In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, your new country director spoils his political capital by pulling such stunts as cutting funding for the Gender and Development volunteer working group because things like scholarships for leadership-oriented summer camps aren’t sustainable. And as if that weren’t bad enough, volunteers are still upset about that new Whereabouts Policy and what they think is a lack of communication. It will take volunteers about a year to realize he’s a good guy.
In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, your service will see the coming and going of four different country directors (two interim), two program managers, two program and training specialists, and so many others you lose count.
In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, a yearlong investigation by the inspector general’s office will cite a high rate of staff turnover in your country’s post as proof of poor leadership and a reason for an inflated budget. The same report will produce evidence that the post’s former country director (who left just before you arrived) sold government vehicles to local non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, for a fraction of their market value. This will eventually lead to a heavy fine and possible jail time for said former country director (who by now is working as a contractor in Afghanistan).
In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, you learn that there is a new file format for submitting your quarterly Volunteer Report File and the directions for downloading it (let alone filling it out in Excel and submitting it to your program managers) are confusing. And where it asks for specific numbers for data such as “How many host country nationals have been trained in a capacity building skill?” or “How many people have learned at least three ways to improve their health?” you are confused by the pull-down menus even after filling out a half dozen of these things already. Mostly, you know from talking to other volunteers that they fill these forms out in a sort of highly organized bureaucratic bullshitese in which it’s not so important that the numbers mean anything as long as your file looks nice—that is to say, your data are aesthetically pleasing. At the end of the year, the office will design an annual report, sent out to volunteers and counterparts in both PDF and hard copy, in which the made-up numbers are compiled into graphs and statistics.
In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, you hike off into the jungle one day with an agriculture tech from the municipality to go grafting cacao branches and she shows you how to do it, and you follow along snipping the green twigs in the same way, wandering through a forest of cacao trees hanging low like a field of giant umbrellas, and all of a sudden the agriculture tech says, “You’ve never done this before, have you?” and you say, “No, never; learned a little about it during our training, but—” and she says, “But you said you’re a natural resources volunteer, isn’t that right?” and you say, “Yes, but—” and she says, “So didn’t you study this at your university?” and then you tell her that you studied government and she frowns in confusion and says, “Then why don’t you work for the embassy or something?” and all you can think is touché, as you continue snipping away at cacao branches and eventually hike back to town.
In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, many of the office staff in Quito come from Ecuador’s educated elite class; some are more ignorant of their own country’s geography and wealth disparity, and more shocked and disgusted by the living conditions at the sites, than the volunteers.
In the twenty-first-century Peace Corps everyone has to sign updated and expanded Drug and Alcohol Policies because one of the newest training groups to show up in the country really likes to party, but possibly took it too far when another volunteer reported that several of them were doing heroin while hanging out in Cuenca one weekend.
THEY APPROVED MY GRANT. THE Peace Corps and, presumably, others deep in the cogs of the Department of Agriculture determined my project was thoroughly sustainable and gave it the green light. It was mid-August.
Days later, my Banco de Guayaquil savings account, which usually never had a balance of more than the three-hundred-dollar stipend I received each month, had that, plus the seven grand for the greenhouse. It was a staggering figure to see on my account balance—more money than I was going to get from Uncle Sam when I completed my service eight months hence.
At the high school, there were handshakes and smiles and fist pumps. At the municipal offices, there were words of congratulations and a genuine sense of shock that I’d gotten all the money I said I could.
Later that week, I took the bus into Loja to see Patricio, the owner of the irrigation and greenhouse construction company that I’d contracted to do the work. I’d met with him several times over the previous four months to talk about the design and construction, including once when he said he was busy so we got in his car and talked while he dropped his wife off at work and took his kids to school on the other side of Loja.
We already had contracts with prices for materials and labor, and computer printouts with designs and layouts. I’d needed all this to write up the grant proposal, which, in its final form, had to include details like exactly how many meters of wire and how many bolts we’d use and the unit price for each. Now, at last, I had the money that I owed him to get the project started. After we sat down to finalize the agreement, I walked to the bank and wired the seven thousand dollars to his business’s account. Patricio was happy. (It would end up taking the municipality of Zumbi a few months to get him the two grand that they owed him, but Patricio never seemed to mind—“I work with the government all the time,” he said with a smile.)
I spent the rest of the weekend in Loja, sleeping on the futon of a volunteer who had an apartment perched up on a hill with a view of the entire city. The many times I stayed there, we ate well and had fun. I’d usually wander around the city during the day, using (slightly) faster Internet and spending money on bootlegged DVDs and getting ice cream. Then I’d get on the bus and head up over the mountain pass and back down through the cloud forest into Zumbi.
CHAPTER 39
It was late August. I’d been in Ecuador for seventeen months. Just over a year had passed since I was jettisoned from the coast and thrown into a shotgun marriage with this new site. And finally things were about to start happening: It was greenhouse construction day.
I felt a sense of accomplishment I didn’t think I’d ever reach during my time here. Mostly, I felt vindicated for the previous year and a half of not getting anything concrete done and feeling sorry for myself about it. Now, the time had almost arrived when, in response to the people asking me what the hell I was doing in Zumbi, I could point to something and say, “That, over there, I built that.”
It was, perhaps, a bit narcissistic.
I walked from my apartment up to the high school with a hop in my step. I was going to meet Carlito at the school and let him know the schedule for when the construction crew would show up and what kind of help they’d need. As I walked, I thought back to the day Carlito and the vice principal came to my apartment to suggest the project. Thank goodness I’d managed to find at least one person in this town who was interested in my help and somewhat on board with something involving the environment—someone who got it.
I approached the high school prepared to talk to the administrators about what a great day this was for the future of the school and the environmental awareness of the students when I saw several tractors and other machinery at work. Just past the front gate, a crew was at work chopping down a forest of trees on the school’s property. Some of the trees were over forty feet tall and others you could walk up to and reach for a lemon. When I first began working with the high school, I remember thinking that this little forest on a plot of land half the size of a football field was the nicest part about their entire property. Now the trees were crashing down one by one, like colossal metaphors, and being loaded up in bundles of firewood-sized logs and shipped away.
Carlito was sitting on the front steps of the administrative building smoking cigarettes and joking around with the vice principal an
d a few of the school’s maintenance workers. We smiled and greeted one another.
“Hey, so what’s going on here?” I said, pointing to the deforesting crew a few yards to the left of us.
“Oh that. We’re just making some room,” said Carlito.
“For what?” I asked. We were yelling to hear over the sounds of chain saws and the splintering tree chunks.
“Actually, we need the money.”
“Ah, you’re selling the wood?” I said.
“Yes, and maybe we’ll plant some corn there,” said Carlito. He shrugged his shoulders.
Everyone paused as we watched the trees fall to the ground, creating giant swirling clouds of dust and leaves.
“Anyway,” I said. “Today’s a great day. The engineer from the construction company should arrive around three o’clock this afternoon to take a look at the land for the greenhouse. Will you guys be here?”
Carlito said yes.
“All right,” I said. I started to say something else about getting the field ready for the greenhouse builders when Carlito interrupted me.
“Our school bus is falling apart,” he said. He pointed at the bus over to our right. It was parked in the gravel in front of the main school building.
“Does it still work?” I said.
One of the workers who’d been sitting smoking chimed in. “Yes, it runs, but not very well.”
“So it made me think,” said Carlito, “that you could help us with another project. You could get us a new school bus. Maybe you could call some of your gringo friends at the Peace Corps or in the United States and say, ‘Look, this is a good school here in Zumbi. How about you help out my friends here with the money to buy a school bus.’”
He arched his eyebrows and lifted his palms up, as if to say, That’s a reasonable proposition, don’t you think?
“But you know the Peace Corps doesn’t do projects like that,” I said. “The project we just did required the contributions from the school and the municipality—”
“I know, I know,” he said. “I’m not talking about a gift or a handout. I’m talking about something fair, you know, where for instance we plant a few hundred trees and then you buy us a new school bus. What about that, huh?”
IT HAD BEEN EIGHT MONTHS since I’d first met Carlito while standing half naked behind my house and seven months since we’d begun the process of getting the grant written. That was a long time to spend talking about a greenhouse. The week before, we’d convinced the mayor to let the school use a government tractor to level out the field where we were building the thing. When the guys from Loja all showed up to build it, they spent a week in Zumbi, sleeping on cots in the classrooms at night and doing the construction during the day.
Once it was finally standing, Carlito and I, along with everyone else at the school, spent a few days just walking around inside and marveling at the thing. In the sunlight, the white plastic let off a blinding glow that you could see when you hiked into the hills around Zumbi and looked down at the town. Then the sun disappeared for days at a time and the roof repelled even the most violent of raindrops, the water neatly draining off in the roof’s channels. It was a beauty.
And then the school year began.
CHAPTER 40
I began thinking that getting the greenhouse built was one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. I did, after all, write that whole grant, in Spanish, practically without any help. In fact, the more other people got involved, the more it usually slowed things down.
Somewhere back in that first year when I just lay around in pain and pitying myself, I’d given up on thinking that I would ever leave with something to show for my time. But now I did and so I patted myself on the back. It also gave me an incredible chip on my shoulder with respect to other volunteers. Almost all the ones I knew were doing arts and crafts with preschoolers, or giving sex education seminars that no one listened to, or—even worse—giving free labor to an already well-established NGO.
I would look at that giant hunk of metal and plastic shining in the green field behind the school and drift off to a self-aggrandizing mind orgy, fantasizing how this thing would still be standing years after I had gone. But the self-congratulatory attitude was exactly what I disliked in other volunteers, so I quickly came to my senses and realized that this was just the work I came to do, nothing more. I got over it.
Maintaining the greenhouse became a Sisyphean adventure. During the planning phases of the project, I had (admittedly) glossed over the exact details of how the outdoor science curriculum would work out. I figured we’d play it by ear. When the new school year began, Carlito signed a contract with his teachers, who agreed to have their classes build the seed beds by a certain date, at which point he would give them the seeds and set up the irrigation access. It was that easy: The order would come down from the principal and the teachers would follow through with the students. I would be there alongside to help facilitate.
I quickly discovered that students attended school an average of only about three days a week. This wasn’t just because Fridays or Mondays were taken off for a long weekend. If it wasn’t a “scheduling holiday” or an entire day of “teachers’ meetings” disrupting the school week, it was a teachers union parade or strike, or one of the country’s several independence days, or a religious observance, or the death of a teacher’s child (more “accidents” with shotguns). Three consecutive days of school were about as likely as finding a textbook in the classrooms.
Once in a while I’d get lucky and show up on a day when teachers and students were present. One teacher was enthusiastic about the greenhouse but had his own idea of how things should work. He had his students building seed beds using the rocky ground soil that could barely support the weeds sprouting from it. When I politely told him we needed to clear that out and use the nice soil the municipal government had just dropped off for us, he said, “My brother, no, no, no. We plant with this soil. Believe me, I know.” The giant pile of fresh, nutrient-rich ground soil was only twenty feet from where we were standing.
Before the dirt conversation could escalate into an argument, Carlito showed up and walked inside the greenhouse, puffing on a cigarette and wiping sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. “What the hell is this?” he said. “Use that other soil! This stuff is no good. Why do you think we went through the trouble of getting this good soil delivered?”
That solved that.
Two other teachers had classes that were supposed to rotate in the greenhouse science curriculum during that first semester. One of them I never saw. I began to wonder if he’d died without anyone telling me (which actually happened a few times before, including when the owner of my apartment passed away).
The third teacher indeed existed and had spoken to me before, but quite simply refused to do the work we had agreed on. I hiked out behind the school one morning to see his class standing around outside the greenhouse. Some were aimlessly pulling weeds fifty yards away. Others were hacking away at rocks with busted shovels, looking like nineteenth-century railroad laborers. Others stood off to the side sucking on lollypops and tossing their wrappers into the creek. They all were doing anything but work in the greenhouse.
I said hello to everyone, then asked the teacher why they weren’t building the seed beds and bringing in the new soil with the wheelbarrow I’d commandeered for them.
“We don’t have any irrigation,” said the teacher.
“Yes, we’re going to set that up after the seed beds are built and we can plant the seeds and have something to water,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Well, we don’t have any tools either,” he said.
I looked around me and saw nearly every student holding a shovel or pickax or rake that had been lent to us by families from the other classes. The fact is there were tools all over the place.
“It looks like you guys are doing all right,” I said. “But I can ask Carlito to get some more tools. In the meantime, maybe we can get started inside. Your cla
ss has to build a third of these seed beds, right?”
“We don’t have any of the things we need to get the work done,” he said. He grimaced at me as if I wasn’t getting it, which, up until that point, I wasn’t. This was just a small, polite “fuck you” from an Ecuadorian teacher who was drawing a line in the sand and essentially saying, Look, I’ve put up with a lot of shit in this life, but taking orders from a gringo half my age will not be one of them.
Later on, I tried humiliation by peers—going to the other teachers and saying, Gosh, Santos’s class is really falling behind schedule. But that didn’t work either. The guy was a rock. When I returned one day with the vice principal, who was as incredulous as I that this teacher refused to work, I stood and watched while the teacher basically told his boss to fuck off, too.
“But Santos—Santito,” the vice principal pleaded, “we all signed the agreement that your classes would do the work.”
The conversation ended in a harrumph, with both men throwing their arms in the air, walking off, and basically saying screw it.
As we walked in from the field to the offices, I asked the vice principal if this sort of thing was normal. “Yeah,” he said. “Some of them just don’t listen.”
And so my days of maintaining, training, and facilitating went just about like that. Eventually, the beds got built and the seeds got sown and the shiny new greenhouse was a pleasure to look at, as the 692 square meters bloomed into neat rows of green produce.
But somewhere along the way I did, in fact, begin to feel an enormous sense of guilt. I started feeling like this was one big handout. What would these people actually learn from it? Only the strategy of waiting with their hands out the next time a gringo or an NGO came through town. I thought more about sustainability, of course. In my most pessimistic moments, I decided that nothing was sustainable anymore. If the money or ideas came from an outside invasion, how sustainable could it really be?
The Gringo: A Memoir Page 18