The Gringo: A Memoir (3 page)

CHAPTER
6

A
couple of weeks after arriving in Ecuador, we traveled to a farm an hour outside Cayambe for what the Peace Corps called a “technical training.” We spent the day in groups of six going from station to station doing things like making a seedbed, raking clean a field so a greenhouse could be built, and turning guinea pig urine into a good fertilizer. Guinea pigs are also considered a delicacy in this area of the Andes, and at lunch we all watched one get prepared for eating, which included a grisly skull crushing.

In the afternoon, we continued working until we got to our last station of the day: tree grafting. Our co-trainer—one of the four volunteers who spent the final months of his service helping prepare the fresh recruits—had a fat dip of chewing tobacco in his lip as he proceeded to explain the several different methods of grafting.

“How many trees did you graft over the last two years?” I asked.

He looked up at me and then turned to discharge a mouthful of golden-brown saliva.

“I learned how to graft trees this morning,” he said, “on Wikipedia.”

THROUGHOUT THOSE WEEKS, WE’D GET
visits from current volunteers, already neck-deep in their service or approaching the end. Some of them came to describe their projects to us. Then during breaks between sessions, over cookies and soda, they’d lean in to whisper things like, “Forget all this shit, man. When you get out to your site, everything changes. They [Peace Corps personnel in Quito] will forget about you and it’s a complete shit show,” or “Dude, don’t take your malaria medicine, that’s a load of shit,” or “Dude, fuck that policy about sending a text message every single time you leave your site. I traveled this entire country without telling those assholes where I was.”

During safety and security sessions, current volunteers would tell us their cautionary tales of getting robbed on buses or mugged in the major city Guayaquil or having their backpack stolen in an elaborate spilled-mustard scheme. One story that stuck out in my mind came from a woman roughly my age who’d been located near Guayaquil for the previous year. She stood up in front of our group of over forty, seated in a semicircle on those campground-style benches, and talked about how she and two visiting friends got into a cab late one night. The next thing they knew, she said, the cab slowed to a stop, and men with guns got out of a car in front of them and forced their way into the cab. With the gun barrels pressed against their temples, the women were driven to the nearest ATM. After draining the money from all their bank accounts, the gunmen dropped them out of the cab in an unfamiliar neighborhood far on the outskirts of Guayaquil. Without money or cell phones, the three of them were left to knock on a stranger’s door and beg for help.

By the time she finished telling her story, she was shaking slightly, clearly traumatized at having to relive the details of her “express kidnapping” for our edification. Normally, when these storytelling sessions—usually concerning run-of-the-mill larcenies—ended, we trainees politely clapped as the speaker stepped down off the stage. This time, clapping seemed out of place, so instead we slow clapped, like you see in cliché sports movies. The clapping faded and the woman walked outside. She didn’t stick around for a meet-and-greet session during free time.

The safety and security sessions were usually capped off with some crime and rape statistics and a chitchat from the country director about how we’d be totally fucked if we got caught doing drugs or messing with an underage girl. If we thought we’d be cut some slack or some diplomatic strings would be pulled for us in the event of getting caught up in anything even slightly resembling a Led Zeppelin backstage party, we were wrong.

Other official policies (easily referenced in the Peace Corps Ecuador
Volunteer Handbook
) were served to us in heaping doses. Chief among them was the Out of Site Policy. If we thought volunteer travel in country was going to be a free-for-all like it was under the previous country director, we had to think again. We would not be allowed to leave our sites for the first three months. This news was received by the trainees with so much devastation you’d have thought it was a personal insult.

After the three months, however, we would be allotted six out-of-site days a month, which could be used in no more than three-day/two-night consecutive chunks. If we planned to leave our site, we had to send a text message to our program manager, our assistant program manager, and our community counterpart, both when we left and when we returned.

This permissible time away was most certainly not for just shits and giggles. As stated in our policy handbook, we needed to use those days primarily for activities like buying groceries, going to the bank, and getting supplies. The list of acceptable excuses for leaving included “mental health days” and ended with “etc.”

As with all other rule breaking, the penalty for not adhering to any of the aforementioned out-of-site bylaws was “Administrative Separation”—a fancy term for getting kicked out. (Administrative Separation entailed getting immediately pulled from your site and sent on a flight back home after spending about thirty-six hours in Quito filling out paperwork concerning your incomplete service.) The way the country director and training manager kept repeating the term “Administrative Separation” and writing it on training materials gave it a chilling, Orwellian connotation. It was as though Administrative Separation was a living thing—a burly monster lurking over your shoulder, ready to catch you in the act of breaking a rule so it could black-flag you from ever getting a government job and, among other things, ruin your life.

If we operated any motorized vehicle, we would be Administratively Separated.

If we failed to take our malaria medications, we would be Administratively Separated.

If we entered any of the areas along the Colombian border that were off-limits to personnel in the American Mission, we would be Administratively Separated.

If we engaged in any public nudity, we would be Administratively Separated. (Although, the
Volunteer Handbook
omitted the word “public” before “nudity,” making for an amusing predicament.)

If we so much as whiffed any illegal drugs, we would be Administratively Separated and left to the Ecuadorian authorities to be dealt with in ways that I’m sure would have made
Midnight Express
look like a picnic. The country director added with a wry smile that if we got in trouble for drugs, the U.S. government would
not
help us get out of jail.

In fact, if there were even
rumors
in the communities about illegal drug use by a volunteer, he or she would be Administratively Separated.

If we engaged in sexual contact with someone under the age of eighteen, we would be Administratively Separated. We were also told—incorrectly, I later learned—that this would be a violation of the United States Protect Act.

If we went to certain beaches, we would be Administratively Separated.

If we hung out in the Mariscal, the grotesquely backpacker-friendly party neighborhood of Quito, past 2 a.m., we would be—
wait for it!
—Administratively Separated.

If we went to Baños, a town at the base of an active volcano that oddly attracts lots of tourists, we would be Administratively Separated. (A woman in our group found this out the hard way after three months in site.)

Medical Separations were kind of like benign cousins of Administrative Separations; they were mostly for people who got serious injuries and couldn’t recover in a reasonable enough time to return to their country of service. Regarding Medical Separations, there was a lot of ambiguous language in the handbook, but I was amused by one topic: If volunteers got one abortion, they were okay. If they got a second, they would likely be . . . Medically Separated.

Last but not least, if we acted in any way that compromised the integrity of the Peace Corps, we would be Administratively Separated—a vague rule, but it struck me as the best one in the handbook because it could have replaced all the others, thereby treating us like the adults they had trusted enough to accept into the Peace Corps.

We would come to find out later that, even when in violation of said policies, volunteers were never truly
kicked out
. Instead, they were given a forty-eight-hour grace period in which they could choose to Early Terminate, thus avoiding a blackballing from all government jobs forever.

CHAPTER
7

F
rom the training facility in Cayambe, I had a forty-five-minute bus ride back to my host family’s home in Olmedo. The village has an elevation of around 10,000 feet, making it chilly at night with a scorching sun during the day, much like the Colorado mountain towns where I skied growing up. Four other trainees were scattered about Olmedo, living with other host families. The five of us had the same language trainer, Javier, who also lived there.

The small town had one big cobblestone street down the middle with a few dirt side streets. The quiet emptiness of Olmedo was occasionally interrupted by pickup trucks rumbling down the street with screeching bullhorns on top. The words coming from the bullhorn were too fast and shrill for me to make out. I once asked Javier what they were saying. “They’re giving some sort of political message,” he said. He paused for a moment. “Oh, no, wait, they’re selling pumpkins.”

On the first day that I arrived at my host family’s house, Papi Juan, the patriarch, greeted me wearing a University of Colorado ball cap. I came to find out that Papi Juan was one of the most popular men in town. He was kind, smiled a lot, and had a big chuckle that would make his dentures nearly fall from his mouth. Papi Juan was fun—and an alcoholic.

He said that I was the fourth
gringuito
they had hosted and apparently not the first from Colorado. As it turned out, the previous Peace Corps trainee was, like me, from Boulder. I later discovered he also went to my high school.

Parked in front of the house was a former school bus that Papi Juan owned and used every day to take laborers back and forth between the flower-picking factories. These were basically industrial-size greenhouses where Papi Juan described the workers being badly treated and breathing in chemicals all day while they picked and sorted flowers that got shipped off to North America.

The host family took a liking to me right away. After one try at pronouncing the name I go by, they asked me what my other name was. My first name, James, which only gets used by credit card companies and substitute teachers, proved to be much easier for them to pronounce, so that’s what they called me.

I lived in the same room of their house that the previous gringos had slept in; each night I fell asleep below a wall shrine of photos and souvenirs dedicated to the Peace Corps trainees that had come before me. It was a four-room house, including my bedroom, Papi Juan and his wife’s bedroom, the kitchen, and a living area decorated with a serious amount of Catholic paraphernalia.

In preparation for my arrival, I could tell they’d tidied things up, including waxing the floors with leaded diesel. A combination of that aroma and the high altitude usually meant that before going to bed, I’d tucker out after about ten push-ups on my bedroom floor.

My second weekend there, Papi Juan took me fishing a few hours away. We drove through the gorgeous
paramo
scenery of shrubs and clear mountain lakes, and when we passed through the clouds on an extra steep section of road, the car almost broke down. Sucking down a cigarette, Papi Juan instructed me to get out and run alongside the car so it could make it over the mountain pass.

Another weekend, I came back late from drinking with fellow trainees in a Cayambe bar, only to find Papi Juan about ten times drunker than I was. He roped me into listening to a slurring soliloquy delivered as a half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips and he demanded more beer from his wife. Before long, things devolved into a slobbering slush of words and tears when Papi Juan remarked that I’d be leaving him in only a few short weeks to go live with those “monkeys” on the coast. (Ecuadorians of the highlands or Amazon regions refer to those living on the coast as monkeys—
monos
—either because of thinly veiled racism or because of the coast-dwellers’ huge consumption of bananas; the first time I heard them talking about
monos
, it took several minutes before I realized they were talking about humans.)

Papi Juan put his head down on the dining room table like a man in the throes of grief. When he looked up, I saw tears streaking down his face. His cigarette stained the wood. “You’re like my son,” he said. “And now you’re leaving me.
leaving me
!” He banged the table with his fist. He cried more and hugged me and asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I told him I didn’t smoke. He told me his family was going to miss me a lot and that he loved tobacco and beer very much. I would miss them, too, I said. His crying let up and I told him that it was going to be okay and that I would visit them every chance I got.

Papi Juan kept on crying. Throughout this time, his dentures (I hadn’t confirmed they were false teeth until he’d had a fish bone–choking episode a few days before and launched them onto the kitchen table) kept slipping out of his mouth. He cried and mumbled some more and lit up another cigarette. All the while, I, his wife, his daughter, and his two tiny grandchildren looked on and said nothing.

One Saturday morning, Papi Juan sat at breakfast talking about the training communities where the other Peace Corps trainees lived.

“I don’t know how they can live there,” he said. He was referring to other villages tucked in the same valley, below the Cayambe Volcano. He went on, “The people in those communities—it’s another class of people”—he paused for effect—“they’re
indigenous people
.” I left the house to go play basketball and returned that afternoon to see Papi Juan bathing nude by the washbasin in the backyard.

Most of the time, things were fine in that house. They treated me—their little gringo—with a reverence that was usually flattering. (Though sometimes it was insulting, like when they thought I was incapable of boiling water on my own.) I became friends with Papi Juan’s wife, Marta, who would sit me down and treat me to some monologues of her own. In one, she shared with me a complete breakdown of their finances. In another, I learned that Marta’s sister had saved up money and moved to Spain, but no one had heard from her since. Earlier that week in training, we’d attended a presentation on the different forms of human trafficking in Ecuador, including hoaxes that led women to believe they were getting a deal with a visa and flight to Spain. They were sold into sex slavery instead and held captive for the rest of their lives.

AT THIS POINT IN TRAINING,
it was time for each trainee to take a three-day visit to his or her site to find out what life would be like for the next two years. Mine was named La Segua, located just outside the city of Chone in the coastal province of Manabí.

On the day I received my site assignment, my program manager—that is, the head of the Department of Natural Resource Conservation in Peace Corps Ecuador—pulled me aside. His last name was Winkler. He was a squirrelly man with the physique of a horse jockey who was the product of an Ecuadorian mother of German descent and an American Peace Corps volunteer father.

As with all sites, Winkler explained, a community-based group in La Segua had filed an application with the Peace Corps Ecuador office requesting the services of a volunteer. Volunteers were allowed to read these applications, which contained some details about the community and the family they’d be living with.

Unlike most of my fellow trainees, though, I wouldn’t be replacing an outgoing volunteer. Typically, a newcomer went to a site that a current volunteer was about to leave, creating an endless cycle of gringos for that village. But in my case, I’d be the first gringo ever in La Segua, Manabí.

Winkler had some additional thoughts on La Segua. “Your site is the most rugged one we have here in Peace Corps Ecuador,” he told me. “We think you can take it.”

I felt proud that somehow in the previous six weeks of being bored and annoyed, I’d given them the impression that I could cut it in their most “rugged” site.

“What do you mean by ‘rugged’?” I asked him.

“Well, Chone—it’s kind of like the Wild West of Ecuador,” he said. “It’s just rough and the people are known for being a little aggressive—you’ll see.”

“That sounds good,” I said. It was just what I had gone there for.

It had been a long journey already. As a friend of mine stated, after all those months of waiting and putting up with the bullshit of the application process, it would have taken “something really fucked” to make him bail before his two years were up. I agreed. I was ready to set off into the rugged beyond.