The Gringo: A Memoir (7 page)

“Is this something we should be worried about?” I asked.

“No,” said all the aunts. “This family has respect in this community, so no one would ever even try to come onto our property and hassle us.”

Sandra told me that back in December, a few months before I arrived, they’d had a spree of gang-related broad-daylight murders in the streets of Chone. It got so bad that all bars had to close down for a few months. I’d talked about this with Juan, too. Even he was afraid to be outside after dark—in Chone or La Segua.

Was this something we should be worried about? I asked.

Again, the answer was no. Things had toned down since then.

Still, almost weekly we heard news of someone in a nearby community getting decapitated after a drunken argument and a machete fight. These stories, like the shootings, were verifiable in the local newspaper and usually the result of long-standing family rivalries or revenge for such high crimes as letting a cow wander onto someone else’s property. Sandra talked about these other places like they were hell on earth; I’d been to a few of them around the outskirts of Chone, and they looked about the same as my community.

What it all amounted to was that people in the region seemed to be adept at living up to their reputation for barbaric violence. Back in training when I’d heard that this area was the “most dangerous part of the country,” I thought it was more of a folkloric warning—the way people talk about the Old West. I assumed that stories about people resolving their conflicts with the same tools they used to clear brush was something that happened either back in the day or farther out in the boonies. Apparently this wasn’t the case.

But apparently I had nothing to worry about.

Sandra also liked sharing general wisdom and life advice with me. She said I should find myself a woman there and stay forever. Then came the generic conversation about girlfriends I’d had in the past and the sexual habits of gringos. When I told her it’s not unusual for gringos to have sex before marriage, she looked disgusted. “We—people here—don’t have sex before marriage.”

The following day, Sandra’s unwed, pregnant sister arrived from out of town for an indefinite stay at our house. The pregnancy was seven or eight months along, and the sister had turned fifteen just a few months back.

CHAPTER
13

W
hen Juan disappeared for days at a time, his departure was quick and mysterious. I’d wake up and he’d be gone without a trace.

But when he was around, he was ubiquitous: He would ask me for money; knock on my door at 4:30 a.m. to ask if I could do his cousin’s English homework (I told him not to knock that early again unless there was a life-threatening emergency); ask to borrow my camera indefinitely; stare at me without a word, nostrils flared and eyes glazed over, as I ate dinner; and watch me through my window while I slept as he “fed the chickens” at the crack of dawn (I caught him doing this several times).

After going away, he’d always reappear a few days later and announce that we had lots of work to do. Periodically, his group of guides would get together at the Mendoza house. Juan would do all the talking. Mostly the discussion revolved around setting the agenda for
other
meetings that would happen at an unspecified time in the future.

At the first official meeting of the Association of Ecotourism Guides of Humedal La Segua, I introduced myself and explained the role of the Peace Corps volunteer. I described that I’d be there for two years, that the Peace Corps’ purpose was to do development projects in other parts of the world, and that it was also about a cultural exchange of sorts. I explained that as a natural resource conservation volunteer, I was to work with their group but also to find some community projects on the side. (I had actually given this little speech several times in Juan’s presence, and every time I made the last point, he became visibly uncomfortable, the veins in his mammoth-sized neck bulging and his nostrils flaring more than usual.) I finished by telling them about the interviews I’d have to do for my Community Assessment Tools presentation. At that news, Juan began to squirm in his chair.

The other six guides said they were really happy to have me there. They appeared interested in where I was from and how I could help them. Besides Juan, who was president of the group—the “maximum authority,” as he put it—there was Ignacio, the vice president. He was a classmate of Juan’s at the university and also a recent recipient of a degree in tourism.

Ignacio and I got along. He was a workout enthusiast who, when he wasn’t pumping iron, was cultivating an encyclopedic knowledge of Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme films. When I’d see him for the first time in a day, he’d often greet me with a broken-English version of a signature line such as “I am the law.” He would throw it out there in Spanish and then road test his elementary English. He was heartbroken to learn it’d been over a decade since I’d seen a movie starring either of his idols.

The guide named Carlos was about five foot five and 225 pounds, with a rat-tail hairdo crawling down his neck. He was a big fan of Bon Jovi. He was not, however, much of a fan of anything pertaining to the wetland. That, and his lack of a tourism degree—or any schooling beyond the fifth grade—made me wonder why he was in the group. He lived a short way down the road from the Mendoza farm and was always hanging around.

I recognized the thirtysomething woman I’d met briefly during my site visit, who was joined by another woman of about the same age from the next town down the road. She had a raspy voice and was always smiling.

There was also a man in his late twenties named Darwin (a common name in Ecuador), who claimed to be a lawyer, but spent all day riding up and down the road on a child-sized bicycle.

The last member was a young guy whose name I could never remember. The first time I met him, Juan pulled me aside and warned me that he couldn’t be trusted. I asked Juan for details and all he said was, “Look, he
can’t
be trusted. There are certain things you can’t say around him—I’ll tell you about that later—but just remember not to trust him.” Nevertheless, he was a fully registered and licensed ecotourism guide in Juan’s association.

IN THOSE INITIAL WEEKS, I
got dragged around, primarily between La Segua and Chone, for more “meetings.” A lot of it was further gringo show-and-tell, but I didn’t mind it much at first because it kept me busy. At the time, I occasionally got on the phone with other volunteer friends of mine and heard about how they were sitting inside all day reading books, dreading having to go outside—because of shyness or culture shock or the heat—and
do something
(such as their Community Assessment Tools interviews).

One night Juan and Ignacio informed me that the next morning we’d be taking a two-hour bus ride south to the provincial capital, Portoviejo, for a meeting at the government office of tourism. Ignacio pulled me aside as we were about to go home for the night. He had a somber look on his face.

“Grigsby, as you know, we’re a new organization that is just beginning . . .”

“Yes,” I said.

“And someday our group is going to have money—
a lot
of money. But right now we don’t, so we were wondering if tomorrow you could pay for our bus fare.”

“How much will it cost?”

“Umm, about $1.25 each way, so $2.50.”

“So neither of you guys have $2.50?”

“Well, uh, you see, um, yeah, we do.”

“You
do
?”

“Yes, we do. Of course we do!” he said. “Of course we have $2.50! What did you think?”

“Then why do you need me to pay for you if you have the money?”

He looked at me as if I was the one who just didn’t understand.

“Okay,” he said. “We have the money for the bus, but that’s not it. Also, we’ll need lunch when we get down there.”

“All right, what’s lunch, another $2.00?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, I’d be happy to help out, but you don’t have another $2.00—$4.50 total?”

“No, I do—we both do. Of course we do,” he said. His face twitched in what could have been a wink or a grimace.

“Then it sounds like you guys are all set.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

Portoviejo was another sweaty inland hell. The meeting turned out to be Juan printing a few pages of something off someone else’s computer, signing it, and then handing it to a woman behind a desk. We also picked up some Department of Tourism materials like Galápagos postcards and free calendars. Before we left Portoviejo that afternoon, I went into a music store and spent eighty dollars on the only steel-stringed acoustic guitar I could find.

The one other time I saw Portoviejo was a few weeks later when we returned as part of a tourism expo. Groups of guides from different attractions in the coastal region had table displays showing off what their area had to offer, with fancy brochures and trinkets and posters. At our table, Juan’s papier-mâché model of La Segua’s wetland sat on a Styrofoam block. It was a little embarrassing, but when some fellow guides from different places informed us we could visit them for free in the future, Juan declared the day a success.

After a few consecutive weeks of nonstop meetings that weren’t really meetings, I told Juan it might be more efficient if I spent some time introducing myself around the community and doing my interviews while he took care of his errands himself. I did the best I could to explain that most of his errands were “one-person jobs.” I knew that by coming to a third-world country and talking about using time efficiently, I was fulfilling the most typical gringo stereotype. But an entire month of Juan wanting to be next to me at all times—insisting that he accompany me into Chone to buy toilet paper or demanding that I come to his university with him so he could get a document signed—was unbearable. He harrumphed and protested, saying that I
needed
to be everywhere he was because we represented the Association of Ecotourism Guides of Humedal La Segua together. But Juan eventually gave up and slunk away. It turned out to not matter, because soon after, he disappeared again.

I took the opportunity to get out in the community.

The predetermined Community Assessment Tool interview questions included all sorts of things, such as what conditions their houses were in, how many people were in the family, and what they did for a living. It also had questions about family income and local resources.

For the volunteers in our group more inclined toward conspiracy theories, this assignment set off some red flags, given that Ecuador was in the oil-rich Amazonian region that had been exploited for years by foreign companies. “Think about it,” one volunteer said to me months later. “Our government is eventually collecting all these reports that include the vital statistics of these small communities that in some cases sit on top of extremely valuable resources.” I suggested that if someone in the State Department was actually taking a look at CAT reports from Peace Corps volunteers in Ecuador, we had bigger problems to worry about.

I walked alone on the dusty road and knocked on doors to introduce myself. Generally, people were excited to talk to me. A lot of the time they were baffled by the questions, so I ultimately entered homes on the pretense of the interview but ended up just sitting down with them to explain who I was and why I was there. Some couldn’t contain their awe at the prospect of an American coming to live in their community and work with them for a couple of years.

Once or twice, the people never invited me inside, and I stood on their doorstep asking the simple questions. Then they’d bark the question back to someone inside and wait for them to yell back the answer—even when I asked things like whether they had an indoor bathroom. At one house, I was so intimidated by the way a family looked at me as I stood at their door that I wrote down their names and ages, told them that was the entire interview, and left.

To most of the families, I described some of the projects I could get involved in—vague things about compost and fertilizers that I’d sort of learned during training. They nodded their heads enthusiastically. Next I’d mention that my primary job there was to work with the group of guides on the wetland, at which point people would clam up. Were they aware of who the group was and what it was doing? Sure, they nodded. But they would never say much about it.

I found out some interesting facts during my interviews: The wetland was actually divided up among fiftysome owners, the majority of whom were
not
Mendozas. And most of those landowners made up an organization—a cross between a cooperative and a homeowner’s association—that got together to make decisions on matters pertaining to the wetland. Many of these people lived on the edge of the wetland and owned a section of land going into it, where they fished or set up a shrimpery. Others just lived somewhere between La Segua and Chone and owned a parcel of the wetland, either leasing it to fishermen or keeping it as a piece of real estate.

Also, a decade before, another group of guides had attempted to exploit the wetland for tourism. They had no success and dissolved.

Walking back along the highway in the pressing heat after a day of interviews, I experienced my first true bout of loneliness. It began in the pit of my stomach and reached out into the rest of my body. It felt as though the life had been sucked out of every one of my muscles. Everything seemed to be piling up: It was hot, it was dirty, and now even my internal organs felt lonesome. I went back to the house and sat in my room playing Johnny Cash and Van Morrison songs on my guitar.

THE NEXT TIME I SAW
Ignacio, I told him about my interviews and what I’d discovered about the co-op of landowners. “So there are all these plans to open up the wetland to tourism, but have any of you from the group of guides spoken with the head of their group?” I said.

“No, we don’t need to,” he said.

“That’s not a little strange?”

“Strange how?”

“Maybe,” I said, “it would help to coordinate with them in some way—to tell them what we’d like to do so they can help us and there’s no confusion.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “Those people already have the land. They have everything they need. They have land and they have money.” He made gestures with his arms out toward the wetland. We were standing in a cloud of dust waiting for a bus to come by. “So why would we have anything to do with them? No, no, no. Juan and I—we work for the people around here who don’t have anything. They’re the ones who need our help because they don’t have land or anything like that.”