The Gringo: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

“etc.”
    As with all other rule breaking, the penalty for not adhering to any of the aforementioned out-of-site bylaws was “Administrative Separation”—a fancy term for getting kicked out. (Administrative Separation entailed getting immediately pulled from your site and sent on a flight back home after spending about thirty-six hours in Quito filling out paperwork concerning your incomplete service.) The way the country director and training manager kept repeating the term “Administrative Separation” and writing it on training materials gave it a chilling, Orwellian connotation. It was as though Administrative Separation was a living thing—a burly monster lurking over your shoulder, ready to catch you in the act of breaking a rule so it could black-flag you from ever getting a government job and, among other things, ruin your life.
    If we operated any motorized vehicle, we would be Administratively Separated.
    If we failed to take our malaria medications, we would be Administratively Separated.
    If we entered any of the areas along the Colombian border that were off-limits to personnel in the American Mission, we would be Administratively Separated.
    If we engaged in any public nudity, we would be Administratively Separated. (Although, the Volunteer Handbook omitted the word “public” before “nudity,” making for an amusing predicament.)
    If we so much as whiffed any illegal drugs, we would be Administratively Separated and left to the Ecuadorian authorities to be dealt with in ways that I’m sure would have made Midnight Express look like a picnic. The country director added with a wry smile that if we got in trouble for drugs, the U.S. government would not help us get out of jail.
    In fact, if there were even rumors in the communities about illegal drug use by a volunteer, he or she would be Administratively Separated.
    If we engaged in sexual contact with someone under the age of eighteen, we would be Administratively Separated. We were also told—incorrectly, I later learned—that this would be a violation of the United States Protect Act.
    If we went to certain beaches, we would be Administratively Separated.
    If we hung out in the Mariscal, the grotesquely backpacker-friendly party neighborhood of Quito, past 2 a.m., we would be— wait for it! —Administratively Separated.
    If we went to Baños, a town at the base of an active volcano that oddly attracts lots of tourists, we would be Administratively Separated. (A woman in our group found this out the hard way after three months in site.)
    Medical Separations were kind of like benign cousins of Administrative Separations; they were mostly for people who got serious injuries and couldn’t recover in a reasonable enough time to return to their country of service. Regarding Medical Separations, there was a lot of ambiguous language in the handbook, but I was amused by one topic: If volunteers got one abortion, they were okay. If they got a second, they would likely be . . . Medically Separated.
    Last but not least, if we acted in any way that compromised the integrity of the Peace Corps, we would be Administratively Separated—a vague rule, but it struck me as the best one in the handbook because it could have replaced all the others, thereby treating us like the adults they had trusted enough to accept into the Peace Corps.
    We would come to find out later that, even when in violation of said policies, volunteers were never truly kicked out . Instead, they were given a forty-eight-hour grace period in which they could choose to Early Terminate, thus avoiding a blackballing from all government jobs forever.

CHAPTER 7
    F rom the training facility in Cayambe, I had a forty-five-minute bus ride back to my host family’s home in Olmedo. The village has an elevation of around 10,000 feet, making it chilly at night with a scorching sun during the day, much like the Colorado mountain towns where I skied growing up. Four other trainees were