The Gringo: A Memoir (21 page)

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 class 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?

I began thinking that it was my own ego or greed or that I just wanted so badly to get a real project in the ground to call my own and feel like I had made a mark of some kind. At the same time, I’d seen plenty of community health or sustainable agriculture volunteers who ended up just drinking with their neighbors for two years. So while I was driven in part by selfishness, I guess I was also driven to not be like them.

In a way, I could justify the fact that I wasn’t in there every day working hands-on with the classes. After all, one day I would leave and they’d have to do it all on their own anyway. This tapering down of direct involvement in projects was one of the methods of sustainable development that we’d been trained about.

But it tore me up thinking about how I’d gloated to myself that I built this structure—this monument to condescending foreign aid—and then didn’t have the emotional energy to follow through and tangle with the teachers and everyone else on a daily basis about what should go on inside the thing.

CHAPTER
41

I
f there was anything in the world of international development sexier than the idea of
sustainability
, it was
ecotourism
. Not just tourism—which was almost like a bad word compared with its new-age cousin—but
eco
tourism. I, of course, had an up-close run-in with this phenomenon with Juan and company during my dark, brief adventure in La Segua. That was far from the last I would hear of it. Not only was ecotourism a term bound to come up several dozen times in any conversation about Ecuador (about half the Ecuadorian college graduates I ever came across had degrees in ecotourism, like Juan), but it seemed that the majority of volunteers were working on an ecotourism project in one form or another.

In the final year of my service, I saw a television documentary produced by one of Quito’s news stations. It told the story of a town of only a few hundred in the northern Amazon region where the suicide rate among locals was several times greater than the world average. People were killing themselves left and right. The town was responsible for producing lots of naranjilla, a sweet fruit grown in that area of the Amazon. The report went on to explain how the locals used an especially toxic pesticide to grow the naranjilla and how because they either couldn’t read the directions or were being illegally sold too much of the pesticide, they were essentially poisoning themselves when they worked with—and later consumed—the fruit. The report went on to suggest that the overdose of chemicals from the pesticide was playing a role in the alarmingly high rates of depression and suicide.

The people in that town just needed someone to provide a safer option for growing the naranjilla, and it could literally start saving lives. We did happen to have a Peace Corps volunteer there for quite some time, but she was working in ecotourism.

And so after a year and a half in Ecuador, I’d sat through too many ecotourism seminars to count. I began to think it was mostly a cruel trick being played on the people there—leading them to believe Ecuador could be the next Costa Rica. Leading them to believe that ecotourism was their golden ticket to prosperity. Leading the poor farmers who lived in three-quarters deforested towns like mine to believe they could build a path to a waterfall and the gringos and their dollars would start raining in.

Ironically, it was only a month after I’d attended another disappointing ecotourism conference at the municipal building when my area of the province actually did attract some visitors—though not in a good way.

About ten minutes east of Zumbi, on the only road leading from the town out of the province to the south, the most unusual bridge spans the Yacuambi River. Made of concrete, it has just one lane, causing traffic buildup on both ends, as cars and buses wait for others to cross ahead of them one at a time. But that isn’t the strangest part. The bridge is concave in shape, meaning it slopes downward with its lowest point midway over the river. The rollercoaster effect created by speeding down one side and coasting up the other makes for an exhilarating few seconds, but has also resulted in several accidents. Every person or product that goes to the town from elsewhere in the province must cross this bridge.

The whole time I’d been in Zumbi, workers had been constructing a new bridge about a hundred yards upstream from the concave one. As much as the ancient single-lane concrete bridge was underdoing it, this new bridge, you could say, was overdoing it. It was a monster, an Amazonian Golden Gate, spanning a river that was no more than ten feet deep and thirty yards wide.

Considering how splendid this structure was, President Correa was scheduled to come down for the ribbon-cutting ceremony when it was completed.

But he never came.

Three days before his visit, the new bridge collapsed, spraying giant scraps of metal and rebar and blocks of concrete into the river and killing one of the construction workers in the fall. For months, while a new team of engineers tried to fix it, the grotesque and twisted heap looked like a Transformer that had lain down to die in the flowing brown river.

After the collapse, every time buses crossed the tiny concrete concave bridge—now considered by far to be our safest river-crossing option—people would hang out the window snapping pictures or simply gawking at the pathetic wreckage. We finally had our tourist attraction.

It was things like this that I spent my final months in Ecuador being cynical about, while working here and there with the teachers in the greenhouse and continuing my love-hate relationship with Ecuador and my battle against immense boredom in Zumbi. Somewhere in there, I read
Atlas Shrugged
in just a few days.

CHAPTER
42

A
nd so you’re here all alone doing close to nothing and the time passes. You’re not even sure how, but it does. And the days feel like they’ll never end, but the weeks become a blur.

And here you are, measuring your life not in coffee spoons, but in dishes washed, good conversations had, baskets of laundry done by hand, walks down the dusty road to swim in the river, cold showers that are
good
cold showers because it’s hot as hell and from the bathroom you can look through the crack between the brick and the corrugated tin and see the green foothills surrounding the small valley.

You measure it in rolls of bread bought for five cents apiece at the bakery down the road. You measure it in ice cream bars bought on hot days for a quarter. You measure it in Saturdays spent drinking bad beer—except it’s good beer because it’s light and cold and you can drink it in the shade and watch the grainy TV in the corner while the women behind the counter ask you questions about the world. You measure it in plates of rice and chicken—which still have way too much rice and not enough chicken—and all you can think after eating it so many times is how it’s not so much food as just something you joylessly insert into your stomach to survive.

You measure it in books read, which eventually comes out to 152 overall, or 1.46 per week. You measure it in Friday nights spent alone because going out to drink with any men in town is an exercise in patience that you don’t have. You measure it in Saturday nights spent sitting on the bench in front of your building and staring at the people and cars going by and wondering where you belong. You measure it in festivals, which seem to be every month because there are celebrations for not just the country or the province or the town, but also for the high schools and the preschools and the neighborhoods. You go to these and you drink and dance and then spend the next six months hearing your neighbors give recaps of every girl you danced with and which ones you are sure to impregnate and consequently marry and stay with forever. And when it briefly crosses your mind that staying here forever wouldn’t be a bad idea, you pause for a moment and become disgusted with yourself.

You see a woman in town who is absolutely gorgeous—
supermodel
gorgeous. But then you find out she is sixteen years old. And if that’s not enough to stop you, you find out she is married. And if
that’s
not enough to stop you, you find out she has a child. Although the others are not quite as gorgeous, this is a similar scenario that happens over and over. More grown-up-looking beauties make eyes at you and then you see them in the classroom at the high school. Or you see them walking down the street another time and now they’re nursing a baby. It all makes you start to wonder that if you were going to find one of these beauties to settle down with, what window of opportunity—if any—was there? They’re beautiful and underage, but by the time they turn eighteen and become available, it seems they’ve already popped out a baby or two. And, by the way, the rapid aging continues—you’ll come across thirty-year-olds who look fifty and sixty-year-olds who look eighty-five. (Then you confirm that this phenomenon is not due to any bias or racism on your part, because when neighbors are shown pictures of
your
parents, who are in their late fifties, the neighbors believe them to be no older than forty.) It must be, as they say, something in the water.

There are good nights visiting other volunteers and cooking Mexican food and exchanging three-month-old copies of
The New Yorker
. There are bad nights wondering how many times you’re going to eat stale tuna or pasta for dinner. There are good mornings, when the sun is shining in through the slats on the ceiling and you can feel the warmth heating up the bedroom and you can feel the light wind pushing back through the torn curtains on the far side of the room. Then there are bad mornings when the rainwater is already flooding in through the bedroom door and you must unclog leaves and broken glass and old shoes from the drain outside before you can even wade to the bathroom. There are days you put on sunscreen and you’re proud of yourself for remembering and then there are days you walk down to the river without it and that stinging redness when you get back probably erases all the times you lathered up with high SPF.

There is a calendar on the wall and turning the page over to a new month is nothing if not a satisfying and glorious feeling. But then you feel bad about counting down the months or weeks or days because you realize that this is life. It doesn’t get much realer than this, and counting the days is like marching toward death.

There are more festivals and there are also holidays, including lots of Catholic ones, which, judging by the grim atmosphere and low-hanging heads and slumped shoulders on the people shuffling into the chapel, aren’t necessarily what you’d consider holidays.

There are hikes into the jungle at almost every opportunity because your friends in town nearly all have a parcel of land out there and the parts that aren’t deforested for grazing are exquisite. There are clear creeks and tall trees and giant green leaves and gullies and caves with bats and rock walls and birds and monkeys in the distance. And there are waterfalls where you can take your clothes off and jump into water so cold that it takes your breath away.

There are walks around town in the morning, with you saying hello to the neighbors or going to shoot your basketball alone behind the elementary school. There are walks around town in the afternoons, with you spitting sunflower seeds and stopping in to talk with the old ladies and single mothers who make up your friends. And there are walks around town at night, with just the stars overhead and the teenagers flirting and making out while sitting on curbs in dark alleyways, because they sure as hell can’t get away with that at home. You spend hours and hours of every day . . . walking. No one has simply
walked
the length and breadth of Zumbi and its surrounding
barrios
as many times as you have. On the walks, your mind spins through time, like a hand reaching into a shoebox to pull out the faded Polaroid memories.

There are letters home. In the beginning there were more and now you hardly have the energy to go through the motions of
explaining
everything. But you write some anyway.

There are rides in the back of pickup trucks with all the jungle around you. You look at the water rushing by and the lush plants shooting up out of the red dirt and you pass by old men on the road walking back to town in their rubber boots and overalls. You hit the potholes, stop for the cattle, and hear the
cumbia
music blaring from the car speakers and you think,
Now, NOW, I’m in Latin America
.

And these are the moments of transcendence. These are the moments when you feel the levity in your chest—when you see all the people passing by and you can’t help thinking that they are human and surely trying to just live their lives with some sort of dignity and that that’s the only thing that really matters. Sure, soon enough you will go back to cursing them for being too slow or ignorant or rude or overly curious about you. But then you will have another transcendent moment in the back of a pickup truck or in the window seat of another bus ride or on another walk along the river, and you’ll feel tremendous guilt about the bitterness and the anger and frustration.

And so life pushes on, even in Zumbi.

There’s a girl who lives on your street, whom you see every day at school working in the greenhouse. She has everyone talking about her because she’s gotten caught letting old men fondle her out by the soccer fields for fifty dollars.

You’re on a bus ride from Loja to Zumbi—a ride you will end up taking eighty-five times total during your time here—and you’re sitting next to an indigenous woman with a child on her lap. The child is wearing tattered clothes and his cheeks are sunburned and his eyes are crusty and he’s getting carsick. (And you can’t blame him because the driver is swerving down the mountain like a fucking lunatic.) So the mother holds the tip of her long black ponytail up to his nose saying, “Sniff it, sniff it. There, come on, sniff it!” And she repeats it over and over, shoving it under the little boy’s runny nose. Finally, he sniffs it.

Here you are, going about life as usual, and still occasionally feeling that brief but crippling pain in the balls and from deep within your man plumbing.

Then it’s another year and you have another birthday and are officially into the realm of when birthdays are neither here nor there. It’s just time marching on.

Here you are at a going-away party for the beautiful doctor who originally dealt with your balls and gave you the injection at the community health center. Some of the men there are talking about how pretty she is and one of them turns to you and says, among a series of winks and nods, “Yeah, Grigsby, you should tell
la doctora
that you have the same problem”—he points to your balls—“and that you need her to ‘check you out’ again.” Everyone at the party, including you, erupts into laughter, because in this life, you can choose to either laugh or cry.

And speaking of your balls: From time to time you’re in the next town over and you keep seeing the lab technician with the swastika tattoo on her wrist and you briefly wonder if she truly exists or if she is only in your imagination.

There are more floods and suicides and landslides and car wrecks. One weekend, Zumbi’s mayor nearly dies when he “falls asleep” behind the wheel at 4 a.m., crashing through a guardrail and rolling his car into a ditch.

Then your next-door neighbor has a baby. The baby is cute and you like to hold him in your arms and talk to him in English, which makes all the single mothers living nearby hoot and holler with laughter.

And then, like most days, there’s the other neighbor boy, Steven, rushing into your apartment to ask you about any and all things gringo. Today he wants to know the meaning of the English term “mission accomplished.”

Here you are finally taking morning jogs again, because with diet changes, warm-water soakings and a switch to briefs, the testicular pain has abated. As you’re running up the hills, dodging cattle and stray dogs, you wonder if you dropped dead out there, how long it would be before anyone realized it.

Here you are walking between your apartment and the high school every day to check on the greenhouse. And on the walk, you always pass by a different, older greenhouse that was built with the help of another Peace Corps volunteer a decade earlier. The years have not been kind to this greenhouse: With its metal frame exposed and its sad tattered plastic flapping about in the breeze, it looks like the rotting carcass of one of those elephants that goes off to die alone on the Serengeti. The people who run this particular greenhouse approached you about giving—yes,
giving
—them the money to repair it, and one time this lady happened to approach you on a bad day and the conversation deteriorated into you saying that it was perhaps time for them to think of ways to raise money that didn’t include asking foreigners to give it to them. “Are you going to just keep asking for money?” you said. She looked back at you with a confused gaze, but it turns out it was a productive conversation after all, because they ended up raising the money themselves. But in the meantime, you continually pass by the dying greenhouse carcass and all you can think is how you’re staring into a former volunteer’s project and also into the future of yours. So you think: This is what foreign aid looks like.

On September 30, 2010, there is a coup attempt in Quito. The national police force attempts to throw President Rafael Correa out of office. Even though their salaries have increased fivefold during his administration, the police are upset about a bill that would make it harder for them to achieve seniority and get raises. (Correa’s response: They clearly hadn’t read the bill.)

There are tires burning in the streets. There is tear gas thrown. There are half-assed attempts at looting in metropolitan streets. For several hours, Correa is barricaded inside a Quito hospital, protected by the military. At one point during the day, he shouts down from a hospital window that if they want to kill the president they should come and get him (which was pretty cool). Later that night, after Correa makes a heroic escape from the hospital and at least one police officer is blown away on live television, he gives a rousing speech to his supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace, where speakers and giant television screens are already set up when he arrives. During the whole day, life in Zumbi goes on as normal and people watch this all go down on the restaurants’ TV sets as if it were a soccer match.

You briefly date a woman who grew up an hour from Zumbi but studies modern art at a university in Loja. The two of you spend some days hanging out and eating lunch and swimming in the river together. But after a while, you lose touch. And one day, months later after you’ve drifted apart, you’re on the bus to Loja and she gets on and sits down next to you. You spend the next two hours talking. And at one point she’s telling you about her studies and her life and her goals and she’s smiling and she’s beautiful and she says something that hits you and doesn’t go away: “I don’t want to live like my parents live.” So then you see her a few weeks later and you spend the day making out and walking through a park in Loja.

You experience your second and final New Year’s Eve in Ecuador. You go with a group of friends for a trip to the beach. You get drunk and eat good food and laugh and play cards and lie in the sand and get sunburned. And upon returning to Zumbi, you find that a neighbor has reported you to the police because he is worried that you’re going to poison his dog to death. (It’s because late one night, when his dog was barking so violently that you thought something dreadful was taking place, you went over to ask him if he could please quiet the dog.) The complaint is filed at the police station—where the neighbor’s sister is the clerk—and you have to go in and explain that in addition to not being a dog murderer, you’re actually an animal lover (which is a phrase that may or may not translate well into Spanish).