The Yellow Envelope

by Kim Dinan

  Up ahead of us on the street corner stood a policewoman armed with an intimidating rifle. I nodded in her direction. “Why don’t you ask that police officer for directions?” Brian looked skeptical. We’d been in Ecuador for less than 48-hours and the entirety of our Spanish vocabulary could be summed up in two words: hola and gracias.

  “Why don’t you ask her for directions? You’re the one who took Spanish for two years in college.”

  “All right, fine,” I said, irritated at having to take control. As I approached the policewoman I tried to conjure up a sentence in my head that would express my basic question: Which way to the statue? Was it safe to walk there?

  “Hola,” I said when I reached her. “¿Hablas inglés?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Err… Statue? ¿Arriba?” I pointed toward the direction of the hill. “Is it safe? To walk there?” I made little walking motions with my fingers and shrugged my shoulders.

  She cocked her head at me. “Walk? Safe?” I said again.

  It dawned on me that I was doing that annoying thing that tourists do when they’re trying to speak to someone in a foreign country. I talked slowly and emphatically, though not, unfortunately, in the native language.

  The policewoman smiled and fired off a quick sentence. My very limited comprehension of the language caught the words yes, walk, and statue.

  Smiling back at the woman I nodded my head like the words she’d just uttered made perfect sense. “Gracias,” I said. I felt confident so I added, “Muchas gracias.”

  “Well,” asked Brian when I returned. “What did she say?”

  “I have no idea. But I think she may have said that it is safe to walk to the statue and that we’re headed the right way.”

  “You sure?”

  “Fairly sure.”

  So we walked in the direction of the statue, waving at the policewoman as we passed her by.

  A few blocks later I turned to see her running after us, pumping her arms frantically above her head. When she caught up to us, her gigantic gun knocking haphazardly against her leg, she spoke in basic English that turned out to be much better than my broken Spanish. “Don’t walk. Very dangerous.” Then she pulled out her radio, said something into it, and asked us to wait with her. She looked concerned so Brian and I did as we were told.

  I glanced around me. Just minutes earlier the streets had been bustling with tourists and locals alike. Now, Brian and I and this cop were the only souls around. Suddenly, a police car shot around the corner and jolted to a stop in front of us. The policewoman opened the back door and gestured for us to get inside. I shot Brian a look. Before leaving on our trip I’d read online about corrupt cops robbing and kidnapping foreigners. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” I hissed to Brian.

  “What? We’re being coerced into an unknown vehicle in a foreign country by a woman with a semiautomatic rifle. What could go wrong?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” he said, and nudged me into the back of the car.

  There were two other men, cops presumably, in the front seat, so the officer wedged herself into the back with us.

  The driver issued us a bellowing hello and began peppering us with questions. Where were we from? How long would we be in Ecuador? Did we like their country? Wasn’t their country beautiful? “Amigos,” he said, wagging his finger at us in the rearview mirror. “El Panecillo is very dangerous. Many robberies. We will drive you instead.”

  “Gracias,” I said, using my word. The cop nodded and turned up the music, a fast-paced Latin beat, and I suddenly felt like I was cruising around town with a bunch of friends on a carefree Saturday afternoon. Sitting back in the seat, I let myself relax.

  My purse, a black, antitheft, cross shoulder bag that I’d paid a fortune for, sat tucked between my knees. I looked down at it and thought about the yellow envelope money. Before we’d left the states, Brian and I had discussed a system for distributing the money. We’d decided to keep the envelope stocked with the currency of the country we were visiting. When we found an opportunity that felt right, we’d give the money away. We’d restock the envelope as often as needed until the money ran out. I’d even set up an Excel spreadsheet to track the money as we gave it away. Although Michele and Glenn had said in the letter that we weren’t accountable to them, I wanted to be able to tell them exactly where their money had gone.

  I was hyperaware of the presence of the yellow envelope in my purse. During the few days we’d been on the road I felt almost manic about finding an opportunity to give the money away. But my vigilance sucked some fun out of our first few days of travel. Instead of relaxing into the trip, I’d been overthinking every interaction even though rule number one of the yellow envelope specifically instructed me not to. Was this an opportunity to give? I’d wonder. And while living in that state of mind sort of made me feel like a magical fairy sent to bestow kindness on the unsuspecting masses, it also put me in my head too much and pulled me out of the moment.

  I leaned into Brian. “Assuming we make it up to the statue alive, should we give some yellow envelope money to the cops?”

  Brian looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “They’re cops,” he said. “We can’t give money to cops. What if they think it’s some kind of bribe?”

  “But they’re being so nice to us.”

  “That’s their job. We can’t just hand them a wad of money without explaining why.”

  He had a point. I looked out the window while the car climbed in zigzags up the hill and watched as colorful, colonial, Old Town passed by.

  When we reached the statue Brian and I climbed out of the car and thanked the cops for the lift. They made us promise to take a taxi back down the hill. “And make sure to tell all of your friends to come visit us in Ecuador,” said the driver.

  “We will,” I promised.

  I slung my knife-proof, lockable, ridiculous purse across my shoulder and waved as the cops pulled away. Our inaugural yellow envelope gift would have to wait.

  • • •

  Ecuador was a beautiful country, mountainous and green. Outside of the city, women in brightly embroidered clothes sat in doorways like decorations, their dark, braided hair roping down their backs. Tropical plants grew alongside the highway in luminous pinks and yellows. The people were wonderfully kind, unrushed, and quick to smile.

  It was shocking how fast life could change. Just a few weeks earlier I’d been hunched over my cubicle like a troll protecting a bridge—toiling away at a job I’d been unhappy at for years—and suddenly I was in Ecuador—dirty and wandering and covered in bug bites—eating almuerzo from roadside stands. It felt like my soul had swapped bodies with the most exciting stranger.

  Brian and I spent three weeks traveling through the north of the country and then headed to Baños de Agua Santa, a tiny town tucked high into the Andes. Its claim to fame was an active volcano, Tungurahua, which loomed over the city and blew up on an unnervingly regular basis.

  Travelers we’d met in Quito had told us about a nonprofit in Baños called Arte del Mundo (Art of the World). Arte del Mundo, nicknamed La Bib (the library) promoted literacy and the arts to the children of Baños. Volunteers came from all over the world to live and work at La Bib. Brian and I signed up to volunteer. We were already looking forward to unpacking our backpacks and calling someplace home for more than two days at a time.

  Our bus dropped us at the station, and we slung our backpacks on and walked toward the center of town. We tracked down La Bib without a problem—it was hard to get lost in Baños—and were greeted at the gate by Jane, a relaxed and refreshingly unbothered twenty-six-year-old British girl with a round face and a splash of freckles across her nose. She smiled, shook our hands, and said, “Nice to meet you,” then introduced us to Blake, a gruff Scotsman with a scraggly beard who appeared to be in his
forties. Blake practically levitated with pent-up energy and reminded me of my childhood dog, Taffy, who used to convulse uncontrollably when presented with her leash.

  Blake showed us to a sparse but adequate room. A double bed stood in the corner, and two grimy windows looked out over the gravel yard of La Bib. On the back of the bedroom door someone had taped hand-drawn instructions of an evacuation route through town in the event of a volcanic explosion.

  “Come on down once you’ve unpacked,” said Blake, “and I’ll give you a tour of the place.”

  The walls in our bedroom were peeling and water stained, and the floor in the hallway creaked. Still, it was nice to have a place to call home for a few weeks. We unpacked our bags and hung our clothes from a wooden rod propped against the wall, our makeshift closet.

  “Not too shabby,” said Brian, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to him. “What do you think?”

  I sat down. “I like it.”

  Lying back in bed, I ran my hand over the worn quilt and looked at Brian. “Do you miss our house when we’re staying in rooms like this?” It was hard to admit it, but I felt incredibly homesick. I missed Wendy and my coworkers. I missed my sisters and my parents. Even though I didn’t talk to them every day back in Portland, I’d never realized how comforting it had been to know they were just a phone call away.

  Before now, it had never occurred to me how proud I’d been of our little house and our good careers, of the life we’d built for ourselves from scratch in Oregon. Without all of the material things that had once surrounded me, I felt suddenly disoriented. I’d never thought of myself as someone attached to my stuff, but it’d been harder than expected to let go of it all, and now that I no longer owned any of it, I felt like a piece of my identity had been stripped away. Without realizing it, I’d allowed my stuff to speak for me. My marathon bibs said I’m a runner. My outdoor gear said I’m a nature lover. Even living in Portland had become a huge piece of my identity. But now all of that was gone.

  Brian leaned back in bed beside me and grabbed my hand. “I miss our house,” he said. “I miss a lot of things.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Me too.” When we left Portland we’d given up a whole way of life. And I realized, quite to my astonishment, that I mourned the loss of that life.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were missing home?” I asked, trying to remember the last meaningful conversation that Brian and I had. Nothing came to mind. Adjusting to our new reality took up so much mental space that we spoke of nothing else. It wasn’t just friends and family that I missed, I realized. I missed him too.

  “I just did.”

  Standing, I walked to the window and looked out at the dark-green slope of mountains. During all of the time I’d spent planning and daydreaming for our trip I’d never really considered that traveling might be hard. That seemed so foolish now. “It’s weird that we can’t go back, huh?”

  Brian raised his eyebrows at me and ran a hand through his red beard.

  “I mean, I don’t want to,” I said, backpedaling. “But it’s strange to think we don’t have a life in Portland anymore.”

  Brian sat up on the bed. “Are you wishing we hadn’t done this? It’s what you wanted, Kim.”

  “I know, I know.” I turned toward the bed and looked Brian in the eye. He stared hard at me, anger furrowed in the arch of his brow. I lowered my eyes. “I’m happy we’re here.”

  It wasn’t completely true, but it was the part of the truth I felt comfortable telling.

  Later we found Blake in his office scribbling into a notebook.

  “Come, follow me,” he said when he saw us, darting out into the yard and up an exterior staircase.

  “Bedrooms are here, but you know that. The classroom is here, the bookshelf is there,” Blake said, pointing from room to room as we tromped down the hall.

  “You can read the books, but do not take them.” He looked at us accusingly like we’d just tried to stuff them down our pants.

  “The bathroom’s here.” He nudged open a hollow wooden door with his foot.

  “The water is hot, but you need to pull this lever to turn it on.” He leaned down and cranked a nozzle in an exposed pipe to demonstrate. He flicked off the light. “Always turn off the light!”

  He turned to leave but thought better of it, thumbed the light back on again and pointed toward a space at the left of the sink. “This rag here is what we call the floor towel.” My eyes wandered over to a pink towel hanging limply on a hook. “You have to put it over the drain to keep the cockroaches out.”

  I shot a look at Brian and Blake saw it.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, and the tone of his voice gave me the distinct impression that he thought I was being a baby. “The big ones only come out at night.”

  • • •

  We were living at La Bib with four other volunteers. There was Stephanie, a smart and serious young teacher from Philadelphia who left her job at a prep school to teach in South America. Louisa, a mature-for-her-age recent college grad taking eight months off to perfect her already-proficient Spanish before heading to medical school, and Alice and Carver, a couple from South Africa who met in Australia and had traveled around South America for the past seven months. They were in their mid and late thirties and, like us, left careers and stable lives behind in order to see the world.

  Later in the day we were called to an orientation meeting. We sat around a large, rectangular table in an airy classroom, the walls covered in peeling blue paint, and introduced ourselves. When my turn came I explained, nervously, that Brian and I had quit our jobs and sold everything, that we were now on an open-ended trip around the world, and Ecuador was our first stop. I was embarrassed because I felt like the declaration sounded braggy or flaky or both. So it surprised me when the group erupted in applause. Blake even let out a “woot!”

  “Amazing choice,” said Carver. He leaned over and clapped Brian on the back. “You won’t regret it.”

  Alice said, “I’ve come home from traveling and then left again so many times that my family thinks I’m truly mental.”

  Back home, our decision to travel had seemed so counterculture, so extreme. And on a few occasions, we’d had to defend our decision to acquaintances and colleagues—even family—who accused us of being irresponsible and selfish. But here we were sitting around a table with a whole group of people who were doing the same thing. Outside of our daily bubble, long-term travel seemed like the most normal thing in the world.

  Jane gave us the lowdown on what our day-to-day experiences would be like at La Bib. The children arrived at three thirty each afternoon, and we would read with them for half an hour. Afterward, we’d conduct an activity focused on creativity and art.

  Blake told us about volunteer expectations. He rattled them off like a shopping list. We were expected to keep our living space clean, to treat each other with respect, and to participate in all meetings and activities. We were expected to represent ourselves well while we were out in public in Baños. It was a small town, and people talked.

  “No drugs! No going home with the locals! No bringing the locals home with you! No getting drunk and making a scene in the streets!” Blake practically lost his mind at the thought of it.

  “You won’t imagine what some people do here,” he continued. “We had a lady, a mother, if you can believe it, giving blow jobs to guys in the bathroom of a bar.”

  I looked around to see if anyone else was as shocked as I was that Blake was telling us this.

  “We had to kick her out. What other choice did we have?” He scanned the room like we had just accused him of being an asshole for doing it. I saw Alice in the corner shaking her head as if to say, “No, you had no choice.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what we’ve had to put up with.” He paused, took a breath, and slapped the table with this hand. His lips curle
d into a smile and the red tint of rage drained slightly from his face. “But this looks like a good group. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with you.”

  He kept doing that, telling us how bad he’d had it but then assuring us that we surely wouldn’t disappoint and embarrass him the way the others had.

  Each day at exactly 3:30 p.m. we rolled up the door to La Bib and the kids came bounding in and bowled me over with their energy. They talked in hurried Spanish, but even though Brian and I were taking Spanish language courses each morning, I couldn’t understand a word they said. Oftentimes I felt overwhelmed and, ridiculously, like I could cry. It was so frustrating not knowing the language.

  I developed a coping mechanism for dealing with reading time. I’d choose an illustrated book with the name of the pictured item listed in both English and Spanish, and I’d sit down on a beanbag chair and practice my elementary-level vocabulary.

  During orientation, Blake had filled us in on some of the kids. One little girl named Agatha hung back during reading time. She preferred to sit alone in the corner with a pile of books instead of teaming up to read with a volunteer. Blake said that her father had died the year before and that his loss had been hard on the family and especially hard on Agatha. Her reading comprehension had stalled, and she skipped many afternoons at La Bib because she had to stay home to help her mother with the housework and care for her younger siblings.

  Her story touched me, and while pretending to read, I’d peek at Agatha over my board books and cook up elaborate ways to give yellow envelope money to her family, then talk myself out of each one. First I decided that I would find out where she lived and anonymously drop money in her mailbox. But that wouldn’t work, because no one even had mailboxes. Next I decided to start a college fund for Agatha and her siblings, but then determined that my measly contribution wouldn’t make any difference.

  Agatha’s sad brown eyes scanned the page before her, her body slumped away from the rest of the room. I knew that even if I figured out how to pull off some kind of Oprah-like giveaway, no amount of money would bring back the one thing she needed most.