First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Read online

  Dear Jean,

  First, let me ask you a few questions that only afellow Volunteer could answer: If the rice you've stored in your kitchen begins hatching and you find little crawly things on your dinner plate, can you go ahead and eat them and consider it a legitimate source of protein? And does the aggressive white mold that keeps coming out of my living room wall count as a dependent and do you think the Peace Corps should increase my living allowance?

  Well, here I am in my own little piece of the jungle—toiling away, sweating, scratching, and being eaten alive by my multitude of tiny (and not so tiny) housemates. When I was ten years old, I had an ant farm. Now, I live in one. But I'm so deliriously happy now that John's here that I hardly notice all that other bothersome stuff. I can't wait to bring him to Quito so you can meet him.

  I'll keep you posted,

  Evita

  One Good Leg Between the Two of Us

  In addition to all of his obvious charms, John also came with hidden ones—traveler's checks! He certainly hadn't gotten rich working as a Peace Corps recruiter, but he'd saved up a few hundred dollars before he quit to go to grad school, which converted to an awful lot of Ecuadorian sucres. After living on a meager “living allowance” for nearly six months, it felt like a small fortune. He wined and dined me at Santo Domingo's only fancy restaurant and took me to a low-budget island paradise, just a canoe ride off the Ecuadorian coast of Esmeraldas.

  Muisne's island “resort” amounted to a row of wooden shacks on the beach. Not much larger than a cabana, ours was crammed with a double bed, a toilet, and a cold shower. But it had a rickety porch where we'd sit and watch the sunset and the fishermen. When they'd return with their catches in their dugout canoes, we'd amble down the beach to the only cantina on the island and, under palm frond umbrellas, eat shrimp and fish ceviche and fried plantain chifles, and wash it all down with tall, slightly cool Pilsners. We'd swim in the ocean, take rambling walks around the island, or just go back to bed until it was time for the next ceviche. We spent our evenings in the bar, or alternately, in bed.

  On the third or fourth day of this lovely routine, we walked barefoot in the hot sun around the whole island. John had his pants rolled up, and his fair skin, from his shins to the tops of his feet, was burned to a bright red crisp. Hurrying back to the shack, we saw what looked like an inflated plastic bag, surrounded by long streaks of blue, splayed out on the beach.

  “Must be a dead jellyfish,” John said as we both stepped closer for a better look. Searing pain shot through my foot and intensified as it spread to my ankle and then to my entire leg. “Oh, shit! Oh fuck! Oh fuck, this hurts!” I looked down and realized that I had stepped on a tentacle.

  “It's dead. How could a sting from a dead jellyfish hurt?” John asked.

  “I don't fucking know,” I screamed. “But I am in serious pain.” John grabbed me around the waist and we hobbled back to the shack and took turns with the only remedy we could find for his third-degree sunburn and my poisonous pain: taking turns soaking our legs in a bucket of cold water.

  By evening, we were both still in pain, but I had stopped writhing and no longer feared imminent death. We limped over to the cantina for the only other remedy we could think of: medicinal beer drinking. We asked a local fisherman for advice on treating jellyfish stings.

  “You stepped on that big blue one that was on the beach today?” he asked. “You're not supposed to step on that! That's a Portuguese man-of-war,” he informed us. “A warning to stay out of the water. Those things can kill you!” Well, at least I knew why it hurt so damn much.

  The next day the tops of John's feet were covered with angry red blisters and my leg still pulsed with pain. But the quaint little island of Muisne had no pharmacy, no place to cash traveler's checks, and we were out of cash. We scraped up just enough sucres to pay for our canoe ride back to Esmeraldas. With only one good leg between us, we limped to a bank, cashed another one of John's checks, and caught the next bus to Santo Domingo.

  Despite the less-than-romantic ending to our trip, the whole thing had felt—at least to me—like a sort of honeymoon. After all, everyone in Ecuador already thought we were married. And though there hadn't been a wedding—or even a proposal—I began to lull myself into the fantasy that our relationship had progressed to the next stage. So being jolted back to reality at the end of the summer was all the worse.

  “What do you mean you're going home?” I whined when John started making plans for his return trip. “Why don't you just stay here with me?” I knew I was being irrational. John had school—and a life—to get back to. But who ever said love—or I—was rational?

  “Eve, this is your Peace Corps experience. Not mine.”

  “Yeah, but you are so much better at it than I am. Remember the extension cord?” A few weeks earlier I had been reduced to tears in the middle of the market when, even with my nearly flawless Spanish, I couldn't get anyone to sell me an extension cord. John sent me home, sobbing, and returned an hour later, extension cord in hand.

  “You'll get it. It takes time. You're doing fine.”

  “But I don't want you to go!” I knew I sounded like a pathetic six-year-old. But truer words were never spoken.

  “I have to start school next month. And I told you when I came that I could only stay for the summer.”

  What followed was a two-week rerun of the conversations we'd had before I'd left for Ecuador. Me pushing shamelessly for a commitment John wasn't ready to make. John offering nothing but his annoying faith that if we were meant to be, it would all work out. He returned to the States at the end of August and I was devastated all over again. I threw myself into my work at the shelter, determined more than ever to become a model volunteer and find that elusive opportunity that would make this whole experience—the missing John, the diarrhea, and the mold that was threatening to take over my apartment—seem worthwhile. That opportunity came shortly after John left, in the voice of a homesick eight-year-old boy.

  Dear John,

  Well, you're back in New York by now. And I'm still here. Your basketball team misses you. The boys at el hogar all miss you. Even the dueños are asking for you (I think they need something fixed in their apartment). But no one misses you more than I do. Hey, the foldout couch you built me has been great. Jean came down from Quito and spent a few days. And Donna came in to town to get her mail last Friday and didn't leave until Monday.

  The whole gang here sends their holas. They're all trying to keep me busy, to keep me from missing you. But I miss you.

  I'll keep you posted,

  Eve

  Take Me Home

  “I miss my family, Señorita Eva,” Orlando said to me in between innings of their odd version of two-base baseball at the shelter. “Can you take me home?”

  “Well, where is home?” I asked.

  “En las sierras,” he said. This wasn't a whole lot to go on since the Andes ran like a spine down much of the country.

  “Well, how did you end up in Santo Domingo?” I asked.

  “My village is not so far from Quito and my oldest brother went there and found work, and I thought I should do that too. But I couldn't find my brother in Quito and I just wanted to go home. But I got the wrong bus and I ended up here with no way to get home. But you can help me get home, Señorita Eva, can't you?”

  I often had a reason to make the three-hour trip to Quito: to see Mercedes, or the nurse, get money, advice, or a gamma globulin shot, use the washer and dryer and hang out in the volunteers' lounge. So on my next trip to Quito, I took Orlando along.

  Although I looked forward to getting to Quito, I hated the steep and twisting bus ride into the Andes. Training had filled our heads with stories of volunteers who had died in vehicles that had plunged down the mountains. I always chatted with the driver, inhaling like a sort of human Breathalyzer, before boarding a bus. But no one had, as yet, devised a quick test to assess if a driver had a death wish. Orlando and I took a seat up front, where at l
east I could keep an eye on the driver. I don't know why I thought being among the first to know that our driver was psychotic or asleep was a good idea, but it made me feel better.

  As if the steep, curving roads weren't nauseating enough, bus drivers tended to make a sport of taking each narrow switchback as fast and as close to the edge as possible. Over the cumbia music that always blasted out of the radio we heard several cries of “¡funda!” from distraught passengers. With each cry, the driver would produce a paper bag from a stash that all the drivers carried, and in a drill that was familiar to most Ecuadorian bus travelers, the bag was frantically passed, hand over hand, until it reached its destination. This didn't always work, and more times than I care to remember, I got off the bus shaking other people's vomit from my shoes.

  “Please, señorita, enjoy the view of our lovely countryside,” an Ecuadorian gentleman had said on my last trip from Quito, offering to trade seats. I tried to convince him that I really didn't need to see the road dropping off beneath us as we were spiraling down from such dizzying heights. But he insisted that I trade my aisle seat for his window seat. I hated the view, but was grateful an hour or so later, when the kid sitting just on the other side of the aisle projectile-vomited all over the kind gentleman in my erstwhile seat.

  Three vomit bags into this trip, we pulled into the main bus station in Quito. Rows and rows of buses were loading and unloading passengers. A jumble of people—businessmen in pressed suits, women in colorful Andean woven cloth with babies tied to their backs, ragged children begging for money—passed back and forth between the rows. The names of destinations were painted in bright colors across the tops of the fringed windshields. Orlando looked around, desperately trying to find the bus that would take him home.

  “That one goes to Pichincha. And that one goes to Ibarra,” I said, reading off the names labeled across the tops of the buses. “That one goes toward Mitad del Mundo. Is your house near the equator?” I asked, hoping that one of these names would sound familiar to Orlando. It was just dawning on me that following a lost eight-year-old around a foreign country might not have been the brightest thing I'd ever done.

  “Otavalo … sí, that one,” Orlando said, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the crowd to what he thought was the right bus. The bus wound its way out of the teeming city, past comfortable-looking suburbs and then into the rugged mountain landscape. Orlando's face was glued to the window the whole time. I nervously checked my watch and tried to figure out how I was going to get us back to Quito before dark if we got hopelessly lost. At least in Quito we could spend the night at Jean's apartment or in one of the cheap but clean hostels that the volunteers frequented.

  “Look!” Orlando suddenly squealed. “It's the church with the broken roof! And there is the farm with the llamas! This is it, señorita!” Orlando pulled me out of my seat. “This is where we get off the bus!”

  Once off the bus, we got a ride in the back of a pickup truck to the farm nearest Orlando's home. After the driver let us off, we walked for another half mile.

  “My uncle lives down there,” Orlando said, pointing down a muddy path. My confidence increased. “And here is the school where my oldest brother went,” he said, sprinting down a dirt road and leaping over a low, moss-covered stone embankment. He bounded up two rickety stairs to a small, wooden house and came out a moment later wrapped in an ancient woman's embrace. Two small boys with smudged faces peered out from behind the old woman's skirt.

  “Mi abuela,” Orlando sighed.

  Orlando's grandmother welcomed us as if God had come down from heaven onto their land. Orlando's younger brothers, wearing muddy rubber boots and torn sweaters, practically vibrated with excitement. Abuela hugged Orlando and cried. She hugged me and cried as the brothers danced around all of us. She apologized as she fed us watery potato soup. It was nothing like the rich, cheesy locro that my host mother used to serve me. But it tasted delicious. The brothers stared in awe as I ate. Abuela stroked Orlando's face and my hands as the little boys rifled through my backpack.

  “Gracias, gracias, señorita,” Abuela repeated over and over. When I got up to leave, she handed me a plastic bag full of small, dirty potatoes. “To thank you for bringing our boy back,” she said. “I only wish we had more.”

  “Gracias a usted,” I intoned and hugged the bag of potatoes to my chest. Orlando and his family escorted me to the nearest farm and arranged a ride for me back to the bus station. On the bus ride back to Quito I gazed at the bag of potatoes on my lap and was elated. Could this be what I do? I wondered. Could this be that opportunity that John talked about? I had my answer when I returned to El Hogar del Niño Trabajador a few days later, and was greeted with a chorus of “Take me home, señorita! Take me home!”

  The young hermano pulled me into his office. “Eva, can you take them home? Not all of them, of course. Some of them came from bad situations and really shouldn't go back to their families. But the ones who just got lost. Could you take them home? And the ones who want to visit their families, could you take them?”

  So I became a social worker of sorts, digging into the boys' histories, trying to find out where they had come from and whether or not it was a good idea to try to reunite them with their families. I heard horror stories of abuse and dysfunction, angry stories of boys running away from home, and wrenching stories of parents who simply couldn't afford another mouth to feed. But the saddest stories came from the boys, one as young as five, who had simply gotten lost in a big, unfamiliar city that just didn't have the infrastructure or resources to reunite lost children with their transient parents.

  I came away from these sessions with a broken heart and a list of boys who I thought I could help. Mercedes not only approved of the project, she offered to help me find overnight accommodations with her friends and family all over the country. The Peace Corps agreed to pay my bus fares and the church agreed to pay for the boys and thus I became Peace Corps Ecuador's Peter Pan, traveling in the company of lost boys.

  “I ran away from my home in Esmeraldas,” nine-year-old Linder told me. “My mother is muy, muy pobricita,” he said, emphasizing the poor part. “So I came here to find work. But I would like to tell her that I'm okay.”

  “Hey, I know how to get to Esmeraldas,” I said, remembering the lovely trip John and I had taken there over the summer. I had hardly noticed at the time, since I was too busy mooning at John, but now I recalled the clumps of glue-sniffing boys on the streets and the broken-down barrios we had passed on our way in and out of that city.

  “And us too! We are from Esmeraldas too!” chimed a pair of recently arrived brothers when I announced that I would take Linder home next. “We ran away from home. But now we want to go back,” the older one said, and the younger one nodded enthusiastically.

  The four of us boarded a bus early one morning for the long trip to the coast. I had packed a change of clothes and my toiletries along with my standard Peace Corps survival kit. Eight months in the Peace Corps had taught me never to leave home without a bandana, which can be used as a tourniquet, sling, compress, washcloth, and most commonly as a shield against the noxious fumes of burning tires or teargas (I had already stumbled into several political protests); a book, because, no doubt, you will be stuck waiting somewhere for something; and a bottle of filtered water, because even if you're dying of thirst, you really don't want to drink the tap water. The boys each brought the toothbrush I had given them and nothing else.

  “So, mis hijos, how do you feel about going to see your parents?” I asked once we were settled on the bus. I thought it would be helpful to get the boys to talk about their feelings. The three usually loud and rambunctious boys stared at me blankly. Perhaps my very American let's-just-talk-about-it approach wasn't going to work here. We rode on in silence.

  We arrived in downtown Esmeraldas in the early afternoon and switched to a “monkey bus,” open on all sides and splashed with brightly colored beach scenes and painted with slogans. Men and
boys often climbed an attached ladder and rode on the top of the bus, nestled in with huge bunches of lashed plantains and bananas. Women never rode on top, from what I could tell. But when the boys climbed the ladder, I followed them, sensing this could be my only chance. The boys seemed to be having a great time, laughing and yelling as the muggy air slapped at their faces. I wedged myself between some bananas, held on to the tiny little handrail for dear life, and wondered why anyone would choose to do something so stupid.

  We rode out of the city this way for what seemed like a very long time. As soon as the ocean came into view, we climbed down and switched buses again. Thankfully, this one was fully enclosed. We rode for miles along roads that paralleled the beach. “This is where we get off,” the brothers announced among nothing but beach and palm trees, and I immediately had warm memories of my trip to the coast with John.

  We turned into a stand of palm trees, and a collection of what looked like wooden shipping crates on stilts came into view. Oh, cute little beach cabanas! I wish John were here! A naked toddler sat out front of one of these, idly banging rocks together. “Mama, we're home,” the elder brother yelled through the doorway that gaped open like a broken mouth. A drawn woman poked her head out, stared briefly at me, and nodded at the boys. She stepped through the door and scooped the toddler onto her hip, shooing the flies that had congregated around his runny nose.