The Gringo: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

morning,” he said, “on Wikipedia.”

    THROUGHOUT THOSE WEEKS, WE’D GET visits from current volunteers, already neck-deep in their service or approaching the end. Some of them came to describe their projects to us. Then during breaks between sessions, over cookies and soda, they’d lean in to whisper things like, “Forget all this shit, man. When you get out to your site, everything changes. They [Peace Corps personnel in Quito] will forget about you and it’s a complete shit show,” or “Dude, don’t take your malaria medicine, that’s a load of shit,” or “Dude, fuck that policy about sending a text message every single time you leave your site. I traveled this entire country without telling those assholes where I was.”
    During safety and security sessions, current volunteers would tell us their cautionary tales of getting robbed on buses or mugged in the major city Guayaquil or having their backpack stolen in an elaborate spilled-mustard scheme. One story that stuck out in my mind came from a woman roughly my age who’d been located near Guayaquil for the previous year. She stood up in front of our group of over forty, seated in a semicircle on those campground-style benches, and talked about how she and two visiting friends got into a cab late one night. The next thing they knew, she said, the cab slowed to a stop, and men with guns got out of a car in front of them and forced their way into the cab. With the gun barrels pressed against their temples, the women were driven to the nearest ATM. After draining the money from all their bank accounts, the gunmen dropped them out of the cab in an unfamiliar neighborhood far on the outskirts of Guayaquil. Without money or cell phones, the three of them were left to knock on a stranger’s door and beg for help.
    By the time she finished telling her story, she was shaking slightly, clearly traumatized at having to relive the details of her “express kidnapping” for our edification. Normally, when these storytelling sessions—usually concerning run-of-the-mill larcenies—ended, we trainees politely clapped as the speaker stepped down off the stage. This time, clapping seemed out of place, so instead we slow clapped, like you see in cliché sports movies. The clapping faded and the woman walked outside. She didn’t stick around for a meet-and-greet session during free time.
    The safety and security sessions were usually capped off with some crime and rape statistics and a chitchat from the country director about how we’d be totally fucked if we got caught doing drugs or messing with an underage girl. If we thought we’d be cut some slack or some diplomatic strings would be pulled for us in the event of getting caught up in anything even slightly resembling a Led Zeppelin backstage party, we were wrong.
    Other official policies (easily referenced in the Peace Corps Ecuador Volunteer Handbook ) were served to us in heaping doses. Chief among them was the Out of Site Policy. If we thought volunteer travel in country was going to be a free-for-all like it was under the previous country director, we had to think again. We would not be allowed to leave our sites for the first three months. This news was received by the trainees with so much devastation you’d have thought it was a personal insult.
    After the three months, however, we would be allotted six out-of-site days a month, which could be used in no more than three-day/two-night consecutive chunks. If we planned to leave our site, we had to send a text message to our program manager, our assistant program manager, and our community counterpart, both when we left and when we returned.
    This permissible time away was most certainly not for just shits and giggles. As stated in our policy handbook, we needed to use those days primarily for activities like buying groceries, going to the bank, and getting supplies. The list of acceptable excuses for leaving included “mental health days” and ended with