-eight hours later.

I lived in fear just thinking about all the things in my medical past that the Peace Corps didn’t know about. I was in a serious car accident when I was five years old that resulted in temporary paralysis, brain surgery, a skin graft, a broken jaw, and broken collarbones—among other bumps and bruises—but I hadn’t listed any of this stuff for the Peace Corps since all their questions asked for
recent
history. I felt nervous that something would come up, or that they’d spot one of my scars, and it was only a matter of time before I, too, was out of there.