We got off and walked down a long driveway with rice fields on either side. It belonged to Juan’s family—a family that I would soon discover was this town. The Peace Corps information sheet I received for La Segua listed the population at a few hundred. It was actually quite a bit less than that where I lived because the documented figure included several surrounding communities. A more conservative estimate, according to the president of the community (a man who walked around barefoot and shirtless, even at town meetings) was 150. But still, it never felt like it, since everyone lived in small houses separated by acres of farmland.
The Mendoza family owned the majority of this land, which began as one giant farm that got divided up as the offspring multiplied. The farm I would live on was the original property settled by the now-deceased patriarch of the family who guaranteed future Mendoza dominance of the area by siring about twenty children with the same woman. About a dozen of these Mendozas, now ranging from their early thirties to late fifties, stuck around the area and spawned on average three kids each. So to say the Mendozas dominated the La Segua population is no exaggeration.
A hundred yards to the right of the farm sat a wooden house belonging to Juan’s uncle Homero, one of the many Mendoza brothers. To the left, at the end of the long mud driveway, was my new residence—an imposing three-story cinder-block structure surrounded by trash and chickens. Because the gaggle of aunts who worked around the clock in the second-story kitchen constantly dumped dirty water out the open windows, the swampy stench of moist chicken shit cocooned the house.
Juan walked me inside and began the not-so-easy task of introducing me to the Mendozas. It became clear that the answers he provided on my Peace Corps information sheet turned out to be half-truths that went well beyond just the town population. It said four other humans lived in the house I would sleep in. When I arrived, the actual figure hovered between a dozen and fifteen. I got the feeling there would be more, not fewer, as time went by.
There was the Mendoza family matriarch who was still going strong after spending the equivalent of fifteen years of her life pregnant. There were two of her daughters, who each had four toddlers. One of them also had a teenage girl with breasts so painfully enormous it’d be impossible not to mention them. There was another toddler in the mix and to this day I’m not sure whom he belonged to. And of course, there was Juan, who had moved into this same house—against Peace Corps regulations and the wishes of his extended family. His parents had their own farm in a nearby town but he apparently preferred it here.
Last but not least, there was a young mentally handicapped kid named Benicio. He wasn’t related to the Mendoza family and his origins only grew more mysterious to me over time. His main purpose around the house, it seemed, was to do chores. At first I found this endearing, until I realized that the family treated him more like an indentured servant. When I first met him, he seemed overly excited and stared at me—sometimes with intense curiosity, other times like he wanted to kill me. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out which room he slept in, a fact that was particularly disquieting because late at night, he took to hiding in dark corners of the house then popping out of the shadows as I passed by, scaring the living shit out of me. The first few times he did this, I nearly knocked him out cold out of reflex. Later my nerves calmed and it merely gave me the creeps.
When Benicio wasn’t stalking me, he continued doing chores around the house while dozens of Mendozas screamed at him. One night, when the grandmother was descaling fish in the kitchen, he crouched down and hit her legs with a cloth to keep the mosquitoes away; it reminded me of how farm animals line up and whip their tails to keep flies off one another.
Juan took me to the bottom floor to show me the room I’d be living in—a ten-by-fifteen-foot space enclosed by dungeon-like brick walls. The only window looked out to one of the puddles of chicken shit. The door was made from scrap plywood; it still had the spray-paint markings on it from the delivery crate it was pried from. I could have punched through it.
Juan iterated that this was the room that Pilar, Peace Corps Ecuador’s head of Safety and Security, had approved when she’d made a site-inspection visit months earlier.
“See,” Juan pointed, “we put netting over that window because she asked.”
He was right—no mosquitoes flew through the net he’d glued over the window; instead, they visibly swarmed through the ceiling gap between floors just a few feet away.
We turned around and Juan took me down the hall to the bathroom. It was a three-by-three-foot concrete basin with a bowl of water for pouring over yourself. There was no sink or running water.
If I needed a toilet, I had to use the outhouse. It was behind the house, through a maze of chickens, pigs, and used diapers strewn from the second-story windows. Between the hornet nest and the cockroaches and the spiders, the outhouse indeed scared the shit out of me. In addition to the other obstacles between the front door and outhouse, I had to cross through a labyrinth of barbed-wire clotheslines. The wire was at just above head level of my Ecuadorian housemates, meaning it was right at decapitation height for me if I wasn’t careful.
All of this—the room, the outhouse—excited me in a way. If it weren’t so dreadful, I thought, it wouldn’t feel like the Peace Corps.
Back inside, Juan handed me a lock for the plywood door that had the weight and girth of one normally used for luggage. He said good night. I crawled under the mosquito net, dripping in sweat, and read a biography of Jim Morrison by the light of my headlamp.
At about 5 a.m., I heard Juan pawing at the door. He wanted to take me out onto the wetland and see what we’d be transforming into an ecotourism paradise during my two years. The wetland was just on the other side of the road from the Mendoza farm. It was the only road in La Segua and doubled as a highway connecting the major inland city of Santo Domingo to the coastline. Every so often, amid the cow herds, snakes, and school children on rusty bicycles, a bus would speed through town at seventy miles an hour, kicking up a cloud of dust that barely settled before the next one screamed past. At the first and only town meeting I ever attended, one parent stood up and suggested they buy concrete mix and lay down a few extra speed bumps on the mile of road stretching through La Segua.
“Our kids are in danger,” he shouted above a crowd that was murmuring disapproval. “I’ll buy the concrete myself if it makes our kids safer.” Others in the room shouted him down. Another person said, “Yeah, but then we’d have to slow down our trucks every time we pass over the bumps.” (The word they used for speed bump, chapa muerto, translated to “dead cop.”)
This morning, Juan and I crossed the highway, ducked under a barbed-wire fence, then walked another hundred yards through tall dry grass toward the water. The entire time, he explained his vision for the wetland. He had already secured funding from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. He was quite proud of this, despite having no idea that USAID was associated with the U.S. government. It actually took me several minutes to figure out what he was talking about because acronyms are customarily sounded out in the Spanish language, so he was referring to it as ooh-sigh-eed.
In short, he wanted to get a long dock built, extending from the road out to the water, complemented by a three-story bird-watching tower. He wanted several canoes to take the tourists around the lake. He kept referring to “the tourists” as if they were some giant, all-powerful, all-knowing bloc of white people who would come en masse to spend money there. A couple of times, he referred to them as “your people.”
“Then the tourists will walk down this way, following me,” he would say, or “Then the tourists will stand here and listen to me . . .” It always ended with said tourists handing over money to Juan and heading on their merry way. For the most part, he had a point: White people from rich countries do like to spend lots of money to visit poorer countries, where they stare at things and climb to the tops of places and wear fanny packs and overpay for stuff, and then
return home and tell all their friends so they can do the same. I’ve been to many of those places.
But this was not one of them.
The wetland was indeed beautiful. There were birds (Juan’s uncles used to shoot them) and fish (Juan could tell you exactly how many species) and the biggest iguanas I’d ever seen (Juan said they’re delicious). The water was shallow and calm, and the scene of the wetland in the early mornings when fishermen were out with their nets was tailor-made for those coffee-table books of gritty, yet beautiful images of South America. But as a tourist attraction, it was underwhelming. No one would fly all the way down to Ecuador just to see it. I’m not sure what the hell else I was expecting to find. I was a volunteer, and this was what I was there to do.
Juan, in his cartoonish voice, began rattling off facts about the area, which sometime in the last decade they’d—quite wisely—gone from calling a “swamp” to a “wetland.”
Fact: At an international conference on wetlands in Iraq some years earlier, this—our—wetland, Humedal La Segua, was included, making it one of the top 4,000 wetlands in the world.
Fact: Raúl Sanchez, their connection to USAID, had worked in the United States and spoke English. This made him somewhat of a deity figure in the world of ecotourism and grant siphoning.
Fact: This wetland—all of it—belonged to his family, meaning it was no problem whatsoever that it was being usurped for ecotourism purposes.
This last fact turned out to be not much of a fact at all. You might even categorize it as a lie, given that it was completely false. The truth would reveal itself with time.
For now, I was the first of what they fantasized would be many gringos to be canoed around the waters by a certified ecotourism guide of Humedal La Segua. Juan continued to point out different sights with his ginormous hands and then turn to me, eyes bulging, with a look that said, Did you get a load of that? Huh?
It all seemed so easy the way he explained it that I wondered for a moment why they even needed a Peace Corps volunteer. They would build a little of this infrastructure stuff, tourists would migrate in, and the financial windfall would heal all the economic and social woes of the surrounding town. This latter point was sold heavily on his application materials to the Peace Corps.
The rest of my short visit was mostly gringo show-and-tell with various other people around town. On my second evening there, an uncle of Juan’s invited us into the back of his pickup truck for a “short ride” to his farm and back. More than an hour passed and we were still in the truck, driving down a dirt road in the dark at what felt like ninety miles an hour while I ducked my head to dodge overhanging tree limbs. The uncle at one point asked me if I wanted to drive. I said I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift; plus, I said, it was against Peace Corps rules. A smile crept to his face as he said, “There are no rules here.”
Later that same night, Juan and I were invited to dinner at his uncle Roger’s home. The house perched on stilts halfway out into the wetland. When we arrived, Roger’s wife, Veronica, suggested to me that we “get dinner.” I agreed. She led me out the front door and down the ladder where she picked up a live chicken and handed me a machete. “Kill it,” she said. I stalled for a bit with the machete in my hand. The aunt told me to stop being such a faggot, at which point I realized I’d eaten tons of chicken in my life and had no business eating it if I couldn’t kill it myself. I sliced the chicken’s throat with the machete and we ate it an hour later.
On the final night of my visit, Juan and I walked a mile down the road to eat at a neighbor’s house. This neighbor, a mother of two in her early thirties, was the oldest in Juan’s group of ecotourism guides. She gave me some hope that the show wasn’t just being run by kids. We drank freshly squeezed orange juice and ate crackers.
In the background, a grainy TV played the nightly Ecuadorian news.
“Ah, President Correa,” I said. “You guys fans?”
“Oh yes, he’s the best,” they both said, nearly in unison.
“What about you?” Juan said. “Do you like him?”
I smiled. “Well, a few days ago, a group of us were in Quito down around the main square, and the president drove by hanging his head out the window and he saw me and a friend of mine standing there. He yelled, ‘Where are you from?’ So I yelled back, ‘Los Estados Unidos!’ and he gave me the thumbs up. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to any president, now that I think about it. So I guess I like him.”
They stared blankly.
“What about your president?” said Juan. “What’s your opinion of . . . what’s his name—?”
“Obama. Barack Obama.”
“Yes, Barack Obama,” he said, pronouncing it unrecognizably.
“Well, we’re not allowed to express political opinions at all, so—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “You can say anything in front of us. We work together now, so it’s, you know, total trust.”
“Right. Well I voted for him, but we’ll see. It’s a little too soon to start saying whether I think he’s a good president.”
They both nodded in satisfaction with my answer. On the television, there was a story about a protest of sorts involving people in the sierra, near Quito. Seeing it, Juan launched into a monologue on how terrible the people from the sierra were. There are, you know, more indigenous people up there, he said. The serranos with all their greed and sneaky ways were the reason people like him and his community on the coast were poor.
I nodded.
His monologue wound down and he ended it with, “At least there’s no racism in this country. Zero. The U.S., you know, is very racist. Very.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“It is. It just is. You know. We’ve seen the pictures.”
Yes, there’s racism in the United States—there is everywhere—but I decided I’d defend my country against someone who’d never left the town he was born in.
“You know we just elected a black president, right?” I said. The fact that Obama is half-white was a detail I’d skip in this conversation.
“Obama is black?” he said.
“Yeah, have you seen any pictures of him on the news or anything?”
“Yes, sure. Obviously,” he said.
“So then you already knew that he’s black.”
We looked at each other.
“What’s your point?” he finally said.
“If our country just elected a black person, we can’t be that racist, right?”
He stared at me blankly.
“Okay, never mind.”
I woke up early the next morning hoping to get into Chone in time to connect to a bus leaving for Quito by 7 a.m. From Chone, it would be a six- or seven-hour ride to Quito (and then another two from there to Cayambe, and yet another hour from Cayambe to Olmedo). When I told Juan 7 a.m., he thought I meant 9 a.m., so I got off to a late start, since he insisted on taking the bus with me into Chone. Soon we gave up on waiting for a bus in La Segua and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. At the Chone terminal I got on a bus headed for Quito.
Everything was normal inside the air-conditioned bus except for two things: The ayudante, or bus steward, seemed to be in an especially foul mood, and the bathroom in the back of the bus, near where I was sitting, had a sign on the door saying it was for women and for urination only. Early into the ride I noticed that when women went to the bathroom, the ayudante would stand right outside the door. When they finished and walked out, he immediately stepped in the lavatory and inspected it.
When we stopped for lunch an hour later, I made sure to force out a piss so I wouldn’t have to break the rules. I grabbed some yogurt, a bag of chips, and a soda, and got back on the bus. About an hour after that, just after we passed through Santo Domingo, a churning pain seized my midsection. A hurricane was brewing in my bowels. It hurt so bad I couldn’t hold it in. I was about to experience the hottest and heaviest case of the runs of my life and there was nothing I could do about it
.
The bus was winding up into the cloud forest, through what is widely considered the most dangerous road in the country, climbing roughly 9,000 feet of the elevation between the coast and Quito in a series of sharp turns. I stood up, hunched over from the pain, and walked a few rows back to the bathroom door. It was locked. I shook it and rattled it and banged it until a little kid a few rows up saw me and wagged his finger. “You have to go up to the front and ask the ayudante to open it for you,” he said.
I walked to the front, still hunched over and bumping into every seat on the way, and asked the ill-tempered ayudante if I could use the facilities. He asked why the hell I didn’t use the bathroom back at the pit stop. I looked him in the eye and just said, “It’s an emergency.” I don’t know if it was the urgency in my voice or the fact that I was now sweating bullets, but he pitied me and led me back to the female-urination-only bathroom, where once inside, I could barely drop my drawers fast enough before my ass exploded into a dark Jackson Pollock all over the metallic airplane-style toilet bowl. The stench was so foul I pried open a window that was partially welded shut to get some fresh air.
The sweating subsided and the feeling of relief was almost orgasmic. I looked to my left and found that the toilet paper dispenser was . . . empty. The thought of a very squishy four more hours on the bus crossed my mind, so I started searching frantically all over the place. Nothing. Back pockets? Nothing. Left pocket? Just my ID and ATM card. No. Right pocket? Something felt like paper. I pulled it out. It was not paper. It was an old one-dollar bill, filthy to the point that it was no longer green—so flimsy you could have blown your nose into it. I unfolded the bill and apologized to George Washington.
I walked out of the lavatory and returned to my seat. Either the ayudante knew what was going on in there or he got hit with my aroma right when I exited. Whichever the case, he didn’t have the nerve to go in and inspect after I was done.
I soon fell into a minor panic thinking that with the dollar-bill wipe, I had risked an exposure to hepatitis or something as serious, but my nerves calmed when I remembered that in our first week there, we got hit with what seemed like a dozen shots and vaccinations. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I was over-vaccinated for Hep A because the doctors were pumping me with another dose every time I saw them—despite my protests that I’d been to Africa and done it all before.)
The Gringo: A Memoir Page 4