The Gringo: A Memoir (18 page)

CHAPTER
34

I
returned from vacation to an email about my balls and prostate. The doctor I’d been in touch with in the States had heard back from his team of urologists. They’d all weighed in and agreed on the epididymitis-prostatitis diagnosis and recommended a continued regimen of tepid-water scrotum soaking.

While noting that even stress could be causing my symptoms, the lead urologist seemed almost sure that I’d come across a tricky strain of E. coli. In a sentence that made my heart sink, he pointed out that symptoms like mine could last up to two or three years.

He recommended more Cipro and said I should try staying away from spicy foods and vitamin C—anything that was increasing the acidity in my urine. Also, it appeared that pain relievers, which I’d been popping like Pez since that first day the throbbing and piercing set in, were a part of the problem, not the solution. I was a little nervous about more Cipro, since I’d already taken the powerful antibiotic for nearly the entire month of November, but I was willing to give anything one last try to reduce the pain.

So I unleashed a pharmaceutical blitzkrieg that left me dizzy, cranky, and easily sunburned. Over the next several weeks, the pain went from frequent cattle prod-like bolts to occasional piercing sensations.

WHEN A WOMAN IN ZUMBI—
to whom I’d described the purpose of the Peace Corps several times—asked me if I was there on vacation, I knew I needed to find a real project. I’d used the municipal firings and my man plumbing as excuses long enough. The only thing I had done to stay busy the previous two months was teach English to two women from the municipality. It was a task I promised myself I’d never stoop to, because I believed that the Peace Corps was about
real
development work—but I was bored.

My English lessons usually degenerated into my students telling me—in Spanish—all the town’s juicy gossip, which was enthralling. Once we even plunged into the depths of anthropology: They reluctantly admitted they had some indigenous blood in them but became enraged when I said I was fairly positive I didn’t have any North American Indian blood in me. Hashing out the differences wasn’t easy.

As for actually learning English, my students became dissatisfied with my inability to teach them through osmosis. Frustrated that they weren’t yet fluent in “gringo speak” after a week or two, they lost interest and the lessons quickly fizzled out.

It was a new year. I’d been living in Zumbi seven months. It had been about five months since the women at FODI had left. And although the pain in my balls and prostate was still there, it was no longer quite the debilitating lightning strikes through my man plumbing that made me double over on the sidewalk. I could finally get outdoors and function. I decided it was time to get something to
do
.

One morning I got out of the shower and walked back around to the front door of my apartment, where two men in dress shirts stood knocking. They were the principal and vice principal from Zumbi’s only high school.

Carlito, the principal, did all the talking. He reminded me of a modern version of the
caudillos
who ruled South American hamlets with an iron fist in the days of yore. Short and barrel-chested, he almost always had a cigarette dangling from his lips beneath his long gray mustache. Most noticeably, he was missing one of his front teeth. He had a demeanor that would have scared the shit out of me had I been one of his students. But since I was viewed as some sort of authority figure—or more likely, someone with access to money—it would always seem like he was kissing up to me. He constantly smiled, offered me cigarettes, and, later on, would clear people out of his office every time I came to see him, referring to me as his “esteemed colleague.”

In a lengthy preamble, Carlito explained that the facilities of the high school were simply not up to snuff. (Indeed, the one time I’d gone there to check the place out, the classrooms appeared as though they’d been abandoned. Other than the shoddy desks, there were no materials to be found. And in place of actual chalkboards was a section of the wall painted green. The most elaborate classroom was the science lab, which was equally as drab, but had both a dog skeleton and a jar with a human fetus.)

The long and short of it was that Carlito wanted to build a greenhouse, but not just any greenhouse—a greenhouse that would be the envy of all other academic institutions in the area. The high school had a huge amount of property—several acres of farmland that the military gave to them years back—but none of it was being put to good use. Up until then, they were simply renting out tracts to people for grazing their cows.

To go hand in hand with the project, Carlito wanted to revamp the school’s outdoor science curriculum. Even though we were in a section of the world that was a natural greenhouse—where you could drop any type of seed and it would grow—the greenhouse was a good idea. Because it rained so hard, many crops actually needed cover. But most important, it would be the epicenter of an outdoor classroom where students could do hands-on environmental education work every day.

I said yes to Carlito. Of course I wanted to do this. If he’d told me they wanted to tear down some classrooms and put in a swimming pool, I probably would have said yes just to get off my ass and start working.

The next day, I began searching for the different funding channels available to volunteers. The most straightforward method was a grant set up through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Someone in the Peace Corps office once described to me that this money came from a pool of cash from leftover farm subsidies. I always thought this was a bittersweet irony—that the overflow from the very subsidies that made it impossible for farmers in developing countries like this one to compete were filtered back to them in the form of four-figure grants, administered by twenty-four-year-old volunteers.

So I embarked on a several-month process that I referred to as the twenty-first-century Peace Corps experience: living on my own way out in the jungle, yet being bogged down with . . . paperwork. In a twenty-page grant proposal, I laid out the parameters of the project: the idea, the costs, the construction company, the timetable, the tasks and people involved, and the ways it was sustainable. If I had been doing this on my own, it would have taken about a week, but since the local government was involved, it would be about five months before I sent in the final draft to the Peace Corps office.

The grant required that 25 percent of the total project cost be provided by local project partners. Therefore, on top of the $7,000 I could get from the grant, we needed about $2,300 more to reach that 25 percent. For us, this meant going to the mayor and asking for money to go toward the cost of the materials and construction. Some came in the form of cash, which the mayor agreed to, and the rest was in the form of in-kind contributions, like soil and tractor use. This in-kind portion meant that eventually my accounting, while technically accurate, would be what you might call
creative
.

At one point during the process, it took me about three months to get the municipal government to print out a signed piece of paper agreeing to pay their portion of the costs. When I finally got the thing, it was a glorious and formidable example of third-world bureaucracy—so overly official and faux professional that it was somewhat charming. The document had about five notarized stamps from various departments and so many vast swirling signatures that even someone in the Peace Corps office deemed it “impressive.”

It became increasingly obvious that the more Ecuadorians were involved, the harder and more needlessly complicated things became. This was a fact I never felt bad about thinking, given that the Peace Corps continually warned us about it throughout training, using nearly the same phrasing.

THE NEXT FEW MONTHS CONSISTED
of me typing up documents on my laptop inside my apartment and occasionally walking across town to the municipal building to ask a small favor, which would normally take a week or two to reconcile. (During this time, I also founded and served as editor of a quarterly newsmagazine for Peace Corps Ecuador, which kept me busy and in front of the computer for a few hours every day.)

All the sitting at my desk didn’t do much to convince my neighbors that I was doing anything for their community, but the grant gave me the peace of mind that I had a “project” going. Plus, now when Winkler called me or sent ominous messages and emails, I could ramble on about how I was working on The Grant Project and how things were
this close
to coming together.

He and I had been at an awkward impasse for several months, which consisted of him giving me shit for not having any project partners, but being passive-aggressive about it, since he knew it was mostly his fault that I was out there idling, without a counterpart. All the while, I didn’t feel comfortable telling him that the reason I hadn’t been moving mountains in my community was because my balls hurt me too much to stand up and all the Cipro was making me delirious.

CHAPTER
35

O
ver Easter weekend I traveled to a jungle town about eleven hours north to visit a volunteer who wanted to have sex. She’d been nudging me into visiting her for many months, ever since I declined her invitation to meet for a night at a random place halfway between our two sites. Her calls and texts urging me to come were nothing if not aggressive and uncharming. But I hadn’t had sex in a very long time. So I went.

When the new country director arrived in November, he instituted a new Out of Site Policy. Among other changes, it was renamed the Whereabouts Policy. Before, we were able to go anywhere in the country as long as we were back at our site within seventy-two hours. Now the seventy-two-hour restriction was gone, but we were limited to traveling within an imaginary radius of roughly five hours away from our sites. This meant relatively little to me, already being so isolated from everything and everyone else in the country, but some volunteers took this, and other changes, pretty seriously and wrote nasty letters to the office, sometimes cc’ing all 150 other volunteers on their emails. They were the types of letters that included sentences beginning with: “It is imperative that . . .”

In any event, this meant that for my trip up north I had to ask for special permission. I was allowed to go only because it was the holiday weekend. But as a result of submitting my proposed itinerary, Winkler had a pretty good idea that I was traveling a half day for some sex and knew the exact woman that sex was going to involve.

The bus ride through the southern part of Ecuador’s Amazon is probably the most pleasing road trip you can take in the country. Going an average of twenty-five miles an hour the entire time, you get to look off to the east and see nothing but jungle. Each town you pass through feels like the final frontier. And when it gets completely dark, you can press your cheek up against the cool glass of the window and see nothing but the stars overhead and a few oil platforms blinking out across the Amazon.

I arrived in the volunteer’s town at 1 a.m. on Friday and she met me at the bus station looking drowsy.

As we lay in her bed after our first go at it, she turned to me and said, “I haven’t had sex in like a year. What about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Her long curly hair spread out over the pillow. I was thinking about how strange it all was.

“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sex before?” she said.

“Eighteen years.”

For the rest of the weekend we cooked and laughed and listened to music and had a good time. But I wasn’t in the mood for any more sex. Part of it was her, and part of it was the shame of feeling as though we were like animals who couldn’t go without it. But I joylessly had sex a few more times before the weekend was over, including once when she’d talked me into using a sex toy she kept in the drawer of her nightstand.

Afterward, I didn’t even want to think about sex for a long time. As I lay there, I told her I planned on taking the six o’clock bus back to my site the next morning. She let out a disapproving groan and said I should get on a later bus so I could fuck her once more before I left. I mumbled something about how my leaving at six and fucking her one last time weren’t mutually exclusive. She persisted on and we went to sleep. At 5:25 I awoke to her pivoting herself atop me. And I was reminded then that there are few things lonelier in life than sex with someone you don’t care for.

As the sun rose over the jungle fog, I began the long ride south to my site, winding up and down dirt roads through the green hills, stopping only to buy snacks and use the bathroom at filthy roadside diners. It was Easter morning in the Amazon.

I saw large, morose-looking religious processions in the streets. Pigs getting roasted with blowtorches on the side of the road. Children selling fried chicken and boiled yucca at the bus stops.

I saw papaya groves and acres of deforestation with cows grazing. Roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary surrounded by fresh flowers and Christmas lights.

I saw women bent down doing laundry in stream beds. Shirtless drunks asleep on sidewalks or park benches or facedown in gutters. Other men with two or more missing limbs hoisting themselves into the bus to wobble up and down the aisle asking for spare change.

I saw beautiful indigenous girls listening to bad music on their cell phones. Black people selling coconut milk. Kids playing soccer. Women burning trash. Teens wearing WWF shirts and Yankees hats. And men peeing in the road.

I saw ducks and chickens pecking at the Styrofoam trash that had been flung from bus windows onto the damp ground.

And I saw moms with babies—lots of babies.

I knew that I would look back and feel connected to this jungle and maybe sorta kinda miss it. I saw all the frontier towns and wondered what it was like living there—was it just like Zumbi? Or was it lonelier, or not as boring, or filled with all the same characters who every day kept me laughing and smiling and cursing? I listened to music on my iPod and then sometimes just looked out the window in silence thinking about how naïve it was to imagine I could come down here and wake up one day knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I thought about how, all things considered, it had been nice to finally hold someone in my arms (and I thought about how just having a thought like that was a sign I’d been isolated for a long time). With the window cracked and music playing and my backpack in my lap and nothing but bumpy open road ahead, I wished bus rides like this would never end.