The Gringo: A Memoir Read Online Free

recently as the late ’90s). Trainees laugh and clap and take pictures while the trainees-cum-puppeteers show off their best Elmo voices. Raucous laughter continues as a gang of talking sock hands describe how quickly we might suffocate on ash or lose our legs to highly viscous molten rock. It’s a real gas.
    Here’s a series of interpretive skits to illustrate what we should do preceding an evacuation scenario (the exact type of event, in other words, that had led to my being there instead of in Bolivia). Inner Peace Mark demands that we sing our script to the melody of Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.” (We absolutely nail it.)
    Here we are in small groups breaking into song and dance again to present reports of the mini projects we’ve done in our training communities. (The winning group got to perform in front of the ambassador.)
    Here we are treated to an impromptu crazy dance party, before 9 a.m., and our language facilitators dress up like clowns and spray us with confetti and glitter. (I later find out this is somewhat of an Ecuadorian tradition, but still.)
    Here we are standing in a large circle for a diversity session and taking turns explaining what makes us different . One trainee says, inexplicably, “I am Hispanic, though I have the good fortune not to look it.” Luckily, the Ecuadorian language facilitators don’t hear it, but the few Hispanic Americans in our training group do (and will remain perplexed and offended by the comment, even over a year later).
    Here we are beginning the day with a game of Simon Says and the loser has to get up in front of the group and sing.
    Here we are playing a version of hot potato for an information session on human trafficking.
    Here we are making not an actual composting toilet, but a scale model of one, using nearby sticks and twigs.
    Here we are baking cake with our language facilitator.
    Here I am asked to dress in feathery chaps and a cowboy hat to help with an indigenous dance routine for a session on Ecuadorian culture.
    And eventually: Here we are having our names pulled out of a hat and announced like we’re contestants on The Price Is Right . Here we are running over rose petals and through a tunnel formed by human arms. Here we are getting handed an envelope with our names written decoratively on the outside and our site assignments written on the inside. Here we are bursting through the tunnel toward a sign that says, “How Far Will You Go?” Answer: ten feet away toward a giant map of Ecuador taped to the floor where we stand on our corresponding part of the country. Here we are catching our breath and brushing off the rose petals as we find out where we’ll spend the next two years of our lives.
    I would be heading for the coast, which in Ecuador referred not just to the beaches, but to the entire western third of the country—a humid flatland squeezed between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean.

CHAPTER 6
    A couple of weeks after arriving in Ecuador, we traveled to a farm an hour outside Cayambe for what the Peace Corps called a “technical training.” We spent the day in groups of six going from station to station doing things like making a seedbed, raking clean a field so a greenhouse could be built, and turning guinea pig urine into a good fertilizer. Guinea pigs are also considered a delicacy in this area of the Andes, and at lunch we all watched one get prepared for eating, which included a grisly skull crushing.
    In the afternoon, we continued working until we got to our last station of the day: tree grafting. Our co-trainer—one of the four volunteers who spent the final months of his service helping prepare the fresh recruits—had a fat dip of chewing tobacco in his lip as he proceeded to explain the several different methods of grafting.
    “How many trees did you graft over the last two years?” I asked.
    He looked up at me and then turned to discharge a mouthful of golden-brown saliva.
    “I learned how to graft trees this