First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Read online

  As the Peace Corps chartered bus descended into Quito, those mountains engulfed us. Exquisite white-capped peak after peak after peak, all haloed in cushions of clouds, burst out of the watercolor sky like in a children's pop-up book. Our bus took twists and turns past tiny mountain villages, gated suburban estates, dirty slums, and finally into the bustling heart of Ecuador's capital city. And the mountains were the breathtaking backdrop to all of it.

  I caught my breath and started crying again. It was clear I wasn't in Kansas, I mean New York City, anymore.

  Dear Mom,

  Well, so far the Peace Corps is a bit like summer camp, and just like when I went to summer camp, I've spent most of the first week here crying. I have no idea how I am going to survive two years without John.

  My fellow trainees are a hoot, though. We are “Omnibus 56” in Peace Corps lingo, but we call ourselves “The Misters,” because all the kids on the street yell at us, “Hey, mister, give me something!” The forty of us are a lively group, having already found ourselves in hot water, for being found, literally, in hot water, uninvited in the ambassador's hot tub. In a few days we'll be going down to the training center and then we'll each go live with our host family. My guess is that they're hoping to housebreak us!

  Be sure to save all my letters. I'm going to want to remember this.

  I'll keep you posted,

  Eve

  How a Tampon Made a

  Peace Corps Volunteer out of Me

  No matter where in the world they serve, all Peace Corps recruits go through three months of training before being sworn in as volunteers. This provides volunteers with the language, cultural, and technical skills they will need once they get to their work site. Our training was held in Tumbaco, a small town outside of Quito. During training, the forty of us in “The Misters” were parceled out to host families who were responsible for our care, feeding, and Spanish-language immersion.

  “Do you like sports in general and basketball in particular?” asked the Peace Corps staff person who matched trainees with host families.

  “No on both counts,” I told her. Although the boyfriend I left behind is a big sports fan, I might have added, but I was afraid to even talk about John for fear that the floodgates would open again.

  “Well, that's too bad because for the next three months you're going to be living with a family of sports lovers, whose two teenage daughters play basketball.” Splendid, I thought. This just keeps getting better all the time!

  It was a bit awkward when my host family came to collect me from the training center. The sum total of my Spanish at that point consisted of what I had gleaned from riding the New York City subway system. No matter how I tried, I just couldn't seem to work No se apoyo contra la puerta (Don't lean on the door) or No salga sin pro-tecíon (Don't leave home without a condom) into any of our conversations.

  Our first exchange was conducted in sign language and theatrics. I'm pretty sure they asked if I played basketball, to which I answered an incredulous “No!” When they asked me why not, I pointed to my five-foot-tall frame and tried to pantomime that I'm too short to play basketball. This seemed to surprise them. It was only then that I noticed that nearly everyone around me hovered comfortingly right around my height. I realized with joy that I had been assigned to a country of short people!

  My new family walked me home, the five of them carrying all my belongings. My father hoisted my duffel bag, my mother slung my backpack over her shoulder, the fifteen-year-old grabbed my daypack, her twelve-year-old sister daintily carried my fanny pack as if it were a purse, and having nothing left, I handed over my hat to the five-year-old boy. They chattered at me like incomprehensible birds as they led the way. I nodded politely, and squelched the urge to warn them not to leave home without a condom. Their house was conveniently located just off the town square, a short walk from the training center. The girls grabbed my hands as soon as we walked in the door and led me through the house out into an enclosed courtyard and back into a second part of the house that consisted of two adjoining bedrooms. They put my things down on the single bed in the smaller of the two bedrooms and then plopped themselves down on the double bed in the larger room, chirping away the whole time.

  “¿Mi casa?”I said, grasping the concept although not knowing the word for room.

  “¡Si, si!” they shouted gleefully, as the rest of the family joined us and piled all my belongings on my bed. My mother opened a small wardrobe and several empty drawers, chattering all the while. I understood that this was where I was to put my things. Then the family led me back to the courtyard.

  “¡La lavandaria!” Mama exclaimed as she walked over to an imposing cement basin with a water spigot coming out of the top that seemed to be the centerpiece of the courtyard. I looked around nervously at the walkway and open doorways that surrounded us. Sensing that I wasn't quite getting the picture, my two new sisters walked over and began scrubbing imaginary clothing against the corrugated bottom. The children's song “This is the way we wash the clothes, wash the clothes, wash the clothes” began playing in my head. All right, I thought. It was definitely not the way I washed the clothes, but I was relieved to understand that this was not where I was meant to bathe.

  The father pointed to a small room off the walkway opposite the lavandaria and said, “El baño,” a word I immediately grasped, as I'd always believed in the importance of knowing how to say both “beer” and “bathroom,” in every language. I was greatly pleased to see that the baño had a sit-down flush toilet and a shower. Our trainers had prepared us for the possibility that we could live in homes that had neither. Clearly, I had hit the bathroom jackpot.

  Father pulled aside the flimsy curtain that was the only thing that separated the bathing space from the rest of the bathroom. He pointed to a small box with Frankenstein-looking lights and switches that was attached to the showerhead with exposed wires. “Agua caliente,” he proudly proclaimed, which I immediately translated as “death trap” and vowed to take only cold showers from here on in.

  The family walked me through the rest of the modest but comfortable house. The small kitchen was jammed with a refrigerator, stove, sink, counter, and plenty of pots, pans, and cooking implements. Just off the kitchen was a dining area with a large table and family pictures adorning the walls. Across from the kitchen was a cramped bedroom that the parents shared with their young son. Our tour ended at the front of the house in a room lined with overstuffed chairs and a couch, and a fancy shelving unit that showed off all the family knick-knacks. All the seats faced what was obviously the main feature of the room.

  “La televisión,” the five-year-old said as if he were unveiling the grand prize on a game show.

  As sweet as my family was, that first weekend with them were the longest and loneliest days of my life. I had no one to speak to in English and my subway Spanish proved to be of no use whatsoever. With no real ability to communicate, I had a lot of time to think about how much I missed John and to question the sanity of sticking out two years in this self-imposed exile. Just as unappealing, however, was the prospect of quitting and going home to face a disappointed John.

  Upon returning to the training center on Monday, I learned however, that I had fared better than several of my fellow trainees. Aside from the ones who would be sharing bedrooms and living without indoor plumbing for the next three months, some had fallen victim to hospitality hell. Host families were warned about our potentially tender tummies and instructed to boil our drinking water and go easy on the lard and oil, which seemed to be a staple ingredient in many Ecuadorian dishes. We trainees, in turn, were warned not to waste food and to try to graciously eat whatever was put in front of us. My family, having hosted a trainee before, was highly conscious of my American stomach. My mother served me mercifully small portions of usually delicious or at least recognizable food, never pressuring me to eat more than I could handle. But other trainees were forced to dig right in to huge servings of traditional Ecuadori
an fare, featuring things like guinea pig heads and cow hooves.

  Privacy is not a popular concept in Ecuador. That became obvious a few weeks later, when I returned from training to find that my two sisters had gone through my drawers and were now arguing over what my tampons were for. The older one asked, hopefully, if these were the miraculous things that she had heard about that let American women have sex but not have babies. No, that's birth control, I thought. Which here consists of sharing your bedroom with a five-year-old. The younger girl was determined to prove her sister wrong by shoving one up her nose to demonstrate that they were used to stop nosebleeds.

  I thanked God that they had not unearthed my diaphragm and did my best to explain, in faltering Spanish, what tampons were actually for. When they refused to believe that my tiny little o.b.'s could really perform such a function, I took them outside to the lavandaria and demonstrated by stopping the flow of water from an inverted bottle of Fanta. I could see the lightbulb flash of enlightenment in the girls' eyes. I had used ingenuity and the tools at hand to bring knowledge to those without access to modern-day feminine care products! Okay, it wasn't exactly lifesaving technology or a giant step toward world peace, but I truly felt like a Peace Corps Volunteer.

  It quickly became apparent that Ecuadorians equate being alone with being lonely. The members of my host family did their best to acompañarme at all times. My sisters spent most evenings in my room, the three of us doing our homework side-by-side on my bed, munching on salty choclo—a tasteless but strangely addictive toasted corn snack. Various cousins, grandparents, and in-laws were called in to acompañarme when the members of my immediate family were otherwise engaged. With all this togetherness, it didn't take long for my family to figure out that I was not totally thrilled to be there. My host mother brewed great batches of “grief tea,” and despite our language barrier she pretty quickly parsed out the cause of my sadness.

  “¿Usted lo ama? (You love him?)” she asked.

  “¡Lo amo mucho!” I confessed.

  As soon as I arrived in Ecuador, I gave up any pretense of being a vegetarian. Within a few weeks I was happily eating guinea pigs, chicken feet, and whatever else was put in front of me. Now our dinner conversations often included discussions of when Juan was coming to get me and what mi mama would serve when he arrived. I voted for her delicious corn tamale humitas, with a roasted cuy—guinea pig—on the side. I didn't actually think John was coming, but it was fun to play along. I couldn't let on to the Peace Corps training staff that I was in love with my recruiter, fearing it might have negative consequences for both of us. But it was a relief to be able to take off the brave, happy mask at home with my family.

  “!Eva, Eva, Juan llamó por el teléfono!” The entire family greeted me when I returned from a day of classes at the training center.

  John called? I thought. Impossible. Not anticipating that I'd even have access to a telephone, we had planned to keep in touch only through letters. Remembering that his host family in Burkina Faso had slept on mud floors, I had only recently fessed up to the fact that my family had beds and electricity. I didn't want John to think that my Peace Corps experience was any less Third World than his, so I hadn't told him that my family also had a telephone. I knew he wouldn't call me anyway, because he wanted me to focus on the Peace Corps experience and not be distracted by him.

  But some English-speaking man had called from America. He spoke no Spanish and my family spoke no English. Still, they were sure that it was John calling to tell me of his plans to rescue me. My mother pointed out the fattest guinea pig in the pen that all Ecuadorians kept outside the kitchen. “That's the one I'll cook for Juan!” she announced proudly.

  Although I knew better, even I got caught up in my family's fantasy that it was John who had called. That he would call back to proclaim that he just couldn't live without me and that I should come home. So when the reporter from my hometown newspaper called back that night to get a few quotes for a story he was writing about me, I was devastated all over again. Of course, John missed me, he told me that in every letter he wrote. But he was also sure that I was doing the right thing by being in the Peace Corps.

  During the three months I lived with my host family, I literally had to climb the roof in order to be alone. Only the wealthiest people in Ecuador lived in completely finished houses. My family's house, like most in Tumbaco, sported the beginnings of a second floor waiting to be finished when money allowed. Hiding among the bare cinder blocks and exposed rebar I could finally be by myself. I would escape up there to try to gather my thoughts and make sense of the new sensations that threatened to overwhelm me. It was from up there that I saw women bent over huge basins washing their clothes and their children; clothing draped over bushes like an odd, mismatched harvest, drying in the equatorial sun; half-naked children mingling with dogs and chickens in the dirt roads.

  How different it all was from the life of push-button ease and antiseptic technology that I had left behind. It struck me then, for the first time, that life in America was the aberration. The life that played out below me—barefoot and soily, among animals, in a forced intimacy with the earth—this was how most of the people on this planet lived. With its stark existence and uncomfortable realities, this was the world that I was going to have to learn to be at home in if I wanted to survive the Peace Corps. I wasn't even sure I could do that. And since this was the world that John longed to return to someday, I wondered if this would be the life that I'd be signing up for if I stayed with him.

  Our three-month training was designed to teach us Spanish, technical skills, and make us more or less self-sufficient once we got dispatched to our volunteer sites. So in addition to our classes, we trainees were put in charge of a barn full of baby chicks, guinea pigs, and a rather sickly cow. I enjoyed helping to raise the chicks and guinea pigs. But later on, when it was time to eat them, I was appalled to learn that I was expected to help butcher them.

  “I'm going to be an Urban Youth Worker,” I emphasized. “Urban. That means I'll be near a supermarket, right?” Thankfully, there were enough 4-H types among The Misters to do the killing for all of us. Although I'm still not convinced that grasping it by the neck and swinging it around lasso style is the recommended method of butchering a chicken.

  The cow wasn't meant for eating, and the animal husbandry trainees tried desperately to nurse it back to health. One morning my Spanish teacher asked me to tell her, using the passive voice, what I had noticed on my way to class. “Le vaca ha sido enterrado (The cow has been buried),” I told her, causing her to burst into tears. While the cow hadn't improved, my Spanish apparently had.

  Like many developing nations in the 1980s, Ecuador was experiencing a large urbanization of its population. People were leaving the villages and moving to the cities in search of a better life. An increase in the numbers of children living on the streets always came along with an increase in urbanization. Some of these kids were runaways, others had parents who could no longer afford to feed them. Some of these kids stole, begged, or shined shoes to get by. Many of them sniffed glue out of paper bags for the temporary relief it offered from hunger and misery.

  The Ecuadorian government had few resources to address this problem, and three gringitas with liberal arts degrees and experience as camp counselors weren't likely to be of much help. But Jean, Mary, and I—Peace Corps Ecuador's first Urban Youth volunteers—were gamely determined to be of use. The recruits who were going to work with rural youth dug latrines and planted gardens. The animal husbandry trainees learned to emasculate bulls. Meanwhile, the three of us in the Urban Youth program hung out with shoeshine boys on the streets of Quito and were reminded over and over again of the important difference between asking ¿Hay huevos? (Do you have eggs?) and ¿Tienes huevos? (Do you have testicles?). We didn't know what we'd be doing once we got to our sites, but it seemed that knowing how to behead chickens and curse like Spanish sailors was going to be crucial.

  Midway through
training, the three of us were sent to a mountain village to get a taste of Ecuadorian rural life. After a few days with no water or electricity and meals that consisted largely of salted fish and quinoa, we were anxious to return to “civilization.” We decided not to wait for the next day's milk truck—the only way in or out of this remote village—and basically slid down the side of the mountain on our butts. Halfway down, as we were clinging to tree trunks for dear life, it became painfully apparent that, unless you were a billy goat, this was not a good way to get down from the Andes. But getting back up—and eating yet another meal of salted fish—seemed even less possible. At least we'd be able to find beer at the bottom, we convinced ourselves. If we survived.

  With a combination of stupidity, gravity, and sheer luck, we made it back to Tumbaco. Jean limped to my house the next day. “Okay, this is definitely not the sort of thing I'd ask of someone back in the states,” she said as she pulled me into my bedroom. “But you have got to do something about my ass!” She dropped her pants and showed me her blister-covered bottom. I pulled out my Peace Corps–issued medical kit and—using antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids—cemented our friendship forever.

  I loved training and didn't want it to end. When it did, I knew that I would have to fly on my own—in a strange world, in a foreign language, without a safety net, and without John. But three months after my queasy arrival in Quito, I was a newly minted Peace Corps volunteer. My knees quaked as I got off the bus in my new home: Santo Domingo de los Colorados, a town that the veteran Peace Corps volunteers referred to as “the Armpit of Ecuador.” Situated right where the Andes slope down to meet the coastal plain, Santo Domingo, named for the colorful Colorado Indians who lived there, was the third-largest city in Ecuador. We would see the Colorados in the market, their hair greased into bowl shapes on their heads and painted with red achiote, the coloring that most Ecuadorians put on their food. Both the men and the women wore skirts and ringed their naked torsos in black paint. The women also wore bras—but not blouses—when the Mormons came to town and told them not to go bare-breasted. The Colorados were the most interesting part of what was, essentially, a dull and ugly town.