One day they gave up and the calls ceased, but my solitary war of anger raged on. I felt like South America—the land I loved so much that at one time I’d felt part of it—had done this to me.
And here I am now, I thought, angry and all alone.
The thought that this country was worthy of receiving my help filled me with sinister and self-loathing laughter.
I was angry with the Peace Corps. How do you send some volunteers to frolic in the rainforest or mangroves with good organizations while you send others to work with a Napoleon-complexed child in a community resembling an open-air insane asylum?
The anger exploded from every one of my pores.
How does your boss in the office, stammering on the other end of the phone, tell you these “misunderstandings” are “common” and then try to convince the country director to keep you out there? I envisioned walking into his office on my last day in this despicable country and telling him what I thought of him, too: “Your job is to help me but you did the opposite because you didn’t want extra paperwork. You put me in danger because you forgot I’m a human and not just a name on a piece of paper.”
My blood boiled more as I strolled through Zumbi with nothing to do. I’d pass the FODI people I worked with for all of two months and they’d ask me, inexplicably, if I’d still been going into the office. I explained that neither they nor anyone else was in the office. I wanted to scream in their face that they didn’t have any work for me to do even when they were actually employed there.
And then I’d go back to burning with rage over how I got sent there. How could Winkler have pawned me off on this community to work with government-paid babysitters who only wanted a gringo they could flirt with?
Winkler had acted like it was the worst inconvenience he’d ever faced to come down to my site and see if they still wanted another volunteer, all while I sat on my ass in Quito for nearly two weeks. The result of his haste was that he chose the worst host family possible.
Graciela became more crazed by the day. And Consuela kept flirting with me and would just happen to walk through the kitchen seminude at odd hours of the day when I was eating alone. The idea repulsed me and further entrenched me in the solitary confinement of my bedroom—my cocoon of hatred.
I also stewed at my family back home. On one hand, I’d hated their response to the incident in Manabí: Some told me to quit and come home. On the other hand, my spears of hatred hurled their way for not understanding what I now realized: that being here was all a sick mistake. I was pissed at them for thinking I could get through it. You weren’t here, I thought. You didn’t have to be around those people like I did. Eventually I gave up on trying to relay any more feelings or descriptions their way. The anger would hurt them. The loneliness would frighten them. There really is nothing lonelier than anger being thrown in all directions.
Now, Winkler was assaulting me with manic emails and phone calls about Reconnect, the Peace Corps meeting where we had to show up with our counterparts and give presentations explaining what we’d discovered in our interviews and analyses of our communities in the first few months.
“What do you mean you don’t have anyone from your community to bring to the meeting?” he barked.
“Well, everyone you sent me here to work with has been fired,” I calmly explained. “Just as you predicted.”
He’d chortle and come back with something like, “Well, this just won’t do.”
His calls and emails became increasingly frantic and devastating for my mood. I’d invited everyone in my town I could think of, including my former coworkers. They all said no. They said it sounded stupid, to which I had no effective reply.
In a sign of just how unsettling Winkler’s calls were becoming, I’d even committed the potentially disastrous maneuver of asking Consuela to come. She was, after all, an important political figure in town. I knew she’d say no and she did—she was busy touring around the county on political business—though I’m sure she managed to mistake my invitation as some sort of signal, which led to more nausea-inducing come-ons from her every day when we passed each other. (One day while I was eating breakfast alone in the kitchen, she came in wearing only a bra and short workout shorts. She pointed out to me how hard she was trying to lose weight by only drinking smoothies and how she just needed someone to massage her midsection like so to allow the rolls of billowing flesh to tighten up. I believe she was fishing for a compliment, so I told her she looked good, not wanting to hurt her feelings. She eventually left the room, but I’d lost my appetite.)
The frequency of Winkler’s calls and the despair in his voice started giving me more anxiety than the threatening calls from the animals at my old site. His calls ended with him saying, “Please, please, we just can’t have you show up to the meeting alone.” I was beginning to think showing up solo to this thing was the Peace Corps equivalent of career suicide.
In the second week of September, after traveling seventeen hours on a bus, I finally arrived in Puyo for the big event. At the meeting, more than half the other volunteers had no counterpart.
CHAPTER 27
Toward the end of October, the testicular pain that had momentarily waned staged a forceful comeback. When the cattle prod-like jolts of pain again became too much to take, I called the Peace Corps doctor.
Now I needed to go all the way to Quito to get checked out by some specialists, he said. The trip would probably include another ultrasound in addition to other exams. The following week, I took the fifteen-hour bus ride.
On the trip from Loja to Quito, I sat next to another volunteer who was leaving her site and Early Terminating. She was throwing in the towel after about three months at her site. She said she didn’t like the community. She hadn’t had any incidents, but she said she felt unsafe and uncomfortable. She asked me why I was going to Quito and I told her. We said no more and both slept for the rest of the ride.
I got to Quito at 7 a.m. By 11:30 a.m. I was naked in the fetal position on the exam table of an internal medicine specialist named Dr. Mendez. His office was inside a private hospital in northern Quito—by far the nicest medical building I’d ever been in. Dr. Mendez wanted to get to the bottom of my unusual amount of pain.
First he ruled out a torsion (which is kind of like a game of tetherball between your testicles). Next he administered a prostate exam. Holding up his index finger inside a latex glove, he said in perfect English, “If this is merely uncomfortable, your prostate is fine; if it’s painful, we’ll need another exam.” He wiggled his finger and I let out a whimper. He concluded that I had some combination of epididymitis and prostatitis. Just to confirm it, the next morning I would return to the clinic for my second testicular ultrasound. As a bonus, I would roll over for a rectal sonogram right afterward.
I left Dr. Mendez’s office and walked up the street to the Peace Corps headquarters. Once there, I stopped by Winkler’s office to say hello. I sat down for a few minutes, squirming in the chair as the bolts of pain tore through my body and he bitched at me for not having an official counterpart. I told him I was working on it. His griping made me a bit dizzy so I said we’d talk later and walked over to the doctor’s office.
The doctor asked me how the consultation with Mendez went. I told him.
“Well, how you feeling, man?” he asked.
“All right, I guess,” I said. “That’s the first finger in the butt I’ve gotten from a doctor.”
“Yeah, no fun, dude,” he said. “Well, let’s get you ready for the rectal ultrasound tomorrow. You doing okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“How about your pride?”
We both laughed.
In preparation for the test the next morning, he handed me some laxatives and told me to take them that night.
“One more thing,” he said. “Have you ever done an enema?”
“No.”
He handed me the prescription paper.
“When do we have to do it?” I asked.
“When?”
“Um, hold on . . .” he pulled up the WebMD website on his computer. “Seven in the morning.”
“Okay.”
“And, Grigs, don’t squeeze it in too fast because it can have a nauseating effect.”
My alarm went off at 6 a.m., and I used the next hour to get myself mentally ready for the self-administered enema. The squishy plastic bottle with its nozzle like a hummingbird’s beak had been on the nightstand staring me down all night. The directions on the box were in Spanish with drawn diagrams: There were two options for how I could go about this.
The first option required a doggy-style position, which seemed to have no amount of dignity to it. I chose the second, which involved taking the pose of the inside person of a couple that is “spooning.” The directions then called for you to use one arm to pull your knees closer to your chest while using your other arm to reach around behind and . . .
THE SPERMATIC CORD WAS NO longer infected, but the rest of the testicular ultrasound and the (harrowing) rectal ultrasound were inconclusive. So after a trip to Quito and multiple things getting shoved up my ass, I still didn’t have any real answers on how to ease the pain. In addition to having me continue with the Cipro, Dr. Mendez prescribed Celebrex, making me probably the first person under the age of fifty to take said drug.
On Sunday evening I took an overnight bus back to Loja. I stayed in Loja Monday night to watch the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football. I was back in site Tuesday morning and went a solid week without nut pain.
CHAPTER 28
But of course the pain returns and I’m back in Zumbi and the time is passing . . .
A man in Zumbi builds a cockfighting coliseum in his backyard, and even for an animal lover, it’s a pretty fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon of drinking. These guys take their cock fighting seriously. The entire time I watch, I contemplate the moral ambiguity of my participation . . .
I take more long bus trips across the country to see friends and attend conferences for volunteers. I pass through most of the provinces. I ride by every volcano, through every big city, on every major highway. I stare out the window, gazing at the wide-open spaces. And I think about all the things that people typically think about when they stare off into those wide-open spaces . . .
Here I am sitting on the bus next to Ecuadorians who strike up conversations with some of the weirdest questions I could ever think of: do we eat rice in the United States, have I tasted beer before, how much does my shirt cost, how much money do I make, how much does my hat cost, how much does my backpack cost, how much does my iPod cost, how many kids do I have.
And here I am with these passengers who badger me with statements like, “There’s no vegetation in the U.S., is there? No, there isn’t. Ha! Plants? Animals? You don’t have any of it. Ha! Not like here. Ecuador—we have the most natural beauty on the face of the earth. It’s true!” Then they say excuse me so they can reach across me and dump their trash out the window. The first dozen times, this leads to a conversation about the ails of litter. But after that I don’t have the patience for it anymore . . .
Here I am, as usual, spending the night alone in my apartment, soaking my balls in a bowl of warm water . . .
Here I am waking up on Sundays in Zumbi to such quiet and empty streets that I wonder if everyone moved out of town overnight and didn’t warn me about it . . .
Here I am buying groceries from the corner store and coming face-to-face with the status of Ecuadorian gender roles. “What—are you planning on cooking something?” the woman behind the counter says in a mocking tone, like I could only have some vague idea of what it takes to work in a kitchen . . .
Here I am making an addition to a daily journal I’ve been keeping since I arrived. Whereas before, it just had a few words describing where I was and what I did on a particular day, now I noted my testicular and prostatic pain. So instead of “Zumbi: talk with neighbor,” it would now say something like “Zumbi: morning, dull throbbing; afternoon, piercing feeling” . . .
And here’s Graciela barging into my room one day to ask me to lend her twenty dollars. The glorious part is that I actually don’t have any money on me because the ATM machine in the next town over hasn’t been working. Graciela looks me in the eye and says, “Liar. Of course you have money. All of you have money.” And she waddles out of the room shaking her head . . .
There are landslides on the only road leading out of the province to Loja—that winding deathtrap of a road that they’ve been trying to pave since I arrived in Zumbi. Rocks fall. People die. Traffic stops. And after five days without passage, Zumbi and nearby towns are running out of food and not receiving newspapers and the only topic of conversation all day long is the status of the road . . .
Older volunteers leave and newer ones arrive. The volunteer who lives a few hours east of me requests that a new volunteer replace him when he’s gone. I ask why, since he spent his two years struggling to get any projects going. His answer is that he wants his host family to keep receiving the rent money (“They need that income,” he says). A new volunteer eventually arrives in that site and lives . . . in a different house . . .
Shortly thereafter, I take steps to make sure the Peace Corps does not put any new volunteers in my site unless there is a foundation or group that specifically has a job for them to do . . .
And here are more emails and texts from Winkler making random threats of Administrative Separation for offenses like not properly texting him our whereabouts . . .
Here I am playing in Zumbi’s municipal basketball league (and eventually letting the municipality make false worker documents for me so I can be on their all-star team and compete against other teams around the province). Zumbi’s gym is actually an impressive structure, with a full-sized court and seating room for a few hundred, all covered by a tin roof. I am a head taller than everyone else on the court and after just one game in the league, I feel like Kobe Bryant—I am Kobe Bryant. Every time I touch the ball I know I will score. It’s a marvelous feeling. Players on other teams try tackling me and stage complaints to the referees that I—who haven’t played organized basketball since the seventh grade—am “too good” and that it’s “unfair.” Ecuadorian basketball brings out the worst in all of us, including me. I eventually am a magnet for technical fouls when I decide to point out to the ref that the other team jumping on my back and trying to trip me are, by any standard definition, fouls. When the ref is unmoved by my complaints, I swear in English, prompting more technical fouls and causing all my teammates to harass the ref for the rest of the game with, “Oh, smart guy here thinks he speaks English now. Ha!” My basketball career in Ecuador ends when I sprain my ankle in the opening minutes of the municipal league’s championship game. With the entire town watching, I play through it, we lose by one point, and the ankle bothers me for the next seven months . . .
In October 2009 the indigenous groups go on strike to protest new laws that, among other things, would extract more water and minerals and petroleum from the Amazonian provinces. They block major roads with boulders and burning tires, effectively paralyzing the country for about a week. In jungle towns to the north of me, skirmishes break out between Shuar political leaders and the military, resulting in deaths. The Peace Corps puts volunteers on Stand Fast, meaning we can’t leave our sites until further notice. (Other times we’d been put on Stand Fast included national Election Day and a short period of time months earlier when the swine flu hysteria first hit.) During this Stand Fast, one volunteer I don’t know very well sends a text message to his friend saying that they will leave their sites, meet up in a big city nearby, and—using some crude terms to describe a vagina—will be, um, meeting females. But he doesn’t send it to his friend; he sends it to the Peace Corps country director, whose cell phone number was apparently listed too close to his friend’s name in his contacts list. The volunteer is not a member
of Peace Corps Ecuador much longer . . .
Near the end of the year, our country director resigns. In addition to making the correct decision to pull me out of La Segua before things got worse, she was kind and smart and professional. A lot of other volunteers had a bizarre distrust of her because she herself had never been a volunteer. After she leaves, others in the Quito office label her a dictator. But I liked her. Two interim directors follow before our new country director arrives . . .
CHAPTER 29
Over the Halloween weekend, three other volunteers and I traveled north to Cuenca. We left our sites on a Thursday afternoon. Our plan was to wake up Friday at another volunteer’s house located in the mountains outside the city and do San Pedro, a cactus that grows in the northern Andes and contains the psychedelic chemical mescaline. On Saturday, we would head back down into Cuenca to celebrate Halloween with dozens of other volunteers in the city.
The trip got off to a strange start. As I got on the bus at the Loja station, I was pickpocketed. In all my previous travels, the closest I’d come to being hurt or robbed in any way involved getting chased down a street by a gang of transvestites in a bad part of Buenos Aires at 5 a.m.
This was the first time anyone had ever stolen from me.
After the initial flush of panic and frustration over the violation, I realized this was likely the least successful larceny operation in modern history: Not only was my cell phone in the opposite pocket, untouched, but my ATM card was also safe and sound in another pocket. A hundred dollars in cash was stuffed in my shoe. My important documents were hidden away in other secure locations. All that was gone was my wallet, which had $1.60 and an expired credit card in it. But the best part was that the stolen wallet had Che Guevara’s famous image emblazoned on the front (because whoever designed it understood marketing but not irony).
The Gringo: A Memoir Page 13
