The Gringo: A Memoir

by J. Grigsby Crawford

  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

  From 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–cho
king 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.

  CHAPTER 8

  First it’s the heat. The heat is what hits you first.

  La Segua sits about an hour inland from the coastline and belongs to a large wasteland of sweaty, beaten terrain that gets pounded, in intervals, by heat and rain. Winkler had remarked that it was the Wild West of Ecuador. To me it felt like swamplands in the Deep South—the antebellum South.

  The province of Manabí is the anti–bread basket of Ecuador. It’s low, if not the lowest, in all the statistics you want to be high in—literacy, production, health—and high in all the ones you want to be low in—poverty, domestic violence, hunger. The people there wake up every morning and get kicked in the face by life. Every day is a battle and they’re losing.

  As a Peace Corps site, it was perfect. You name it—plumbing, running water, stable electricity, post–elementary school educations—and they didn’t have it. The bar was so low that the possibilities for improving the quality of life seemed endless.

  Approaching La Segua from the north, you pass a giant landfill between the highway and the ocean. The toxic runoff from the fill drains down toward a shrimp farm leading out to sea. Wisps of smoke and sick-looking pelicans perch atop the mounds of smoldering gray waste in a postapocalyptic image.

  The chief export of Manabí, technically speaking, is bananas. But if you ask anyone else in Ecuador, the chief export of Manabí is laziness. It’s the unique brand of stereotype that, if true, is at least forgivable. On either side of the highway, I saw an endless landscape of potbellied men swinging from hammocks, with a machete in one hand and a beer in the other. In the heat and with so little going on, their sloth is understandable—not to mention that with every meal being a variation on rice and plantain, there was literally a finite amount of energy your body could exert.

  It is a strange place with strange stories. But mostly, it is a land of distrust.

  BEFORE WE LEFT CAYAMBE FOR our short visits, our program managers gave us a batch of information about our sites and the people we’d be teamed up with, known as our counterparts.

  These locals were described as heads of organizations or the community. Among other things, they were in charge of finding us our initial housing for the first few months. In addition to working with us, they were, in a sense, responsible for our well-being. For instance, if we ever left our site—even for a day—we were supposed to notify them when we left and when we returned.

  Throughout training, counterparts had been described to us as figures of authority, so you can imagine my surprise when my “boss” turned out to be a child.

  I stood on the dirty sidewalk of the bus station and called my counterpart to tell him I’d arrived.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  I told him I was standing over in the corner of the parking lot.

  There was a pause. “Oh, I see you,” he said. “I’m walking toward you now.”

  “I don’t see you yet. Are you sure you see me?”

  When I said this, he was standing about five yards away—directly in front of me. Expecting to see an adult, I’d been looking right past him.

  He was twenty years old (and fresh off a university degree in tourism—a fact he wasn’t about to let me forget, ever), but he looked no more than fifteen.

  He wore flip-flop sandals, short shorts that rose uncomfortably high on his thighs, a Fidel Castro–style green hat cocked to the side, and a green tank top that read in English, “Ca$h Rules Everything.”

  He was about five foot six and 120 pounds. In addition to the initial shock that my boss was younger—and indeed looked so much younger—than I, his appearance startled me. Everything about him was grossly out of proportion.

  His nose was enormous, and this is something I can say without feeling bad, because my own isn’t exactly petite. His, though, was crooked, leaning to one side just enough to make me wonder if it caused him respiratory problems. His nostrils, however, had a permanent flare to them that must have made up for any inhalation deficiencies caused by the crookedness. His neck was too big for his head—like a wrestler’s, but worse, since it wasn’t balanced out by large muscles elsewhere on his body.

  He had easily the largest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen on a human being. It bobbed up and down enthusiastically, as if doing calisthenics, every time he spoke. And, because the picture just wouldn’t have been comple
te without them, he had a set of pointy elfin ears shooting out from his head.

  When he removed his Fidel hat, he revealed a glistening helmet of hair slicked back with ungodly amounts of gel into an aggressive faux hawk. His hair and ears formed three towering, sinister peaks that all seemed to point directly at me no matter where I stood—like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.

  When he spoke, every vein in his neck bulged out, causing a disturbance that made it seem as though talking even at an indoor volume caused him pain. He would tilt his head at an angle and the rope-like veins and hyperactive Adam’s apple caused a commotion. As for his voice, there may be an actual medical term for it, but the best I can do is say he sounded like Kermit the Frog. Along with the neck’s peculiar components, it all combined for a perfect storm of verbal and physical cacophony.

  His feet were also large—noticeably larger than mine—particularly the toes, which is not insignificant since I was about half a foot taller. But it was his hands that got me the most. They were fit for a man twice his size. They were absolutely massive. Really—I can’t stress enough how truly gigantic and out of place his hands were. They were so disproportionately large for his body that, after a while, they were all I could look at. On top of their excessive size, he used them—in conjunction with his permanently puckered lips—in a manner that can only be described as effeminate. They were giant ogres of hands that moved daintily through the air and into pockets and across cell phone keypads as if they were scared of injuring the air around them.

  The combination of all this would horrify me for weeks to come.

  This was my boss. His name was Juan Mendoza.

  JUAN AND I MET IN the city of Chone, a place that—true to description—could have been one of those dusty old Western towns where the music stops when a stranger walks into the saloon. To get to where I was going to live, we hopped on a bus that took us about twenty-five minutes outside the city.