A few others and I hitched a ride into Santo Domingo where we caught a different bus headed for Quito. A car accident along the way turned what is normally a seven-hour bus ride into a ten-hour one. I got to Quito at 2 a.m. and checked into a hotel a few blocks from the Peace Corps headquarters. I spent the next ten days sitting in the office and wandering around Quito waiting for Winkler, in all his wisdom, to find me a new site.
I’d lived in La Segua for less than eight weeks. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of what had happened there, but before long everything about the place would come back to haunt me.
CHAPTER 20
I traveled down the spine of the Andes for twelve hours before turning east and descending into the Amazon for another few hours. The province of Zamora Chinchipe is Ecuador’s most isolated—hidden away in the southeast corner of the country against the Peruvian border. The bus followed the Pan American Highway south until it reached Loja, the country’s southernmost city of any significance. From there, I boarded a different bus and rode for three and a half hours, passing through several in-progress landslides on the way to Zamora, the provincial capital, and then another hour northeastward to my new site, Zumbi. This was my first time in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and it looked exactly the way I thought the South American jungle should.
Not knowing the town, I’d been asking other passengers if we were there yet for the forty-five minutes preceding our arrival. To enter Zumbi, you turn right off the highway (essentially the only main road that runs through the province) and cross a bridge that goes over the Rio Zamora, which snakes down through the mountains all the way from Loja. On the other side of the bridge is a town square with a church at the far end. Buses go around the square and stop on the side where the street vendors (and their litter) sit.
I arrived late in the morning. The sky was overcast and the air was cool with a light drizzle. I would later find out that these were the best mornings of all because the alternatives were either heat so penetrating that I’d stick to my sheets or rain so violent I had no choice but to avoid the outdoors altogether. The four-block-by-four-block town of Zumbi sits along the river, nestled between tall lush mountains on all sides. On days like this, wispy clouds hang low above the valley with the green mountaintops exposed on top.
My host family lived three blocks off the main square and in those three blocks, the sound of car horns and blaring reggaeton music disappeared and the roads turned from stone to dirt. Zumbi went from a miniature city to something resembling the rustic countryside, or campo, you’d expect from a Peace Corps site. A few of the houses were made of wood and corrugated tin, but most were one-story concrete blocks. Extending above from the first and only floor would be concrete pillars and exposed rebar that could potentially be the beginnings of a second level. It was as though they’d left that area unfinished in hopes that one day they would have the resources to fill it in. But based on the age of the homes and the rust dripping from the rebar, the second stories rarely became a reality.
I would be living with a grandmother named Graciela and her thirty-five-year-old daughter, Consuela, who was a local politician and a mother of three. Recently widowed, Graciela spent her free time walking through town wearing a giant red-and-white antiabortion shirt with the Pope’s face on one side and a child’s on the other. As I would come to find out, Graciela and Consuela did not exactly get along. In fact, they hated each other.
The family had two dogs at the house: Jack and Benji. Both were eerie mixes of opposing breeds that should never have been let near each other, creating ugly little animals that seemed to know that they’d been dealt a terrible hand in life. Jack was a big, mean-looking animal and Benji was small and gentle. Consuela once told me that Benji was either gay or “just metrosexual.”
That first day, I entered the front gate and Graciela showed me to my room on the second floor. It was the Ritz-Carlton compared to what I had in La Segua. Painted walls instead of exposed brick. Linoleum floors instead of concrete. A bathroom that would occasionally have sewage backups—but it was better than my old outhouse. Windows I could look through and see the jungle hills.
Like almost every family in the town, I would come to find out, this one had relatives that either had lived or were currently living in Spain. From there, they would send home sums of money, and then several years later, they’d come home for good and use their savings to splurge on their properties in Zumbi. Consuela had lived for some time in Spain (where her third child was born), and three of her brothers currently lived there (one of them, I later discovered, would be there indefinitely because he was a fugitive in Ecuador). Thus, their house was one of the “nicer” ones in town. However, this usually just meant that they’d used their saved-up Euros to put a new façade on the same house they’d always had. Look around the side of the house and you’d see the same cinder-block walls that covered every other building in the area.
I WOKE UP AFTER MY first night in Zumbi and met up with two volunteers who lived in Zamora Chinchipe for an up-river excursion. We rode a truck two hours east to the site of the next closest volunteer in the province. From there, we drove another hour to where the road ended and got in a motorized canoe and rode for a couple of hours before getting out to hike near the Peruvian border. At one point our guide said not to go off the trail because of land mines; this was the lingering result of a nearly century-old border dispute between the two countries.
The hike was a pleasant first look at the Amazon. We saw snakes. We saw waterfalls. We saw an indigenous community where my fellow volunteer had previously witnessed a failed suicide attempt. We almost ran out of gas. It rained. I got back to my site late at night.
I opened the front gate to the property of my house and walked across the yard to reach the outside stairs leading up to my room. Before I could make it, I was cut off by a flying dog. Jack—the big, mean one—had gotten a running start from about ten feet away. His open jaws went straight for my left arm, and he landed a slobbery bite on my triceps. The only move I could make at the time to defend myself was several kicks in Jack’s direction. I probably landed a half-dozen good blows before Consuela came racing across the yard screaming and nearly crying. She began lashing Jack with the type of whip you see lion tamers use at circuses.
Consuela frantically asked me if I was okay. I said I was; Jack’s bite hadn’t broken the skin. She grabbed him by the neck and took him over to the wash area and tied him to a post. Benji, meanwhile, cowered at the far end of the front yard. Consuela kept apologizing as she tied up the dog. I repeated that I was fine and walked to my room.
Graciela and Consuela took off the following day and didn’t say when they were coming back. They left Jack chained to the post near the washbasin and didn’t give me any directions for feeding him. I woke up the next day to the sound of Jack’s whimpers as Benji pranced around the property looking for attention.
With time, the whimpers became more intense and I began to feel bad for Jack. I also felt bad about the several roundhouses to the muzzle I’d landed during his attack on me. But I didn’t feel safe enough letting him loose. I finally went out and gave him some food and some TLC. After a few days of this, he was my friend.
The first night Graciela and Consuela were gone, I awoke to the sound of a madman at our front gate. He was screaming for Consuela and rattling the fence and throwing rocks at our house. I peered down at him through my bedroom window. All I could think was, Oh shit, not again. But after a midnight call to Consuela to find out what the fuck was going on (and a visit from some trusted neighbors), I found out that he was merely a man with “many demons” (Consuela’s words) who often “became confused” and came calling for her in the night.
When the two women returned, Consuela apologized profusely for the madman’s midnight visit. And both she and her mother were amazed at the transformation I’d made in Jack.
CHAPTER 21
The Peace Corps sent me to Zumbi to work for a government project called th
e Fund for Child Development, referred to by its Spanish acronym FODI. Essentially, it was a government-run rural childcare service. Their main office was in the municipal building, and in smaller communities throughout the countryside, they directed a dozen centers where parents dropped off their toddlers in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon after work. At a FODI center, the children were bathed and fed. They also played educational games and learned basic things like the alphabet.
On my first day, I went to the office and met everyone in FODI. The municipality took up a four-story yellow building on the outskirts of town. Surrounded as it was by jungle foothills, dirt roads, and the crumbling wood and cinder-block buildings in the rest of Zumbi, the structure looked strikingly out of place.
The FODI office was filled with women. The project leader, Jenny, was in her late thirties, and the six other women were all about that age or younger. I introduced myself and they stared back at me. In Quito, Winkler’s assistant had told me to be careful with the women there because they were very flirty, and when he’d visited the site months before, they were calling him things like “stud muffin” minutes after meeting him.
I went around the room trying to remember names. They asked me mine; I told them and they proceeded to call me . . . stud muffin. They wanted to know about Kathy, another volunteer who’d gone to Zumbi for her site visit but had gotten kicked out of the Peace Corps the night before we swore in. Kathy’s dismissal was the only reason Zumbi was available as an approved site for me after the La Segua calamity. Back in training, the Peace Corps was unhappy that Kathy had ditched Spanish class one morning and gotten caught drinking beer in Cayambe. After this incident, the training manager went to her host family and found her bedroom too messy, to the extent that it was deemed culturally insensitive (seriously), and thus grounds for Administrative Separation. Understandably, the women in FODI were confused about having Kathy visit for three days back in March only to never return and then four months later getting a man in her place.
I told the women I thought Kathy had had some medical issues that forced her to go home. Winkler suggested that I have an answer like this handy when they asked me about it.
“I couldn’t figure out why the Peace Corps had sent me a woman in the first place,” Jenny said. “I asked for a male volunteer.”
“You requested a man?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
At home I dug back into my files, including the volunteer solicitation that I’d never looked at very closely. Indeed, FODI had made only one request: a male volunteer. They didn’t list a single other tangible skill or attribute that they needed the volunteer to have. They didn’t even care whether the volunteer came from the sustainable agriculture program or the natural resource conservation program—as long as he was male.
After introducing myself the first day, I stood in the middle of the room and asked what they wanted me to do. They all smiled and looked at me. No one answered until Jenny hemmed and hawed and told me to come back tomorrow (I would get told to “come back tomorrow” almost every other day at FODI).
The next day we drove two hours east into the hills to a community named San Francisco. Of all the towns in the county, this one was farthest from Zumbi. It had no more than a hundred people, mostly indigenous. A couple of the women from the FODI office jotted down notes after talking to the teachers who worked full time in the center. The teachers cooked us lunch. My plate had a mysterious meat on it, and when I asked my FODI colleagues what it was, they laughed. I asked again and they laughed even harder. This went on for several minutes until a woman next to me whispered that it was cow intestine. Someone across the table reached over and ate it off my plate.
Before we left, a deaf woman came to the center and got in an argument with one of the FODI workers. They were going back and forth with dramatic hand signals that definitely weren’t formal sign language. Apparently, the woman wanted to know why her child wasn’t allowed to go to the FODI center, and the worker was trying to convey to her that it was because the child was over five years old. The grunts and violent hand gestures went on for a few more minutes and we got back in the truck and drove home to Zumbi.
AFTER A WEEK OF BEING driven out into the countryside with the FODI workers and not doing anything, I got in touch with a volunteer who lived in my province and had worked with this FODI office in the past. I asked her if she had any idea what they wanted me to do for them—it was the same thing I’d asked Jenny and the other workers a number of times and only gotten giggles in response.
“Well, they just wanted some male energy in the office,” she said.
“Male energy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They just wanted a guy around to flirt with?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” she said.
“What did you do for them?”
“I used to give some lessons on nutrition to the mothers of the FODI kids,” she said. “Then I started bringing a book of crossword puzzles with me when we traveled out to the centers.”
“And they didn’t ask anything else of you?”
“The thing is, for them, it’s good that we’re even around. We are basically doing a job by just being here—you know, goals two and three.”
She was referring to the three goals of the Peace Corps that had existed unchanged since its legendary JFK-era inception. The first goal is the one that talks about alleviating poverty in poor countries. The second and third refer to sharing our culture with the host country and in turn sharing the host country’s culture with Americans back home. Among volunteers I knew, it’d become a bit of an inside joke: When they weren’t doing any actual projects in their communities, they said they were “working hard on goals two and three.” As with most jokes, it had a message: Here’s an organization that didn’t know whether it was an actual development agency or an ambassadorial program where your main job was to go to some community and just chill (which, after all, fulfilled a whopping 66 percent of your stated objectives).
This volunteer, however, wasn’t joking.
I continued to go to FODI every day of the week for about two months. I tried to start community vegetable gardens with the teachers, but it usually rained too hard. A few times I gave presentations to the mothers of the FODI children about how to make compost in their homes or about the most fundamental environmental education lesson I could think of: reduce, reuse, recycle. But mostly, I just kept hearing “come back tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 22
When the days got long and the rain let up and I had nothing to do, I spent a lot of time walking around Zumbi. In case it wasn’t odd enough to have a white American, out of nowhere, living in their community, the town’s inhabitants were now treated to this strange creature wandering aimlessly at all hours of the day without any particular destination.
I passed them as they sat—on curbs in front of dusty streets, on splintered wooden benches in front of one-room concrete houses, in plastic chairs on the sidewalk. And they stared. At me. The gringo.
The town of Zumbi is several dozen acres cut out of the jungle, located on the western end of a 291-square-kilometer county that’s 75 percent deforested. The hills surrounding Zumbi are part of the Cordillera del Condor, a range of mountains formed independently of the Andes thousands of years ago.
From my house, I could walk southward to the other far end of town. I would pass an elementary school with paint peeling off the walls and murals that announced both the glorious nature of Zumbi, the “Ecological Garden of the Amazon,” and an opposition to abortion. I passed store after store, each selling the same things: milk, candy, toilet paper, Coca-Cola, and bread. I passed stray dogs that came after me barking savagely until I picked up a rock and they scattered away; I passed other dogs too hungry to lift themselves up off the sidewalk. I passed a bar that had empty bottles of several exotic liquors on the shelf, but really sold only one drink: Pilsener, Ecuador’s national beer of choice.
I passed by tiny r
estaurants that served the same thing as the restaurant a block down from them: boiled chicken and rice. I passed row after row of crumbling cinder-block houses, interrupted only by the mayor’s hulking, multistory, brand-new, Mediterranean-style mansion, which was squeezed in between an abandoned lot and a one-room wooden shack on the other side. (The mayor’s annual salary was about $40,000, or nearly fifteen times the salary of the average citizen in Zumbi.)
I passed by miniature hardware stores—lots of them. For a town of around a thousand, there were nearly a dozen hardware stores all selling the exact same products, from paint to barbed-wire to gardening tools. The lack of entrepreneurial diversity is something you see a lot of in Latin America—a guy will open a hardware store simply because his friend down the street has the same business, not realizing that if they each had a unique business, both would make more money—but Zumbi’s oversaturated market of hardware stores was like nothing I’d ever seen. It’s a town where the water and power go out on a weekly basis and people all over the place are coming down with bizarre illnesses, but if you ever need a shovel or a screw driver, you needn’t walk more than forty yards.
I passed by a chicken, or pollo, establishment with a sign out front that, due to a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, appeared to say that they had “Polio for sale.” I passed by a store that sold bootlegged CDs and had converted its back room into a makeshift arcade by setting up a couple of dusty XBOXes with old TV monitors and plastic chairs in front. I passed by children playing soccer, or kicking dogs, or yelling at me in broken English, “Hello, gringo!” or “Good morning, teacher,” even when it was late at night (and even though I wasn’t their teacher). I passed by barefoot drunken men with food smeared on their faces who yelled, “Hey, gringo, come drink, c’mon, just come drink, here have a drink.” I passed by women between the ages of ten and sixty who made catcalls at me.
The Gringo: A Memoir Page 10