I arrived in the volunteer’s town at 1 a.m. on Friday and she met me at the bus station looking drowsy.
As we lay in her bed after our first go at it, she turned to me and said, “I haven’t had sex in like a year. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Her long curly hair spread out over the pillow. I was thinking about how strange it all was.
“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sex before?” she said.
“Eighteen years.”
For the rest of the weekend we cooked and laughed and listened to music and had a good time. But I wasn’t in the mood for any more sex. Part of it was her, and part of it was the shame of feeling as though we were like animals who couldn’t go without it. But I joylessly had sex a few more times before the weekend was over, including once when she’d talked me into using a sex toy she kept in the drawer of her nightstand.
Afterward, I didn’t even want to think about sex for a long time. As I lay there, I told her I planned on taking the six o’clock bus back to my site the next morning. She let out a disapproving groan and said I should get on a later bus so I could fuck her once more before I left. I mumbled something about how my leaving at six and fucking her one last time weren’t mutually exclusive. She persisted on and we went to sleep. At 5:25 I awoke to her pivoting herself atop me. And I was reminded then that there are few things lonelier in life than sex with someone you don’t care for.
As the sun rose over the jungle fog, I began the long ride south to my site, winding up and down dirt roads through the green hills, stopping only to buy snacks and use the bathroom at filthy roadside diners. It was Easter morning in the Amazon.
I saw large, morose-looking religious processions in the streets. Pigs getting roasted with blowtorches on the side of the road. Children selling fried chicken and boiled yucca at the bus stops.
I saw papaya groves and acres of deforestation with cows grazing. Roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary surrounded by fresh flowers and Christmas lights.
I saw women bent down doing laundry in stream beds. Shirtless drunks asleep on sidewalks or park benches or facedown in gutters. Other men with two or more missing limbs hoisting themselves into the bus to wobble up and down the aisle asking for spare change.
I saw beautiful indigenous girls listening to bad music on their cell phones. Black people selling coconut milk. Kids playing soccer. Women burning trash. Teens wearing WWF shirts and Yankees hats. And men peeing in the road.
I saw ducks and chickens pecking at the Styrofoam trash that had been flung from bus windows onto the damp ground.
And I saw moms with babies—lots of babies.
I knew that I would look back and feel connected to this jungle and maybe sorta kinda miss it. I saw all the frontier towns and wondered what it was like living there—was it just like Zumbi? Or was it lonelier, or not as boring, or filled with all the same characters who every day kept me laughing and smiling and cursing? I listened to music on my iPod and then sometimes just looked out the window in silence thinking about how naïve it was to imagine I could come down here and wake up one day knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I thought about how, all things considered, it had been nice to finally hold someone in my arms (and I thought about how just having a thought like that was a sign I’d been isolated for a long time). With the window cracked and music playing and my backpack in my lap and nothing but bumpy open road ahead, I wished bus rides like this would never end.
CHAPTER 36
Sometime around then I’m in Loja for a weekend and I meet a girl. And then I’m in Loja a lot more. Out dancing. Going to dinner. Walking on the narrow sidewalks arm in arm. Getting ice cream in her parents’ café. Drinking together in dark bars on weeknights with live music while she smokes cigarettes and leans in for kisses. It goes on like this for several weeks.
She is twenty-five years old and beautiful. Born and raised in Loja, she has traveled to the States and Europe and speaks English. And we always see each other in Loja—never at my site. She is the type of upper-class Lojana who would prefer to pretend that places like Zumbi don’t exist. If I ever brought her to my site, it’s unclear what exactly would disgust her the most, but she would surely unload an entire bottle of Purell by the time we reached my doorstep.
But she’s beautiful and sexy. She’s so beautiful that other guys are always staring at her when we walk into restaurants and bars. And she acts like she doesn’t know why. She’s so beautiful I dig into my U.S. bank account for late lunches on the weekends after nights when we’ve stayed out late drinking and the next day our clothes still smell like whisky and stale smoke. (She does not settle for pathetic two-dollar lunches with the commoners.) She’s so beautiful I tolerate her smoking and even look at the way the plumes of smoke leave her lips and disappear above us in the dim lights of the nightclubs and think it’s . . . sexy.
One day we’re in one of those nice restaurants with the white tablecloths and the other Lojanos in their very expensive but ill-fitting suits. We’re on the far end of town past the old church and on the way to the stadium. I’m tired. I look at the menu and it all looks expensive and unappetizing to me but I order the ceviche, which turns out to be awful and later that day I will take a lonely bus ride over the mountain pass and down into the Amazon on a empty stomach and twenty-five dollars poorer. It’s a clear and warm Sunday.
I’ve been seeing her a few weeks now so I feel comfortable telling her about my epididymal/prostatic infection and the ensuing pain that lasted six months and necessitated trips to Loja and Quito and—yes—multiple testicular sonograms. She listens with vague amusement. I also tell her about how I got pickpocketed but how it wasn’t a big deal because I only had like two bucks in my wallet and all the other important stuff was squirreled away in my shoes and other pockets and how I really just missed the wallet.
She laughs, but it’s not a ha-ha laugh; it’s a pity laugh. She smiles and leans over and kisses me and pours herself another lemonade and barks something else at the waiter and then stares me in the eye and says, “Why are you still in this country?”
WEEKS LATER WE SIT IN her parents’ living room eating big slices of mango for breakfast. I’ve just come back from another administrative trip to Quito and I’m stopping in Loja for the night before returning to Zumbi. Hanging on the wall in front of me is a giant painting of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. The painting is so vivid and grotesque it looks as if the blood from his forehead could drip right off the wall and down onto the Persian rug.
Today is the day it ends and we can’t be seeing each other anymore and I tell her this. She is surprised when I tell her, which is strange since just a week earlier she told me she had a boyfriend and in a few months would be moving to Belgium to work as an au pair and be with him, which is especially strange since he lives in Holland. She just has to get out of this country that she loves so much but can’t stand to live in. She wants to go to the U.S. again if she can, but keeps getting denied a visa. (It turns out that the last time she was there, she worked while on a student visa, which means she’ll likely never be allowed to return—a piece of news I broke to her gently.) But this is all just a side note. She’s leaving soon for Europe and for some European man she’s been talking to on the phone every day this whole time and she’s surprised that I’m walking away from it all.
All of this makes my mind race. It races through why I can’t manage any long relationships and then it races through all the circumstances (there are always circumstances) and from there it races through all the reasons and I wonder if her (or any woman) not understanding me is still a valid reason for breaking up. (The year before, I’d broken up with another volunteer I’d dated very briefly and when I told her that I couldn’t “do this anymore,” she said, “You’re leaving the Peace Corps?” I paused and continued, “Well, no . . .”)
Right now, here on the couch, I think about all this and I feel sick to my
stomach. It’s a throbbing aching feeling of sickness that I can’t shake. (I find out a week later that this is not the result of acute heartache but a combination of amoebas, E. coli, and worms—a triple play of intestinal issues.) She leans toward me and I’m not sure if she wants to kiss me or tackle me. I just look up at the painting of Jesus, who stares back down at me. Suddenly her cigarette smoking isn’t sexy anymore. All I can think is I should have ended this weeks ago on that Sunday when I ordered the bad ceviche.
CHAPTER 37
In May I received an invitation from the Peace Corps asking for my “mandatory attendance” at a Resiliency Workshop the following month in the central sierra city of Cuenca. Most of the volunteers from the southern half of the country would be there. The “invitation” didn’t say what kinds of topics would be covered, but they turned out to focus mostly on hanging in there. This was odd because I was always under the impression that the Peace Corps did its best to weed out the lightweights during the application process, not coddle them once they were at their sites. Even stranger, roughly half the volunteers at the workshop were completing their service in just two months. But I couldn’t complain about a free trip to Cuenca.
We enjoyed our three days and two nights in what is probably Ecuador’s cleanest and most beautiful city. The daytime activities harkened back to my training exactly a year earlier: We sat together in a room and withstood a battery of group sessions and activities and evaluations. One activity was a card game designed to show us how we made decisions. A language segment to the workshop required that we go out on a scavenger hunt through the city. We talked about taking risks; we talked about things that are difficult; we talked about the definition of stress.
And we heard happy stories. Volunteers who were about to complete their two years and hadn’t gotten much done but had forged relationships that they’d cherish forever. Or volunteers for whom the stars had aligned who ended up at sites where gung-ho counterparts helped them form wildly successful beekeeping operations or fertilizer factories.
Then, in another session, I found out that there is a legitimate term for what I, and pretty much everyone else there, had been experiencing at certain points during my time in country: compassion fatigue. Apparently, this term gets tossed around in the expatriate/development world to describe what happens when people get fed up with the work they’re doing and the people they’re doing it for. Due to the stress or frustration or despair from having things go wrong or working with host country nationals who don’t care, the pendulum shifts from having empathy for these people to feeling unsympathetic or even hostile toward them. This is a component of the larger issue of culture shock. Of course, whenever we got to talking about that, there were always great stories to be had, such as the one about a guy who got in a cab with some other volunteers and, upon learning that the cab driver planned on charging him $1.50 instead of $1.00 to travel across town, lurched forward in his seat screaming, “Oh fuck you!”
Lastly, we received a refresher safety and security session on, among other things, what to do in the event of coastal flooding—a curious exercise given that everyone at the conference lived either in the Amazon or in the sierra, at several thousand feet of elevation. Other notable highlights from the conference: One volunteer got up to ask a question and said “fuck” about five times in the course of fifteen seconds, and another volunteer speaking to the room kept saying the word “Ecuas,” a slur that volunteers used for Ecuadorians. At one point, she even looked at our training manager from Quito and said, “I know you guys don’t like that term, but . . .”
I left the workshop feeling tired, sad, and embarrassed to be a part of the Peace Corps.
ONLY A MONTH LATER I had to travel up to Quito for my training group’s Mid-Service Conference. In the three weeks between the Resiliency Workshop and this event, I learned that four volunteers in my old province, Manabí, had been pulled out of their sites in response to a major drug bust that took place in the area. One volunteer, who lived in a small fishing village, was arrested because, unbeknownst to him, his landlords were major drug traffickers who’d been storing bulk amounts of cocaine on their property. Just as she did with me, Pilar immediately arrived on the scene and got the volunteer out before he could get into serious trouble. All the major newspapers around the country carried the story, pointing out that the DEA had been involved. This newest shake-up in Manabí was a hot topic during the Mid-Service Conference. It had been almost a year since Pilar and the Colonel had come to rescue me from the savagery of La Segua.
In addition to routine medical checkups, the object of the conference was to evaluate the first half of our service and make plans for our final year in site. Again, the specifics were a little shady beforehand, but one thing we could be sure of was that no group activity or team-building trope would be omitted.
The first day kicked off with a somewhat humiliating exercise: We had to stand, one by one, in front of the room and speak of the “accomplishments and/or lessons learned” from our first year in site (most people focused on their “lessons learned”). I still had a little ways to go with my grant proposal before I could turn it in for approval, so the future conditional tense was a big feature in my short speech.
On the second day we played. One of the many games involved taking a set of cards with varied descriptions of how we viewed our working relationship in our communities and lining them up in categories marked by hopscotch-like boxes taped to the floor. The session ended a full hour later with many of us still unsure of its purpose.
Another game tested our communication skills. We sat in circles of five people, and a colored sticker was put on everyone’s forehead. The person with the green sticker was to be interrupted every time he or she tried to talk during the discourse. The session ended with hearty laughs all around and a reminder that we should actively listen to one another.
For a special treat, an American woman who lived in Quito—a self-proclaimed relationship expert—visited for an advice pow-wow. Her talk focused on the difficulties of communication in a cross-cultural relationship. She brought up, for instance, that in Spanish there is no real word for “rape” and the word that’s used for it could also mean “annoyances” or “traffic violations.”
When giving love advice, she often cited her former relationship with a Chilean man. She attributed the downfall of their courtship to the fact that every time they got in an argument, she said they needed to make a compromiso. She thought that she was saying “compromise,” when actually she was saying a word that translates to “obligation” or “commitment”—both words that, to varying degrees, mean the opposite of what she was trying to say. (The word she was looking for—as she and all of us now knew—was comprometer.) I found the intersection of grammar, rhetoric, and love to be unsettling.
At the end of one day we all filled out pieces of paper that read, “Who Is Going to Keep You Accountable?” On the front of the sheet was a “Balance Wheel of Life for Peace Corps Volunteers.” We had to rank several designated topics on a scale from 1 (not satisfied at all) to 10 (completely satisfied). My Balance Wheel of Life was marked thusly:
Being a Peace Corps Volunteer: 2
Relationships with Counterparts: 5
Family: 8
Growth & Development/Spirituality: 7
My Future: 4
Personal Relationships/Support from Others: 3
Health & Recreation: 6
Other: Personal Hobbies/Creativity: 9
I don’t know why, but I brought this paper back to my site and it remained taped to my wall for the next forty-four weeks.
Taking the several workshops and activities into account, the theme of this conference, without a doubt, had to be sustainability. This was the newest buzzword in the development industry. The idea that “if you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day but if you teach him to fish, he’ll eat for life” had been around for a long time. But it seemed like it wasn’t until very recently that people had bee
n getting borderline hysterical about the fact that it wasn’t development unless it was sustainable development. (Of course, not once does the Peace Corps or any of these other organizations address whether it is sustainable to continue teaching that man to fish for fifty years straight—with no end in sight.)
Less than a month earlier, the BP platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, creating one of the largest ocean oil spills in history. I sat with a friend of mine in the back of the room during another session on sustainability and discussed whose society was more sustainable: ours or Ecuador’s. My friend finally said that while Ecuador’s way of life was nothing to aim for, we probably came from the least sustainable society in human history.
We sat through hours and hours of more sessions about what made up sustainable methods of project development and how best to implement sustainable practices. During our lunch breaks, I checked the Internet in the volunteer lounge: At record-setting rates, crude oil continued to gush from the sea floor and spread across the water like a creepy dark cloud.
CHAPTER 38
I returned to my site after the conference and put the finishing touches on my grant proposal. It was mid-2010. I was twenty-four years old and halfway through my service. I was thinking about the future. I was analyzing the past. I was trying to get something done. I was isolated in my jungle town, the power was blacking out frequently, the Amazon pelted my area with violent thrusts of rain and heat, and once again, I spent my days cooped up indoors doing paperwork for the grant.
The single mothers living across from me spent all day cooking and doing laundry by hand and hanging it on the lines across the patio, only to have another rainstorm give it a second rinse. Out on the street, men selling coconut milk and candy belted out the destinations of the buses that passed through, even though the buses were really only headed to one of two places. My landlady’s son used kerosene to burn the trash behind the property, creating flames that climbed fifteen feet into the air, licking the branches of the fruit tree above. I saw and heard and smelled all this while sitting in my apartment working away . . . on my laptop. This was just the beginning of the twenty-first-century Peace Corps experience.
The Gringo: A Memoir Page 17