The Gringo: A Memoir (22 page)

CHAPTER
43

M
ore months melted together and I got tired.

I was tired of the kid next door lighting things on fire right outside my bedroom window. When the little arsonist wasn’t playing with matches, he was getting violent with the other neighbor’s kitten or baby boy.

I was tired of the mother across the patio screaming at her kids day and night. Her eighteen-year-old niece, who lived next door to them, smacked around her four-year-old in gusts of anger that echoed throughout the patio and startled me from dozens of yards away.

I was just tired. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t peel myself out of bed until I’d gotten a solid nine hours of sleep, often slumbering right on through the neighbor’s blaring techno music that lasted from six to seven every morning.

I was tired of people who’d known me for nearly two years staring at me and asking where I was from and if I spoke English.

I was tired of baking banana bread at the kitchen down the road and having the woman there tell me I was doing it wrong. I’ve made this about a hundred times and I’m reading right from the recipe, I’d say. She’d shake her head like I was an idiot and then ask, “What’s this food called?”

I was tired of people asking me if Alaska was its own country and when I said it was actually part of the U.S., having them laugh at me and call me stupid.

I was tired of people asking me for the thirtieth time what I did there. “You know the new greenhouse your child works in every day at school? I got that built.” They stared back at me in dumb amusement with the hollow eyes of poverty.

I was tired of people asking me why I didn’t have a girlfriend there. I wanted to say it’s because I prefer girls with full sets of teeth or fewer than three children. But I never said any of it. I let them call me a faggot and continued on with my day.

I was tired of the heat blisters that developed on my ass cheeks. I rubbed on cortisone every night to stop the itching and doused my underwear with baby powder in the mornings. But the itchiness never went away.

I was tired of people asking me when I was leaving and then asking why I didn’t stay and live there forever. Have you taken a look around? I wanted to say. You’ve managed to turn a piece of the Amazon into a bald, sweltering cloud of leaded diesel fumes.

I was tired of the landlady’s son, a slightly mentally handicapped alcoholic in his late thirties, asking me if I wanted to go to the whorehouse with him. He spent every evening getting drunk in the park then wandering around town trying to coax others into drinking whisky with him. Like a lot of things, the image of him going to the whorehouse and dropping seven dollars for twenty minutes with an underage girl was sad and surreal.

I was tired of finding cockroaches in my cereal and in my shoe and on my dresser and in my bed.

I was tired of being tired.

I was tired of explaining that colds and the flu are caused by viruses, not changes in the weather or from drinking cold drinks on hot days.

I was tired of my body. After several months of thinking that I had just a bad case of swamp ass, the Peace Corps doctor discovered that it was, in fact, a simple fungal infection requiring the same cream used for athlete’s foot. It turns out that standing in front of a fan in the nude every time I got out of the shower that whole time was doing me no good.

And my armpits smelled like the meat section in an open-air market.

And I had amoebas again and this time didn’t even realize it for a few months.

I was tired of taking notes of all the things that were making me tired; I worried it was making me callous.

I was tired of waking up in the mornings and feeling like crying from the loneliness.

I was tired of people being nice to me and asking me questions about my family and where I was from because I knew that soon I would leave and never come back.

I was tired of the threatening letters from the Peace Corps doctors to all of us reminding that if we didn’t take our malaria medication, we’d be Medically Separated. I taped the letters on my wall, next to the four unopened medicine bottles of doxycyclene sitting on my windowsill.

I was tired of the policeman taking his gun out of its holster and aiming it at my face “for fun” every time he saw me.

I was tired of the whole town mourning a teenage boy who got killed by a truck. That’s what happens when fourteen-year-olds drive motorcycles on the highway, I wanted to say.

I was tired of feeling cruel.

I was tired of heartbroken teenagers getting drunk and jumping off the bridge because their girlfriends had left them.

I was tired of workers on the roof of the building next to mine getting electrocuted to death.

I was tired of people who were unemployed and spoke no English and had never traveled outside their own country telling me that my country was racist for denying them a travel visa.

I was tired of walking up to the high school and seeing new holes torn in the greenhouse’s plastic and mesh netting (apparently the juvenile lust for vandalism is universal). It made me think more and more that they didn’t deserve to have the greenhouse. I fantasized about tearing the place to pieces right before I left town for good and leaving them with nothing but a pile of trash where the structure once stood. But it turned out I didn’t have the energy to follow through on that either.

I was tired of some people in Zumbi thinking they were better than other people there just because they made fifty dollars more a month, or because their skin was one shade lighter, or because their cinder-block house had two bedrooms instead of one, or because their family came from the sierra.

I was tired of seeing babies get dropped.

I was tired of seeing people who were indeed poor because they were too lazy to get a job or an education when the opportunities were available.

Then I was tired of seeing people who
did
work hard but didn’t realize that they were poor, in part, because their poverty contributed to others’ wealth and because governments like it this way and because it’s a system where there will always be a ceiling on some people’s prosperity.

I was tired of being asked if, in addition to English and Spanish, I spoke “Colombian.”

I was tired of the way things seemed to drone on without an end.

Yes, I was tired. And all the while, I had no idea that one day I would be back home in the U.S. but it wouldn’t feel like home, and I’d feel so empty and confused that I would wish I had never left.

CHAPTER
44

F
or my first Thanksgiving in Ecuador, the year before, I traveled north to another Peace Corps site in the jungle where a group of volunteers met for a giant feast. While there, we met up with some Shuar Indians and I pointed out that—just like the Pilgrims—we were having our first Thanksgiving with real Native Americans. People rolled their eyes. The bus ride home—the distance from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.—took me seventeen hours.

The following year, I had an uneventful Thanksgiving with about ten other volunteers in Loja. We drank lots of tequila and went to bed early.

The next day in the bus station, I bought my ticket back to Zumbi and waited near the turnstile. Ten feet away, a tall man began staring at me. He didn’t take his eyes off me, even when I occasionally glanced back and caught him staring. He was partially bald, which was unusual in Ecuador. He seemed to be smirking at me as though he knew something I didn’t know. At his side he held a small handbag. And no matter where I looked or who else passed by or what else happened, he kept staring.

I turned around, walked twenty steps, and paid five cents to go to the terminal’s bathroom. I used the urinal, washed my hands, and walked out. The man was still staring at me, eerily smiling like he wanted to put a knife into my gut. He’d repositioned himself in the terminal. Now he was over by a snack stand, still never taking his eyes off me.

I walked outside to the front of the terminal where taxis drop people off. I acted like I was waiting for someone to pick me up or for someone to arrive and meet me. I stood with my back to the brick wall so I could see anyone walking in or out of the terminal. A minute later the man came outside, glanced at me like he would enjoy hurting me, and stood out by the curb still clutching the handbag at his side. He didn’t stare at me while we were outdoors, but he stood and looked back at me every now and then, waiting to see what I did next.

When he wasn’t looking, I slipped back inside the terminal, went through the turnstile, and boarded my bus. It was parked at the platform and was leaving in ten minutes.

I sat down in my seat and waited. Looking out my window, past the turnstile, and into the terminal, I could see the man standing in the same place I’d first seen him. Now he was looking around and peering out toward the bus platforms like he was searching for me. I wanted the bus to leave faster. I wanted it to leave
now
before the man spotted me again. I clenched my fists and dug my heels into the floor hoping that the fucking bus would get moving.

A minute later, the bus engine rumbled on and we pulled out of the station. I exhaled and pulled my iPod from my backpack and put in the earphones. The bus got closer to the exit. On the way to the gate to leave the station, it stopped. Two girls had run after it and flagged us down. They looked relieved that the bus hadn’t left without them as they climbed on to find their seats. Just behind them, also getting on the bus and passing through the door to find a seat, was the man who’d been staring at me. He still had his handbag. It was small but looked heavy. His purple T-shirt was stained with sweat.

The two girls quickly found seats. The Staring Man slowly walked toward the back of the bus, bracing himself on each of the seatbacks as he stepped forward. Now I was staring at
him
. When he passed by the row I was seated in, he paused and looked me in the eye and smirked as if to say,
I found you, motherfucker
. I win. His face was red and shiny, dotted with beads of sweat. His eyes seemed to burn and grow darker when he looked directly at me. The grin lingered on his face as he walked on past to an empty seat toward the back.

I decided not to fall asleep on this bus ride. The man sat down directly behind me, six rows back. I could see his reflection ahead of me in the window that led to the driver’s cab. One hour became two, and the man still had not taken his eyes off the back of my head. I would slump down in my seat so I could still see his tall frame poking up above the other passengers but he couldn’t see me.

I hid money in my shoes. I hid my ID and ATM cards deep in my backpack on the floor between my legs. I wrung my hands together. If this man got off the bus with me in Zumbi, I was going to take a running swing at him and break his nose, then sprint to find one of the policemen I knew. I was going to punch the man so hard his legs would go limp and he’d be lying there on the sidewalk when the police came to get him.

After two hours the bus was pulling into the Zamora terminal for a brief stop before continuing on to Zumbi. The man was still staring at me and smirking and clutching the small handbag in his arms.

I jumped up, grabbed my backpack, and stepped down off the bus. I walked quickly to the far end of the platform and paid five cents again to go into the bathroom. I had to go for the entire ride but didn’t use the bus’s urinal because I would have had to walk to the back of the bus, which meant passing the Staring Man on the way.

I heard the honk of my bus as it pulled out of the lot. I left the bathroom and jogged through the parking lot to catch it. I kept my head down as I found my seat, but I peeked toward the back and was pretty sure the man wasn’t there anymore. I sat down and put my backpack on the floor. I looked around the bus. I looked out the window. I looked at the reflection in the front window. The man wasn’t seated behind me.

We headed out of the station and down the avenue toward the bridge that led out of town. Three blocks away, as we neared the bridge, I looked out the window and saw the Staring Man. He stood there on the street like he was waiting and watching for something. My bus passed. I looked at him. He saw me and cocked his head sideways as he stared back. He smiled at me this time—a really sick, dark smile—and kept his eyes on me until my bus crossed the bridge and turned out of view.

An hour later, my bus dropped me off in Zumbi. I went inside my apartment and locked the door.

CHAPTER
45

I
n 2011, I turned twenty-five. And the United States Peace Corps turned fifty. As I entered the final four months of my service, headquarters began bombarding us with magazine articles, videos, emails, and photos to remind us. It was exactly a half century earlier that President Kennedy announced he would send Americans to the poorest parts of the world to alleviate poverty and create intercultural understanding. (These parts of the world, the third world, also happened to be vital grounds for the Cold War raging between us, the first world, and the Communist Soviets in the second world, but that’s another story.) Coincidentally, Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law and the Peace Corps’ first director, passed away in January.

This year also marked the agency’s forty-ninth in Ecuador. It and one or two other countries had been along for pretty much the whole ride. And they had no exit strategy. Lots of people—usually either former volunteers who were overcome with nostalgia or current volunteers who hadn’t thought about it very critically—considered this a reason to rejoice. Many of them, including dozens of associations of former volunteers back home, were still calling for Congress to
double
Peace Corps.

I was starting to believe that, like most humans turning fifty, the Peace Corps should begin thinking about retirement. Good god—five decades of young white people coming to this country to teach poor people to improve their lives.

Eventually, people have just got to figure it out on their own. Eventually, they
want
to figure it out on their own—and I saw this everywhere. It sounded like this: “Thank you for the money, gringo, now please fuck off.”

There’s a time to help and when you do it, it’s virtuous. But what is perhaps more virtuous is having the wisdom to know when it’s time to step back and let humans do it themselves, their way, after all the years of training. A half century of gringos giving health seminars and planting trees and teaching to recycle—how much longer must it go on, I wondered. Apparently forever. When I first arrived in Ecuador, about 130 volunteers were there; midway through my service, that number ballooned up to around 200.

WITH THREE MONTHS LEFT, I
joined other volunteers from my training group and traveled to Quito for one final conference. Of the forty-four of us who arrived in the country, only twenty-eight remained, with about a half dozen of those planning to extend their service in one way or another.

The Peace Corps put us up in an Italian villa–style hotel that sat on a sprawling piece of property looking over a valley in the wealthy outskirts of Quito. The place had a pool, where on our first night we had a fancy dinner banquet with the office staff, followed by a “special surprise” that turned out to be a mariachi band (yes, the Mexican kind) kicking off an impromptu dance party. I stood off to the side after overeating.

Part of the purpose of this conference was to prepare us for life after service. One session included some staff members delivering a chilling seminar about the terrors of returning to the States. We learned that it would be harder than ever to find a job and people would ask us questions about our service and not really care to hear the answers. Then we’d get sick of talking about it anyway. The effects of reverse culture shock were real and more terrifying than anything we could imagine, so we needed to avoid grocery stores at all costs if we wanted to avert a public meltdown at the overwhelming number of
choices
.

The U.S. government would pay for three therapy sessions to deal with any “readjustment issues.” The mix of emotions from leaving here and entering the U.S. at this stage of our lives could and would be crippling. And—oh yeah—before they could actually let us out of the country, we’d have to deal with more paperwork than we ever thought possible. In fact, there was a hulking document stapled together for us, which turned out to be . . . just the checklist for all the
other
paperwork we had to complete.

There were a bunch of chitchats and focus sessions that week about where the Peace Corps was and where it should go—as if it mattered and as if someone higher up would say, “Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right, we should completely refocus the way we’ve conducted business for the last half century.” Everyone had always had an opinion on the Peace Corps. But now it was as though completing two years of service had given us a certain authority or power that morphed opinion into fact—as though we had earned a PhD in all things Peace Corps, allowing us to profess on the way
things should be
.

Some—actually most—thought we should downsize and somehow attract more “highly skilled” volunteers (no one acknowledged the fact that under this requisite, nearly everyone present would have been denied during the application process). Some thought we should forget the ambassadorial stuff and dedicate the program strictly to concrete and sustainable development goals (perhaps forgetting that this already exists and it’s called USAID and it is perpetually disorganized and underfunded). Others thought we should forget the “work” component—you can imagine how
their
two years went—and focus on volunteers having good times in faraway communities while facilitating cultural exchange and understanding.

Some wanted more of the Peace Corps in every way. A few liked the organization just the way it was but didn’t really expound much beyond that. Almost none, however, thought that as it was currently structured and organized, the Peace Corps should continue in Ecuador.

Some, when I caught them alone and in moments of honesty, agreed that half a century is an awfully long time to be showing people how it’s done. The invariable rebuttal to this is that “there are a few really great projects here and there.” Yes, there will always be those few good projects. But we’re talking about five decades, or two generations—or more—of Ecuadorians being treated to the worldly generosity of the white man. When does it stop?

One morning, the country director informed us that at the end of the year, Peace Corps Ecuador would discontinue its sustainable agriculture program. Although the program had been a staple of the Ecuador post for most, if not all, of its forty-nine years there (and probably the least wishy-washy in its goals), many countries worldwide were under orders to cut one of their programs. He said that lots of the agricultural themes would be folded into the community health program (“food security” was the buzzword now in contemporary international development speak).

The director also talked about their plans in the coming months to implement an English-teaching program, for which they’d secured the funding long before learning that agriculture would be cut. So much for the
real
development work I’d always associated with the Peace Corps.

In any event, as of December, the agricultural program in Ecuador would be no more. Alas, we were in the waning days of gringos telling poor people how to farm, only to have them smile, turn around, and continue with the way they’d been doing it for hundreds of years.

As with the many injustices before it, my group of departing volunteers absorbed this
coup de main
as a personal insult, which it kind of was, since the decision to eliminate agriculture was based at least in part on program results. As the director spoke, they were speechless. Later in the day during coffee breaks, each launched into bouts of nostalgia, as if the agricultural program were a dying human, followed by sentimental self-praise at all the remarkable things the program had done over the years.

The next day, I had my final medical checkup in the office. I gave another fecal sample; I got another physical; the doctor listened to my heart, thought I might have a heart murmur, then said never mind; I carried a urine sample of mine across town in a bag and it broke open and got all over me and I just laughed (two years earlier I would have cursed); I took a blood test (all clear!); I got some good food in my stomach but wondered what the point was since in a couple of months I’d be back in the U.S. gorging burritos at an alarming rate.

After another day in the big city, we all returned for our final weeks in site.