The Gringo: A Memoir

by J. Grigsby Crawford

  This was all circling through my head, but fortunately my brother and I were together in that city for less than seven hours.

  Andrew came bearing gifts of magazines, flavored sunflower seeds, and a new pair of shoes. I barely slept and the next morning we were up and out of there. Andrew took one look at the plane (the very one I’d taken the evening before) and shook his head laughing, “You sure about this?” We both smiled and talked about the thrills of the developing world.

  The plane ride was quick and easy. Then we hopped on a bus for the four-hour ride to Zumbi.

  I’d taken the bus between my site and Loja so many times, I’d almost forgotten that the twists and turns down shoddy roads at lunatic speeds could be startling for a newcomer. Andrew took it in stride, often shaking his head in disbelief. I, for whatever reason, felt the urge to let out my frustrations with the various nuisances. At one point, we were stopped for half an hour while a beer truck that had just crashed was cleared off the road. Shattered bottles were littered everywhere. Foamy beer washed across the pavement.

  “How does someone manage to get into an accident like that?” my brother asked.

  “Easy,” I said. “Ecuadorians were driving, that’s how.” And it all came pouring out like this probably because I normally had no one to share these everyday absurdities with.

  Though he was older, I couldn’t help feeling like I was looking after my brother while he was there. First off, he spoke no Spanish. So I fretted about translating everything. And I stressed about making sure our trip went smoothly and making him feel comfortable and not letting things fall apart on his one and only visit to my alternate universe. I got all worked up feeling the responsibility.

  When our bus stopped at Zamora, midway between Loja and Zumbi, Andrew hopped out to run to the bathroom. I gave him the nickel it would cost to use the facilities and I told him to hurry. For a country with a flimsy relationship with time, bus terminals were the one place that had little margin for error. I knew the bus would pull back out of the station in just a minute or two.

  When the gears shifted into reverse a minute later and Andrew still wasn’t back, I stood up, my fists clenched into white knuckles, looking to see if he was on his way back. I began sweating. I didn’t see him, but the bus hadn’t begun to pull all the way out just yet. Right when I was about to yell at the driver to stop and wait, I saw my brother walking up nonchalantly, as if there were time to spare. I felt like yelling at him, “What the fuck! You can’t dillydally around like that, you gotta hurry, man. Don’t do that to me again!” But I managed to hold it in.

  “Wow, he was getting ready to leave,” Andrew said. “Did I make you nervous?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shrugging it off with a chuckle.

  My paranoia and protectiveness carried on when we got to my site. I’d only been in the apartment a month. It was scant for furniture: In the main room, just a desk, a table, and some plastic chairs; in my bedroom, just a crappy mattress on a bed frame it didn’t fit and a splintery dresser I piled my clothes into. For now at least, it was the bare bones. And when we walked in, the apartment stank: While I was gone, a rat had eaten the poison under my sink and crawled inside the wall to die.

  I wanted my brother to get an impression of how I lived. But with him finally there, I was embarrassed. When I saw him walk out the front door to my outside bathroom wrapped in a towel and wearing my ragged sandals to take a shower, or hunch over at the too-low sink with the garden-hose-looking faucet in my kitchen, or struggle with the smell of the dead rat that was decomposing in an unreachable space in my wall, or trip across the shredded linoleum on my floor, or look at my foam twin-size mattress with a sinkhole in the middle, I was reminded of where I lived. It pissed me off. All I could hope was that the cats didn’t choose that week to unleash another volley of piss down from the rafters. (When I told my new landlady about the cats pissing through my ceiling, her response was, “There are no cats here.”)

  Andrew offered to buy me a nicer chair. He couldn’t stand to see me sitting at my desk in the ass-numbing plastic patio chair I’d bought for six bucks.

  “No!” I said. “I don’t need a new goddamn chair.” I felt lonely just saying this out loud. Perhaps it was the ego factor of feeling like I needed to rough it, but I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s help—and certainly not their pity.

  “What’s your problem? I was just offering to help,” he said with a scowl that made me feel worthless. “It’d be my gift to you.”

  “It’s because I feel like with every comment it seems you’re reminding me of what a shit hole I live in. Whether it’s the chairs or the crappy linoleum floor or the shit food, or the way Zumbi moves in slow motion . . .”

  He shook his head and we were quiet for a while and let it drop.

  Zumbi was, indeed, moving in slow motion—even more so than usual. The heat was so heavy and strong that stepping outside into the white glare didn’t feel anything like the damp Amazon that my brother was expecting. I showed him everything there was to see rather quickly, and not surprisingly, there wasn’t much else to do. One afternoon, we went to the derelict soccer field at the local high school and tossed my football around. I’d brought the ball with me from home a year earlier and this was the first time I’d inflated it. The next day we went on a hike and got a good view looking down on Zumbi from up in the foothills. We turned around to head back when we both felt like we were getting heat sickness.

  For a spare mattress, I’d borrowed a two-inch-thick roll-up thing from a neighbor and put it on my floor with a sleeping bag. My brother was so uncomfortable the first night that I offered to take it the next two. My bed wasn’t a huge upgrade or anything—especially since I had only one sheet at the time—but he seemed pleased.

  Several months later, I would grow comfortable in that little apartment, once I had time to make it mine. After those few days with my brother, though, I was happy to leave it—and Zumbi. Our last night there, we both lay in our beds talking late into the night. He couldn’t go to sleep and my balls were flaring up. I talked a little bit about how much pain I was in and how I’d thought about Early Terminating because at least at home I could sit in pain with some relative comfort around me.

  I wanted to say so much but couldn’t get it out. I didn’t know where to start. I felt disconnected from everyone and everything. It was suffocating. But I kept it to myself and we spent the late hours talking about all the places we’d traveled to together and how, by far, this felt the strangest. We talked about that and whatever else came to our minds that didn’t cause too much laboring to get out in the open.

  I was relieved to lock the door behind me and head out on my first real vacation in a year. Andrew pointed out that this was probably the first time in history that anyone had been relieved to go into Colombia because it meant they finally could, as I’d said, let their guard down.

  CHAPTER 34

  I returned from vacation to an email about my balls and prostate. The doctor I’d been in touch with in the States had heard back from his team of urologists. They’d all weighed in and agreed on the epididymitis-prostatitis diagnosis and recommended a continued regimen of tepid-water scrotum soaking.

  While noting that even stress could be causing my symptoms, the lead urologist seemed almost sure that I’d come across a tricky strain of E. coli. In a sentence that made my heart sink, he pointed out that symptoms like mine could last up to two or three years.

  He recommended more Cipro and said I should try staying away from spicy foods and vitamin C—anything that was increasing the acidity in my urine. Also, it appeared that pain relievers, which I’d been popping like Pez since that first day the throbbing and piercing set in, were a part of the problem, not the solution. I was a little nervous about more Cipro, since I’d already taken the powerful antibiotic for nearly the entire month of November, but I was willing to give anything one last try to reduce the pain.

  So I unleashed a pharmaceutical blit
zkrieg that left me dizzy, cranky, and easily sunburned. Over the next several weeks, the pain went from frequent cattle prod-like bolts to occasional piercing sensations.

  WHEN A WOMAN IN ZUMBI—to whom I’d described the purpose of the Peace Corps several times—asked me if I was there on vacation, I knew I needed to find a real project. I’d used the municipal firings and my man plumbing as excuses long enough. The only thing I had done to stay busy the previous two months was teach English to two women from the municipality. It was a task I promised myself I’d never stoop to, because I believed that the Peace Corps was about real development work—but I was bored.

  My English lessons usually degenerated into my students telling me—in Spanish—all the town’s juicy gossip, which was enthralling. Once we even plunged into the depths of anthropology: They reluctantly admitted they had some indigenous blood in them but became enraged when I said I was fairly positive I didn’t have any North American Indian blood in me. Hashing out the differences wasn’t easy.

  As for actually learning English, my students became dissatisfied with my inability to teach them through osmosis. Frustrated that they weren’t yet fluent in “gringo speak” after a week or two, they lost interest and the lessons quickly fizzled out.

  It was a new year. I’d been living in Zumbi seven months. It had been about five months since the women at FODI had left. And although the pain in my balls and prostate was still there, it was no longer quite the debilitating lightning strikes through my man plumbing that made me double over on the sidewalk. I could finally get outdoors and function. I decided it was time to get something to do.

  One morning I got out of the shower and walked back around to the front door of my apartment, where two men in dress shirts stood knocking. They were the principal and vice principal from Zumbi’s only high school.

  Carlito, the principal, did all the talking. He reminded me of a modern version of the caudillos who ruled South American hamlets with an iron fist in the days of yore. Short and barrel-chested, he almost always had a cigarette dangling from his lips beneath his long gray mustache. Most noticeably, he was missing one of his front teeth. He had a demeanor that would have scared the shit out of me had I been one of his students. But since I was viewed as some sort of authority figure—or more likely, someone with access to money—it would always seem like he was kissing up to me. He constantly smiled, offered me cigarettes, and, later on, would clear people out of his office every time I came to see him, referring to me as his “esteemed colleague.”

  In a lengthy preamble, Carlito explained that the facilities of the high school were simply not up to snuff. (Indeed, the one time I’d gone there to check the place out, the classrooms appeared as though they’d been abandoned. Other than the shoddy desks, there were no materials to be found. And in place of actual chalkboards was a section of the wall painted green. The most elaborate classroom was the science lab, which was equally as drab, but had both a dog skeleton and a jar with a human fetus.)

  The long and short of it was that Carlito wanted to build a greenhouse, but not just any greenhouse—a greenhouse that would be the envy of all other academic institutions in the area. The high school had a huge amount of property—several acres of farmland that the military gave to them years back—but none of it was being put to good use. Up until then, they were simply renting out tracts to people for grazing their cows.

  To go hand in hand with the project, Carlito wanted to revamp the school’s outdoor science curriculum. Even though we were in a section of the world that was a natural greenhouse—where you could drop any type of seed and it would grow—the greenhouse was a good idea. Because it rained so hard, many crops actually needed cover. But most important, it would be the epicenter of an outdoor classroom where students could do hands-on environmental education work every day.

  I said yes to Carlito. Of course I wanted to do this. If he’d told me they wanted to tear down some classrooms and put in a swimming pool, I probably would have said yes just to get off my ass and start working.

  The next day, I began searching for the different funding channels available to volunteers. The most straightforward method was a grant set up through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Someone in the Peace Corps office once described to me that this money came from a pool of cash from leftover farm subsidies. I always thought this was a bittersweet irony—that the overflow from the very subsidies that made it impossible for farmers in developing countries like this one to compete were filtered back to them in the form of four-figure grants, administered by twenty-four-year-old volunteers.

  So I embarked on a several-month process that I referred to as the twenty-first-century Peace Corps experience: living on my own way out in the jungle, yet being bogged down with . . . paperwork. In a twenty-page grant proposal, I laid out the parameters of the project: the idea, the costs, the construction company, the timetable, the tasks and people involved, and the ways it was sustainable. If I had been doing this on my own, it would have taken about a week, but since the local government was involved, it would be about five months before I sent in the final draft to the Peace Corps office.

  The grant required that 25 percent of the total project cost be provided by local project partners. Therefore, on top of the $7,000 I could get from the grant, we needed about $2,300 more to reach that 25 percent. For us, this meant going to the mayor and asking for money to go toward the cost of the materials and construction. Some came in the form of cash, which the mayor agreed to, and the rest was in the form of in-kind contributions, like soil and tractor use. This in-kind portion meant that eventually my accounting, while technically accurate, would be what you might call creative.

  At one point during the process, it took me about three months to get the municipal government to print out a signed piece of paper agreeing to pay their portion of the costs. When I finally got the thing, it was a glorious and formidable example of third-world bureaucracy—so overly official and faux professional that it was somewhat charming. The document had about five notarized stamps from various departments and so many vast swirling signatures that even someone in the Peace Corps office deemed it “impressive.”

  It became increasingly obvious that the more Ecuadorians were involved, the harder and more needlessly complicated things became. This was a fact I never felt bad about thinking, given that the Peace Corps continually warned us about it throughout training, using nearly the same phrasing.

  THE NEXT FEW MONTHS CONSISTED of me typing up documents on my laptop inside my apartment and occasionally walking across town to the municipal building to ask a small favor, which would normally take a week or two to reconcile. (During this time, I also founded and served as editor of a quarterly newsmagazine for Peace Corps Ecuador, which kept me busy and in front of the computer for a few hours every day.)

  All the sitting at my desk didn’t do much to convince my neighbors that I was doing anything for their community, but the grant gave me the peace of mind that I had a “project” going. Plus, now when Winkler called me or sent ominous messages and emails, I could ramble on about how I was working on The Grant Project and how things were this close to coming together.

  He and I had been at an awkward impasse for several months, which consisted of him giving me shit for not having any project partners, but being passive-aggressive about it, since he knew it was mostly his fault that I was out there idling, without a counterpart. All the while, I didn’t feel comfortable telling him that the reason I hadn’t been moving mountains in my community was because my balls hurt me too much to stand up and all the Cipro was making me delirious.

  CHAPTER 35

  Over Easter weekend I traveled to a jungle town about eleven hours north to visit a volunteer who wanted to have sex. She’d been nudging me into visiting her for many months, ever since I declined her invitation to meet for a night at a random place halfway between our two sites. Her calls and texts urging me to come were nothing if not aggressive and uncharming. But I had
n’t had sex in a very long time. So I went.

  When the new country director arrived in November, he instituted a new Out of Site Policy. Among other changes, it was renamed the Whereabouts Policy. Before, we were able to go anywhere in the country as long as we were back at our site within seventy-two hours. Now the seventy-two-hour restriction was gone, but we were limited to traveling within an imaginary radius of roughly five hours away from our sites. This meant relatively little to me, already being so isolated from everything and everyone else in the country, but some volunteers took this, and other changes, pretty seriously and wrote nasty letters to the office, sometimes cc’ing all 150 other volunteers on their emails. They were the types of letters that included sentences beginning with: “It is imperative that . . .”

  In any event, this meant that for my trip up north I had to ask for special permission. I was allowed to go only because it was the holiday weekend. But as a result of submitting my proposed itinerary, Winkler had a pretty good idea that I was traveling a half day for some sex and knew the exact woman that sex was going to involve.

  The bus ride through the southern part of Ecuador’s Amazon is probably the most pleasing road trip you can take in the country. Going an average of twenty-five miles an hour the entire time, you get to look off to the east and see nothing but jungle. Each town you pass through feels like the final frontier. And when it gets completely dark, you can press your cheek up against the cool glass of the window and see nothing but the stars overhead and a few oil platforms blinking out across the Amazon.