First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Read online

  Ecuador is one of the most ecologically varied and beautiful countries in the world. Within its relatively compact borders are the majestically snowcapped Andes Mountains, lush and tropical Amazon jungle, still-unspoiled beaches, the pristine Galápagos Islands, and nearly every imaginable ecosystem that exists. Somehow, I managed to get sent to the bus station between it all.

  Anyone traveling by road up into the mountains or down to the beaches passed through Santo Domingo. All buses stopped there to refuel and exchange passengers and were immediately inundated by hawkers, arms flailing and goods thrust in through every open window. There were women offering bananas in a dozen variations: fried, baked, sweet, and with slabs of salty cheese; girls selling tasteless allullas, which as far as I could tell were rocks disguised as some sort of bread; boys selling everything from chewing gum to razors. Like crumbs in the tropics, any bus that stopped there was soon covered with an army of human ants. The fact that all roads converged there seemed to be Santo Domingo's entire raison d'être. The city started at the bus station, then spread like a fungus up to El Centro, the circular town common that boasted not much more than a statue of a Colorado Indian stuck in the center. From there it spilled onto a huge stone and dirt walkway that ran the entire length of the city. The pedestrian mall bustled day and night with commerce: women hawking food, clothes, and household goods down the center; men and entire families running the chockablock shops on either side. Here you could find cheap clothes made in China and wool sweaters woven in the sierras, fresh fruits and vegetables, tins of imported sardines and the cheap aluminum pots to cook them in. Somewhere in that mayhem was anything you could ever need. The trick, of course, was finding it.

  Within a block or two of El Centro you could get almost any food, from pizza and hamburger to the traditional meals that you ordered by asking for almuerzo (lunch) or merienda (supper) and then got whatever they were serving. Because the town had seen its fair share of foreigners over the years, most notably a huge influx of Mormon missionaries, Santo Domingo even had an ice-cream parlor. But the entire town had only one hotel and it was questionable, which I thought was an indication of the fact that visitors didn't tend to stick around long. To get to Santo Domingo you left behind the beautiful Andean vistas, and though you could smell the salt in the air, you were nowhere near the ocean. Boasting neither natural nor cultural attractions, the bus station and the market basically were the high points of town. I was never sure how or why a city sprung up there. I figured someone just got off a bus and started selling stuff and soon thousands of people followed suit.

  Like most of the other volunteers in Ecuador, I had hoped for a placement in the pure, exotic air of the sierras, as the Andes Mountains were known locally, or on la costa, Ecuador's many miles of coastline. I was sure I'd look cool in a woolen poncho riding my horse up to some remote mountaintop village. Or I could learn to slow down to beach speed, take afternoon siestas in my hammock, lulled by the ocean waves. Instead I got the buggy, muddy, hot swamp in the middle. I was sorely disappointed. But like Charlie Brown's sad little Christmas tree, I felt like Santo Domingo just might need me. And yet I had no idea if I was up to the task.

  Dear John,

  All of the The Misters got together last weekend. We've been at our sites for a month now and it seems like everyone is in a slump. Most of us haven't found work yet, and all of us would give anything for a cold beer and a warm shower (and not the other way around) for a change! I'm going to meet with the Padre from the local Catholic church who runs a shelter for homeless boys here in town. There must be something useful for me to do there. And now I'm the new volunteer representative on the Women in Development Committee. So hopefully that will keep me busy, too.

  I'm the only one from my training group that got sent to the heart of the “armpit,” although my friend, Donna, got sent to a village not too far from here and she comes here to get her mail. But there's a whole crew of PCVs here already. There's Jane, who's been here a year, and she's living with Carl, who's extending for his third year. Then there's Lisa and Bird, who both teach and live right in the center of town. And Keith, who was the newest volunteer in town until I got here.

  So I'm not lonely, although I miss you tremendously. But I think I'm getting the hang of this. I guess I'm a lot tougher than I thought.

  I'll keep you posted,

  Eve

  P.S. Please send toilet paper, Handi Wipes, and hair conditioner.

  In All of Its Third-World Glory

  “You know the hardest thing about being a Peace Corps volunteer?” Jane asked when I washed up on her doorstep a few days after arriving in Santo Domingo.

  “The constant diarrhea?” I asked.

  “Oh, you'll get used to that,” she assured me. “Either that or you'll just start eating all those bananas they sell on every street corner.” Jane knew the ropes. “No, the hardest part of the Peace Corps is just finding a role for yourself. You get out to your site with some pretty lofty goals. And then you find out that what you thought you would do is not what the community wants you to do. Or that the agency where the Peace Corps sent you just wanted a token gringo and never had any work for you in the first place. Or you can't speak enough Spanish to be useful anyway. Be prepared. It can be really frustrating.”

  “I know, I know all about it. I have to be patient, not have any expectations, don't expect too much help from Peace Corps staff,” I recited the good volunteer litany that John had drilled into my head. “And go out and look for my own opportunities.”

  “Ah,” Jane looked at me admiringly. “You'll do well, little Evita. Your recruiter did a good job!”

  “Yeah, my recruiter did a great job!” I wailed. “And now I can't live without him!” Jane laughed. I couldn't keep the charade up all through training and it was now common knowledge, at least among the volunteers, that I was the fool who had fallen in love with her recruiter.

  When I arrived in Santo Domingo, I had been assigned to work with a strange woman in cat-eye glasses who claimed to run a home for orphans. For the three days I stayed at her house, she fed me nothing but bowls of sweet, milky coffee and the only orphans I saw were the two scabby ones who slept on the roof of her house and seemed to be her indentured servants. I excused myself one morning after coffee, took my bags, and made my way to Jane's house, which she shared with her boyfriend, Carl, a fellow volunteer. Peace Corps staff wasn't particularly thrilled about volunteers shacking up, but we were adults, after all, and there was not a lot they could do to stop it.

  With Jane's help, I found a perfect apartment just a kilometer or two from the center of town. Which just goes to show that “perfect” is a highly subjective word. A moldy, second-floor walk-up with cold water and hot cockroaches would not exactly be considered perfect by most standards. But in Santo Domingo, the indoor plumbing and electricity made it a real find. The bathroom boasted a flush toilet and a shower. The kitchen had a sink with running water and a counter on which I could put the two-burner camping stove the Peace Corps supplied. The living room/dining area even had a little balcony that afforded me a view of the neighborhood. Sure, it wasn't much to look at, just a crisscross of dirt roads lined with one- and two-story cinder block houses, all sprouting the ever-hopeful rebar on the top. But the balcony gave me a place to hang my hammock.

  “Don't worry,” los dueños, or the landlords, said over me to Jane. We were the same age, but because of her better Spanish, they seemed to think she was my guardian. “She will be like our very own hija. We will always be right here.” They pointed to their own ground-floor apartment, which one had to walk past to reach the outdoor staircase that led to my apartment. “We will take good care of her.”

  I bought a bed, a picnic table, some pots and pans, and a set of dishes with my Peace Corps–allocated moving-in allowance. The Peace Corps provided me with a mosquito net, a bicycle, and a small refrigerator. A volunteer on her way home left me a sewing machine and two colorful sling-back chairs. I hadn't made
much progress in the Suzy Homemaker department, despite the fact that, days before I left for Ecuador, I had finally finished sewing the quilt that I had toted around in a picnic basket for a year. But I bought some cheap material in the market and made curtains for the windows and sheets for the bed. They weren't much to look at—especially up close—but who was looking, anyway? Whenever Jane, Lisa, Bird, or Keith came by it was usually for potluck meals, drinking warm beer, and venting. Carl, who was the most well-adjusted volunteer among us and never complained, made me a tiny barbecue grill for my balcony, and not being able to afford any meat, we cooked bananas on it.

  It took a few weeks and most of my moving-in allowance, but I turned my simple, mold-infested apartment into a cozy nest in the jungle. For the first time in my life, I was living completely on my own—and liking it. While I still didn't have a day job, I was feeling somewhat useful. Jane let me tag along with her to the health clinic where she worked, and Lisa and Bird introduced me around the school where they taught. Some evenings we'd all cook together at Bird's apartment, hoping to be entertained by her pet parrot (for which she was nicknamed). But most nights I'd go home and entertain the endless stream of neighborhood kids whose parents sent them over to acompañarme anytime they thought I was alone.

  We would bake chocolate chip cookies in a campo oven made with a huge pot on the stovetop, and read children's books or do craft projects with supplies that my mother sent. When I was finally alone, I'd sit at my picnic table, under a naked lightbulb, listening to the nightly broadcast of Voice of America on my shortwave radio, and writing letters home. I missed John like crazy. But no one was more surprised than I was that I was actually beginning to feel at home.

  I might have been perfectly content to play with the neighborhood kids, hang in my hammock, and drink Peace Corps–subsidized beers for the next two years. But my Peace Corps program manager, an Ecuadorian woman named Mercedes, seemed to think that volunteers ought to be doing more than that. Hearing that things hadn't worked out for me and the cat-eye woman, Mercedes came down to Santo Domingo, determined to find me a suitable place to work.

  Like a reluctant daughter meeting her mother's handpicked suitors, I trailed along as Mercedes made my introduction at every quasi social service agency and do-gooder organization in town. Mercedes, being originally from a well-established Santo Domingo family, commanded great respect from everyone. It also didn't hurt that one of her former volunteers was now married to the mayor of Santo Domingo. The mayor, or alcalde, was a surprisingly young and friendly guy, with a wooden leg and a soft spot for Peace Corps volunteers. But it was his wife who most impressed me. Here I was thinking I was getting a handle on expat life because I had finally made it through a week without mistakenly ordering the ubiquitous cow intestine almuerzo—yet again—while this gringa was fluently raising two bicultural children and serving as First Lady of Santo Domingo.

  “Of course,” she confided while we sat in her luxurious home in an upscale suburb far closer to Quito than Santo Domingo, “I only go back to the armpit these days when it is absolutely necessary.”

  With the help of Mercedes and her connections I soon found work in El Hogar del Niño Trabajador, a church-run shelter for homeless boys. Well, maybe “work” is not the most accurate word for what I did there. The young Colombian hermano who ran the day-to-day operations brought me through the two long bunk rooms and introduced me to the nearly two dozen boys in his charge.

  “This is Señorita Eva, a volunteer from the United States.” Like the troops being inspected, the boys, who ranged in age from five to fifteen, stood at the foot of their neatly made beds, intoned their names, shook my hand, and said “Con mucho gusto.” The two haggard women who did all the housework seemed pleased to meet me, too, and I hoped they harbored no illusions about my helping with the laundry or the cooking.

  For the first weeks I “worked” there, I didn't quite know what to do. I'd come in the morning and the boys would all be off at school.

  I'd chat with the hermano, trying to get a sense of what he expected from me. “Maybe you could teach us English,” he offered. I really didn't see how learning English was going to help these homeless boys, but we'd all gather in the dining pavilion when the boys came home from school and I'd teach them a few words in English. Eventually I moved on to teaching first aid and basic health courses. I used small grants from the Peace Corps to purchase a first aid kit for the shelter and toothbrushes and toothpaste for all the boys.

  Mostly, I played games with the boys—inadvertently teaching them an odd version of baseball in which three strikes and the pitcher was out. That's what you get from learning baseball from a girl who knew nothing about sports. I wasn't very useful and didn't even feel I deserved the lunch that the ladies insisted I eat with them every day. But it gave me somewhere to be and a perch from which to look for that opportunity to do good that John was so fond of talking about. As I was beginning to settle into something that felt like the life of a Peace Corps volunteer, John wrote that he was coming for a visit.

  “Will you be using some of your vacation time when your boyfriend is here?” Mercedes asked me when I told her the news during one of her visits.

  “Well, actually, he's planning on staying until he starts graduate school in September. He'll be here for the whole summer.”

  “Just where exactly will he be staying?” she asked, surveying my one-bedroom apartment.

  “Here,” I said meekly.

  “Oh, Eva, that is not a good idea. You have to think about your reputation.” Mercedes was used to Americans, but she was still a middle-aged Ecuadorian woman at heart. “Why don't I ask Padre if he can arrange for a place for your boyfriend to stay in town?”

  “That won't be necessary, Mercedes. He can stay here.” She might have been my program manager, but I was a nearly twenty-five-year-old woman. And my boyfriend was not coming all the way from America to sleep with a priest!

  “Well, if you are not using your leave time, you are going to have to work. This boyfriend of yours has to respect the rules of the Peace Corps.”

  “This boyfriend of mine was in the Peace Corps, Mercedes. For three years,” I added, knowing that she'd understand that meant he'd been such an outstanding volunteer that his program manager had deemed him worthy of an extension. “He's the reason I'm here.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “Okay, but you must be very sensitive, Eva. Sleeping around will get you a reputation here, and that can get you into trouble.” I thought of the woman across the road who had three children by three different men and the lady who did my laundry who was raising four kids on her own, neither of whom were treated any differently from any of the other overworked housewives I knew. But I suspected the whole reputation thing was tied up with being a gringa. And gringas, as anyone who watched American movies knew, were loose.

  “Mercedes, I am not going to have any other men sleep over. John's the only one.”

  “Okay,” she said. “If he's the only one and you are sure of it, then let me handle it.”

  A few days later I returned home to find that another program manager who was passing through Santo Domingo had left a bicycle with my dueños.

  “It must be a mistake,” I told them. “The Peace Corps already gave me a bicycle.”

  “Oh, this is one for your esposo,” they told me excitedly. “Why didn't you tell us your husband was coming?” And within days everyone in town was asking when my husband would be arriving from America. Now this was a fantasy I could go along with.

  John's flight was scheduled to arrive in Guayaquil at four o'clock in the morning. Female volunteers were told not to travel alone at night, not to walk in unknown places alone at night, and not to check into motels alone at night. But I was a fool in love and determined to see John the moment he arrived, so I got on a bus in the afternoon for the eight-hour bus ride to Guayaquil. Arriving at the deserted Guayaquil bus station close to midnight, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that thi
s was no different than arriving at Penn Station, alone, late at night, not knowing a soul. Of course, I knew better than to arrive in Penn Station, alone, late at night, and not knowing a soul.

  I did my best to look bigger and braver than I was and strode out to find a taxi and a cheap motel. Luckily, Ecuador's second-largest city turned out to be a smaller and steamier version of downtown New York City, with plenty of activity, even at night. It wasn't too hard to find a taxi with a driver who was eager to help a lone gringita. He took me to a decent and cheap motel and promised to come back to take me to the airport in a few hours. I repeatedly reminded the guy at the front desk to wake me at three. But between the excitement and my nervousness I hardly closed my eyes. All the awful things that were supposed to befall a woman alone in a fleabag motel in a strange city didn't happen. The front desk guy politely knocked on my door at three and the waiting taxi driver whisked me to the airport in plenty of time to see John's beaming face as he emerged from customs. I flung myself at him shamelessly and we kissed for a long time.

  The sun was just rising as we made our way back to the city, and I got my first real view of Guayaquil, the coastal capital, in all of its decrepit, Third-World glory. Gleaming skyscrapers towering over cement hovels, slick fast-food joints next to smoky vending carts, horses and donkeys meandering between city buses, men carrying briefcases and women in high heels jostling barefoot campesinos hunched under heavy loads. With its warm, wet breath creeping down our necks, Guayaquil struck me as Santo Domingo on steroids. But walking hand-in-hand with John, I couldn't have cared less what was going on around me.

  As soon as we got back to my site, John went to work. He found the hardware section that I had never noticed in the market and painted my apartment. He befriended the local carpenter and borrowed tools to build what must have been the only sofa bed in the entire country. He made friends with all the young men in the neighborhood and was asked to join their basketball team. Soon the same guys who had previously only leered at me on the street now politely came to the gate and asked for my husband. He charmed the dueños by offering his services and being up to any task that needed doing. In short, he proved himself to be a better Peace Corps volunteer than I was. And no one even seemed to notice that he spoke practically no Spanish at all.