The Man Who Quit Money (10 page)

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A
T THE SAME
time that Suelo’s Christian faith was expanding, he was suffering the crisis that would eventually break it. Delving deeper into the feminine side of Christianity, he began battling with the most unwelcome biological urges. Daniel dated plenty of girls, but when it came time for the first kiss, he would freeze. “My heart would go pitter-patter from fear,” he says, “and the girls would think it was attraction.”

His closest friend in the dorms was a tomboy named Robin. They were both somewhat androgynous, he with his smooth face and delicate figure, she with short hair and baggy clothes. The two were inseparable, mutually infatuated, yet they didn’t touch. “It seemed inappropriate to both of us,” Suelo remembers. He wanted to believe his lack of libido was appropriate, given the prohibition on sex before marriage. As Valentine’s Day approached, two girls on the hall teased him. “Have you kissed Robin yet?” They giggled. “Aren’t you going to buy her flowers?” The thought disgusted him, but he succumbed to the pressure.
Maybe I am in love with Robin,
he told himself. In a burst of resolve, he bought a bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates, and knocked on her door. She looked at the gifts in horror. “She was pretending to enjoy it,” he remembers. “After that it was really hard to be friends with her. Very embarrassing. We finally got over that and got back to our old selves.”

One day the pair was out on the Boulder Mall when a flamboyantly pretty man sashayed up to Daniel, patted his butt, and whispered, “Aren’t you cute!” Daniel, who had lived twenty years without fighting or cursing, shoved him off. “Get the hell away from me!” he screamed, his heart pounding. After he calmed down,
he began to wonder what had been so frightening. He remembers thinking:
What am I afraid of? Not of him, but of what’s in me.

At Bible study, he had found himself locking eyes with a boy across the room, fixed in a hypnotic, breathless stare. “The flame was there,” he remembers. “We went camping all the time. We’d pretend like we were wrestling, and had our hands on each other a lot, but neither of us would admit it. It’s comical looking back on it.”

Daniel’s upbringing did not allow him to believe that his desires were natural, or right. They were the work of the devil, and he kept them under wraps. Fortunately, celibacy before marriage was expected, and as long as Daniel remained unmarried, nobody would interpret his virginity as a lack of attraction to women. He hid his true self from his female friends, many of whom fell for him. Dawn Larson, who at nineteen had almost no dating experience of her own, often found herself paired up with Daniel.

“He was a cutie, a sexy guy, attractive in that natural sort of way,” Larson says today. “He wasn’t afraid of emotions, but he was also very strong. That’s a hard blend to find.”

Unable to contain her attraction, Larson told Daniel that she’d never felt such a strong connection with someone. Daniel blinked and said, “We’re all connected in God’s grace.” They never spoke of it again.

Daniel maintained his strongest affection for male friends. “One day Daniel said something extremely attractive,” Damian Nash remembers. “He wanted a friend he could be together with and not have to talk. Everything would be understood. Almost telepathic. Over the years he has groomed me into that.”

Celibacy and theology, however, could not prevent Daniel
from falling in love. His first crush, alas, was on his straight best friend. “I was a Christian evangelical, a virgin, as naive as a young man can be,” says Nash. “The line between eros and agape was blurred.” But even as both men sensed their friendship was beyond the norm, Daniel could not admit that his attraction was physical, and neither could Damian perceive it.

By the time he graduated, Daniel Shellabarger had won the friendship and admiration of many whose paths he crossed. But as he set out into the world in the summer of 1985 with his degree, he was distraught. His treatise on the feminine nature of God made for scintillating chats in classrooms and Bible study, but the manuscript itself was a mess—the incoherent passions of a college sophomore, on a subject at once too deep in biblical esoterica for secular readers yet downright heretical to most evangelicals. A few years later he burned the thing. He departed the academy wondering how to put his beliefs into practice, less sure about his place in the world than when he started. The predictions of his family’s congregation were proving true: Boulder had rattled his fundamentalism.

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S
UELO’S RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATION
in college was accompanied by a political awakening. This was the eighties, and contrary to the national conservative trend, in academia leftist professors were successfully challenging the supremacy of the canon produced largely by white men of privilege. The narrative of the West as enlightened protector of freedoms lost ground to a vision of the West as colonial exploiter and oppressor of women and minorities. Departments of African-American, American
Indian, and women’s studies cropped up in universities to grant institutional validity to these ideas.

Suelo was particularly influenced by the writings of American Indians like Black Elk, John Lame Deer, and Vine Deloria Jr. These thinkers confirmed the beliefs he’d first contemplated in South America: that the money system was rigged to benefit the wealthy, and the people who had the least were the most willing to share. White Americans, writes Lame Deer in
Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions,
“are also wagging their fingers at us when we have a give-away feast. What they are trying to tell us is that poor people can’t afford to be generous. But we hold onto our outhan, our give-aways, because they help us to remain Indians. All the big events in our lives—birth and death, joy and sadness—can be occasions for give-aways. We don’t believe in a family getting wealthy through inheritance. Better to give away a dead person’s belongings. That way he, or she, will be remembered.” This sort of thinking, combined with the liberation theology he was learning from Dr. Mahan, convinced Suelo that the way to put his beliefs into practice was to work with poor people in the Third World.

In 1987 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Ecuador. He was twenty-six, an innocent with a head full of theology. Of course idealists with liberal-arts degrees were not rare in the Peace Corps, but fundamentalist Christians were. For most of his two years in South America, Daniel kept a daily journal, copies of which he meticulously transcribed by hand on lined paper and sent to his parents in thirty-page installments, rich with detail and tender with introspection. The first letter described crying the entire flight from Grand Junction to Denver, then reaching an epiphany on the way to Miami:

What’s absent from Suelo’s letters is the tone that would become emblematic of his generation: irony. His reports range from the aw-shucks delight of a rube (“The bananas are delicious here!”) to the wide-eyed bedazzlement of an innocent abroad (“The churches are especially beautiful, intricately carved on the outside, towering in spires toward the sky, and full of paintings and gold-plated sculptures”) to the stirrings of conscience of a son of empire: “It is hard to tell how much of the coldness is due to the communist propaganda against ‘Yankees.’ It is also true that there are many foreign corporations & oil companies totally exploiting the people here.”

Suelo had none of the jaded worldliness of his peers. His fellow Peace Corps volunteer Corinne Pochitaloff says, “He was a devout and spiritual young man, more contemplative of a person than the rest of us. He was moved and distressed by the state of affairs of the Amazon and I remember feeling that he would take action in the future. He was a force of good.”

What I find most powerful is his earnest wrestling with faith. He wrote to his parents: “We have talked about how the Indians from North America to South America have been
pushed around and massacred through the centuries and how these facts are conveniently left out of our history books in public schools both in the USA and here in Latin America. We must pray that the Love of Christ covers the multitudes of sins on our hands so that people will no longer notice our evil but our good.”

The next blow to his religious convictions came when he and Corinne went to visit a missionary who knew Daniel’s family. Envisioning some swashbuckler in a jungle hut surrounded by natives in loincloths, Suelo was alarmed by what he discovered.

“He was in this huge suburban house surrounded by barbed wire to keep people out,” Suelo remembers. “He talked about what he was doing with the indigenous people in the jungle, mostly the Huaorani and the Quechua.” The missionary, with the blessing of the Ecuadoran government, had gone into the cattle business, shipping a herd from North America. He had brokered a deal with his converts: if they raised and fed his cattle, the government would grant them a plot of jungle, and the converts would be entitled to keep every other generation of calves. The alternating generation would be added to the American’s herd.

“Before we came here the Indians had the whole family sleeping in one bed, and they didn’t have radios or TVs,” boasted the missionary. “Now the Christian Indians are the richest in the jungle.”

“This is why governments all over the world love missionaries—they civilize people and get them into the money system,” Suelo observes now, but at the time he was flabbergasted. What of Jesus’s teaching his followers to give up possessions? “And suddenly it dawned on me: if you were going to call something Antichrist, this would be it. The people who were promoting this so-called Christianity are really Antichrist.”

What’s more, with each acre of land doled out to ranching, more jungle was clear-cut. And after just a few years of grazing, the land was unusable, turned into desert.

“What about the jungle?” Daniel asked.

“It’s infinite,” said the missionary. “If you’re up in a plane, look at the Amazon. It goes on for miles.”

Daniel took a scenic flight over the Amazon. “It looked like Paul Bunyan had taken a razor blade to it.”

On the way back to Quito, Suelo juggled the contradictions. On the one hand, the missionary was doing some tangible good work for the Indians—fighting for their legal rights, promoting their education. On the other hand, introducing them to the money system didn’t seem to help. “There was no poverty in the jungle until they introduced money, and all the sudden there’s poverty,” he says. “And all the diseases that come with it. And you look at people and they’re not happy. They have all these goods, and they’re unhappy.”

Suelo’s doubts deepened as he began his assignment in the remote Andean village of El Hato, population three hundred. Armed with an identification card with the title of “Health Extensionist,” Suelo arrived ready to teach first aid and nutrition.

“Usted es doctor?”
said the villagers. You’re a doctor?

“Not exactly,” he replied, struggling in broken Spanish to explain
extensionista de salud
.

The first order of business was to rent a home. Suelo had envisioned a dirt-floor hut just like the natives had. But the villagers wanted to rent him the concrete box of an abandoned health clinic.
“Usted es doctor,”
they insisted.

Whether or not they believed his protestations, the locals made clear that the only edifice for rent was the clinic. And so
Daniel moved in. In a chain of events that could not have been better scripted by a writer of television sitcoms, as soon as he unshuttered the doors, the patients arrived in droves, having walked miles over mountain passes, and presented Daniel with their phlegm, sprains, and rashes—ready to barter milk and chickens for his services. After a few months of pointless protest, Suelo decided that since he couldn’t beat them, he might as well join them. He traveled to Quito, and with his meager stipend and his mysterious ID card, loaded up at the pharmacy on antibiotics, aspirin, acetaminophen, Benadryl, and epinephrine, as well as a handy paperback written by a former Peace Corps volunteer,
Donde No Hay Doctor,
on how to administer care when there’s no doctor for miles. By the end of his term, Suelo had treated innumerable maladies, sent a few serious cases to the nearest clinic, and armed with nothing more than clean towels, a pail of hot water, and
Donde No Hay Doctor,
delivered three healthy babies.

“They wanted to walk around and, like, do stuff,” Suelo says of the laboring mothers he encountered. “So I let them. I recommended that they squat, and they did, and the baby slid right out into my hands. The last one I did, the baby almost hit the floor.”

Medical triumphs notwithstanding, Suelo felt a deepening disillusionment with Western efforts—both religious and secular—to improve lives in Ecuador. A woman he’d befriended at the clinic required surgery that would cost two hundred dollars, but the family was poor, chronically in debt, and the husband earned only a dollar a day. Suelo wrote to his college friend Tim Frederick, asking him to take up a collection at his church in Boulder, hoping the congregation would send the cash immediately, without any questions or board meetings. “That’s the way Christianity should be,” he wrote, “the way Jesus taught it.”

Although the money arrived as hoped, Suelo continued to feel that the system of delivering charity was flawed beyond his ability to fix it. He wrote to Tim Frederick, “I feel very strongly, now more than ever, that any influence I have on these people should be on the individual level—helping and sharing knowledge on a one-on-one level, with my life, not with set programs.”