The Gringo: A Memoir

by J. Grigsby Crawford

  Four blocks past the park and away from the river, things abruptly turn from city to countryside. Since the municipal building is at the far end of town, it’s surrounded by the farmland that extends from the outer edges of Zumbi up into the hills where farmers grow corn and bananas and cacao, but mostly tear down trees to make room for cattle grazing.

  I walked up and down each of these blocks, sometimes saying hello to people only to have them stare blankly back at me.

  And one day I walked into an old building on the edge of town that had history books and old newspaper clips about the region (along with a surprisingly large amount of Scientology material). I peeled back the dusty pages and read about the land and the people, going back hundreds of years to when the first inhabitants spilled over the Andes and into this part of the Amazon.

  Those first people were the Shuar—an indigenous group best known for shrinking the heads of their enemies after battle. Later, of course, the Spanish arrived—changing the religion, language, and bloodlines in the area forever.

  Then I read about the country’s independence, and it explained the strange maps I’d seen hanging in classrooms, with Ecuador’s southeastern border not in its usual spot but instead bulging far out into Peru’s Amazon territory. This cartographic aggression resulted from over a century of border disputes between the two countries that had caused military skirmishes close to Zumbi as recently as the ’90s. The disagreement was ultimately put to rest with a peace treaty in 1998. Now, more than a decade later, for one of the country’s most isolated provinces, Zamora Chinchipe remains heavily militarized, with small army bases dotting the hillsides and lining the rivers in even the most obscure locales.

  Zamora Chinchipe didn’t really start to grow until the ’80s, when modern mining got underway. But in the three decades since, its population has increased to only about 75,000, making it mainland Ecuador’s second-least populated province, despite being one of the four largest in land mass.

  Zumbi’s county, Centinela del Condor, was the smallest in Zamora Chinchipe. Up until the ’90s, Zumbi had looked the same for several decades. It began as farmland with small houses scattered here and there. Eventually more jungle was hacked away and what is now the location of the central park began to take shape. Soon the church was built and a few other wooden buildings came in around it. But the lack of a car bridge had a moat-like effect on Zumbi, preventing it and everything to its east from developing as quickly as the rest of the province. And nowadays, the only remnant of the Shuar in the area is its name—zumbi was the Shuar word for a type of fish that was once abundant in the Rio Zamora—and a tiny Shuar village located in the hills an hour east of Zumbi. When I’d visited the village with FODI, it was the saddest, poorest place I encountered in Ecuador—complete with food being boiled in outdoor cauldrons over burning trash and thirteen-year-old mothers without shoes.

  What I didn’t read about the history of the area, I learned from listening to some of the old men I passed on the streets. They were among the original settlers who’d come to build roads or mine for gold or shoot at Peruvian helicopters decades ago. And they had watched as bridges got built, roads got paved, and more people moved in.

  CHAPTER 23

  I was adjusting to life in Zumbi. By late August I’d spent more time (eight weeks) in my new site than I had in my coastal nightmare. I also eclipsed the half-year-in-country mark and somehow convinced myself this milestone meant something.

  It didn’t.

  The days were long and I had less and less work with FODI. The constant rain from my first months in Zumbi gave way to a penetrating jungle heat. Shop owners would hang large plastic tarps in their storefronts to shield themselves from the blinding sun. Zumbi usually moved in slow motion, and the heat slowed it down even more. Even the buses passing through town were never in a hurry to get anywhere. They idled near the side of the road for up to forty-five minutes, filling the most crowded street in town with gasoline fumes.

  Because I didn’t feel entirely comfortable cooking in Graciela and Consuela’s roach-infested kitchen, I would eat out at the roadside cafés frequently. It was a good way for me to meet people in the community. Plus, a full meal was dirt cheap. For just two dollars, I’d get a heaping plate of chicken and rice—with a serving of questions on the side.

  “Where are you from?”

  I told them.

  “Ah, American.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I explained.

  “Do you like it here?”

  Early on, I would answer this question by playing into their intracountry xenophobia: “I was living on the coast and I had some security issues, so now I’m here and I like it much better.”

  “Yes,” they’d say. “Bad people on the coast. Can’t trust ’em. Bad, dirty, violent people. Here, the people are nice.”

  Then they’d lay into me with the real kickers. And it would go something like this:

  “Is the United States bigger than Ecuador?”

  Or: “Does the United States border an ocean?”

  And then: “Have you met Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

  “Actually, yes,” I’d say, and they’d ignore me to jump to the next, apparently rhetorical, question.

  “Which part of the U.S. are you from?”

  “A state called Colorado, in the West,” I’d say.

  “I can’t pronounce that,” they’d say. “Cow-loo . . . what?”

  “It’s a Spanish word,” I’d say. “You have a province here that used to have the same word in it—Santo Domingo de los Colorados.”

  “Oh, Colorado,” they’d say. And then, “Do you have black people in the U.S.?”

  One night while I was at one of the two watering holes in Zumbi, I put my beer on the table, looked at the wall, and saw a Che Guevara poster. It was taped up between ones of Christina Aguilera and MTV’s Lauren Conrad. I asked the owner if she liked Che.

  “Love him,” she said.

  “So are you a fan of Rafael Correa?” I asked. Correa, their president (and University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana alumnus), is known as a leftist.

  “No, no,” she said. “I voted for—” She named one of the other half-dozen dudes who had just run unsuccessfully against Correa. The guy she named was to the right.

  “You voted for the right-wing candidate?” I said.

  “Sí!”

  “But you think Che is the man?”

  “Sí!”

  ONCE, IN A RESTAURANT, I had a conversation that went like this:

  Teenage girl: “Where are you from?”

  Me: “The U.S.”

  Girl: “Ah, and do you speak English?”

  Me: “Yes, it’s our country’s primary language.” (Had I been in a more chipper mood, I might have added the surely mind-blowing statistic that the U.S. also had thirty million more Spanish speakers than Ecuador.)

  Girl: “Cool, do you speak Spanish as well?”

  Me: “Yes . . . wait, what?”

  Girl: “Spanish. Do you speak it?”

  Me: “We’ve been speaking Spanish the entire time I’ve been sitting here.”

  Girl: “So do you speak Spanish?”

  Me: “I guess not.”

  I finished my meal in silence.

  I TRIED MY BEST TO rotate between the very few eating venues in the town. Only on one occasion did my dining experience force me to boycott a location.

  As I was finishing the food on my plate, the cook/waiter (he was the only other person in the restaurant at the time) came from behind the counter and sat down across from me. He had long hair and looked like an emaciated version of Carlos Santana.

  “Gringo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “So then what do you do?” He smiled with raised eyebrows and the vaguely detached look of someone who had no idea how creepy he was.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do
you do to . . . you know?”

  “Are you asking if I go to the whorehouses?” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh, I see. So then what do you do?” He made an exaggerated jerking-off motion with his hand.

  “You want to know if I jerk off?”

  His eyes widened, like I’d just breached some taboo subject.

  “It’s only because I heard gringos have big ones.” He motioned with his hands about a yard apart and then brought them together to suggest a girth that would make even a mare wince.

  “Really?” I began pushing my chair out to stand up and leave.

  “I bet you have a big one. Do you have a big cock? I bet you’ve got one, don’t you.”

  I stood up.

  “Have I offended you?”

  “Oh no, not at all,” I said, starting to walk out.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, “it’s just that—” He motioned again with his hands suggesting a whale-sized member.

  I headed for the door. I forget whether I paid.

  CHAPTER 24

  At the end of August, everyone in the FODI office was fired, along with nearly all the other workers in the municipality.

  A month before I arrived in Zumbi, they’d had an election and the sitting mayor—a man named Raúl—lost. I’d hung out with Raúl a bit, most notably when we were on the same team in a game of pickup basketball and he was smoking a cigarette while playing.

  The fact that he lost struck me as odd at first since he was in the same party as President Correa, who had enormous support in the area. I later found out that Raúl had participated in numerous extramarital affairs with municipal workers over his five-year term. During his race for reelection, the opposition—a young political novice with a law degree—based his entire campaign on painting Raúl as an adulterer and well-known wife beater (when I first got to town, I was confused by the graffiti on buildings that said “Enough with Raúl and the disrespect to women,” but it finally made sense when someone told me all this months afterward). The opposing candidate’s scathing refrain was that Raúl had been “running the municipality like a whorehouse.” Incredibly, despite all this, Raúl was nearly reelected. The difference-maker on Election Day came from the town of San Pablo, where the young candidate supposedly received four hundred votes from the hundred or so registered voters.

  In any event, the new mayor came in and, per tradition, removed all municipal workers who didn’t support him in the election—even the janitors. So all the FODI women were gone and I was left with no one to “work” with.

  When I was in Quito, waiting on my site change, Winkler talked to me about working with FODI and warned me that this might happen. “They’ll likely be replaced,” he said. At that point, the election had already taken place; I arrived in Zumbi in the interim while the old mayor still had a few more months left and the new mayor had yet to swear in.

  “It’s just the way politics work here, unfortunately,” said Winkler. He suggested that in those first few months, I use FODI to make some contacts within the municipality for work I could do down the road.

  Given that conversation, I was pretty confused the first time Winkler called and asked how things were going in the office. I told him I was looking for new projects to do because of the firings. His response: “What! They’ve been fired? Then who . . . I mean, what are you going to . . . I mean, who exactly are you going to be working with? This just isn’t good. It’s no good. We’ve got to find you someone to be working with. And fast!”

  AT HOME, THINGS BETWEEN CONSUELA and Graciela had fully deteriorated. Their screaming matches and dog abuse became more frequent and it was getting under my skin. But I couldn’t move out. When I changed sites, the clock got reset on my Peace Corps–mandated three-month stay with a host family. On top of that, it would likely be an even longer wait for me to find a new place since only program managers or their assistants could approve new housing. The program managers were obligated to visit our sites within those first three months, but between my site changing and Winkler stalling on taking the trip down to my part of the country, I was approaching eight months without a visit from a program manager.

  During that time, the household had grown by one: Consuela’s sixteen-year-old goddaughter, Lucia. She came from San Eduardo, a tiny rural community about an hour and a half from Zumbi that I’d visited with FODI and seen more kids walking barefoot through piles of trash. Lucia had come to stay with Consuela and Graciela indefinitely while she finished her high school degree on Saturdays, meaning that six days a week, she moped around the house because Consuela and Graciela didn’t want her leaving without them.

  One morning while I was eating alone in the kitchen, Lucia—who mumbled and spoke so poorly she sometimes said four sentences before I figured out what she was talking about—decided she trusted me. She leaned close to me and whispered, “How do you stand it here?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You know, with Graciela, Consuela, and the constant fighting,” she said. “Graciela—she’s so . . . mean.”

  A few weeks after she arrived, Lucia came to me as soon as Graciela and Consuela had left the house. She told me she couldn’t take the yelling and the fighting anymore and was “running away”—presumably, back to San Eduardo where the rest of her family was from. I asked her why she didn’t just tell Graciela or Consuela that she wanted to go back home, and she said they wouldn’t let her. So she left a note on Graciela’s bed that said she couldn’t stand the way they treated her and was leaving. Consuela came home first and found the note and went ballistic. Graciela was indifferent.

  The very next day, Lucia came back. Apparently, she was done running away.

  Graciela had been growing increasingly bitter since about a month after I’d moved in. In that first month, because everything seemed normal, and the house—remodeled with money her kids earned in Spain—was as nice a place as I would ever find in Zumbi, I signed a rental contract with Graciela that would last through April 2011, till the end of my service. Graciela read the contract, signed it, and welcomed me into their home. She asked me what I liked to eat, and I said, don’t worry, I’ll cook for myself. She asked me how I’d clean my clothes, and I told her I could wash them. I’d already done the host-family scenario twice in Ecuador, so I felt more comfortable as a sort of tenant than as a gringo quasi-family member once again.

  Aside from the little water and electricity I used, it was almost like they didn’t have another person living with them. My room was detached from theirs, so they didn’t see me if they didn’t want to. I didn’t have visitors because I had no friends. I wasn’t noisy and even if I were, they couldn’t have heard it downstairs and across a patio. When I was done eating, I washed and put away my dishes, and when they used the kitchen, I stayed out of their way and came back later.

  But somewhere in there—perhaps because I didn’t go to church with Graciela every Sunday or because I’d said no thank you to her cooking—she hated my guts.

  After making my breakfast one morning and leaving the kitchen cleaner than I found it, Graciela ambushed me.

  “I’m trying to get new people to come and live in your room,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. “I thought I’d be able to stay until the date we agreed on in the contract.”

  She ignored the whole “contract” business and said that these new people were going to pay her $60 a month—three times more than the $20 I was paying, per the agreement Winkler made with Graciela when he came down to approve the site.

  “Okay,” I said, “does that mean that if I pay $60 I can stay?” Admittedly, $20 was a lowball price considering volunteers with “rural” sites like mine were allotted up to $70 a month. Whether I paid $20 or $70 made no difference to me because it was deposited into my bank account separate from my normal monthly living allowance.

  “Maybe,” said Graciela. She wrinkled her forehead, and the fake e
yebrows she painted on every day arched up comically into two points.

  I was pretty sure the prospective renters she mentioned didn’t exist, but I couldn’t call her bluff and risk being homeless in Zumbi until Winkler decided I was important enough to visit. Graciela knew this, meaning a little old Ecuadorian grandmother was successfully extorting $50 out of me for the next couple of months.

  After a few days of haggling back and forth, Graciela agreed to let me sign a new contract with her that would raise the rent to $70 (I kicked in ten more dollars than she asked for because it made no difference to me and so she’d shut up about any new bidding wars with imaginary renters). But when I sat down to sign the new contract with her, she changed her mind. Now she wanted $100 a month. I reminded her that I was literally not allowed to pay more than $70, and it was a decision that was out of my hands.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “How about $80?”

  “Seriously?” I said. “I just told you that I can’t pay more than—”

  “Here’s the thing. If you’re not going to pay what that room’s really worth, you can’t live in it anymore.” Mysteriously she was no longer mentioning the alleged seekers willing to pay $60.

  “All right, but my boss from Quito won’t be visiting me until November. He can approve a new place and the soonest I could move out would be the beginning of December.”

  Mumbling obscenities under her breath, she agreed and signed the contract. (After I moved out at the end November, no one else ever moved into that room, meaning that by trying to shake me down for the $100 I didn’t have, she lost out on $1,330 over the next year and a half.)

  From then on, it was war.

  I had a place to live until December, but the final three months there were a hellish ordeal full of other extortion attempts. In Graciela’s boldest move, she tried blaming me for their rising utilities bill. It had risen from something like eight to twelve dollars a month. The only problem with her hypothesis was that during the month in question, I was out of town for about ten days. Meanwhile, two of her other grandchildren (Consuela’s teenaged kids) were in town, one of whom watched TV for no less than eighteen hours a day and frequently left the refrigerator door open. But since I lived in “two rooms” according to Graciela (actually it was just one big one), she screamed and blamed me for the inflated bill.