On Pilgrimage: The Peace Corps, Part I

My series on pilgrimage has thus far just covered traditional pilgrimages - that is, physical journeys with locations for destinations.  The Camino de Santiago was a striving to reach Santiago and the TransAmerica bike trip was a striving to reach Yorktown, Virginia.  The Peace Corps does not match that criteria - it's a striving to finish your service in the very place you started - some village tucked in the middle of nowhere, hopefully with electricity.  But I am including it in my series on pilgrimage because, while you end the Peace Corps in the same PHYSICAL location, you most certainly do NOT end it in the same MENTAL location.  Peace Corps volunteers, upon completing their service, are profoundly different.  I know this because I was profoundly different when I completed my 2-year commitment, and I was only 9 months into it.  I joined the Peace Corps just after graduating from Humboldt State University with philosophy on the brain.  I left it 9 months later with fluency in Spanish, fluency in hoeing and feeding multitudes of guinea pigs, and experience in working on a farm.  I also left with two missing teeth and a jaw smashed in two places.  I jumped on a plane with my mouth banded shut, and said goodbye to my girlfriend, Marcela.   Needless to say, I left Ecuador in tears, a profoundly changed man.

Cariacu - My backyard!

The Peace Corps begins with a letter that you need to respond to within weeks that tells you where you are to be stationed.  Embarrassing to say, when I found out I was to go to Ecuador, I had to look it up on a map.  I was delighted to find it in South America.  I really wanted to live in South America.  I helped my chances by taking Spanish classes at HSU, and it worked out.  Ecuador, nestled between Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, is an amazing place to live.  Within a couple hours' drive, you could be on the coast enjoying coconut juice and humid warmth, the transitional zone between the coast and the mountains enjoying amazing fruits and watching strange birds, high up in the Andes mingling with proud indigenous populations and eating cuy, or in the jungle surrounded by an abundance of plant and animal life.  It wasn't a hard decision to say yes, although I knew it would not be an easy experience, especially as Peace Corps volunteers serve alone.

In the Peace Corps, you join an Omnibus, and together you train, in your country, for a couple months.  I was a part of Omnibus 95 in Ecuador.  My group was fantastic, and I'm still friends with many of them today.  We all met in Miami, Florida and made our preparations to move to Ecuador, where we were to be stationed in Cayambe, a city north of Quito in the Andes.  The way training worked was that we were each placed with an indigenous family in the various towns surrounding Cayambe, and each day we would migrate to the city to take classes on Ecuadorian culture, language, and courses on agriculture and habitat conservation.  We had several field trips to experience agricultural practices and conservation methods in the various ecosystems of Ecuador.

Isabel, Milking one of her Cows

My family lived in Cariacu and they were dairy farmers.  We developed a very close relationship right off the bat, in large part because I love kids and I played endlessly with little Paul.  We played futbol and tag all the time, and we often made shadow puppets on the walls.  The neighbor kids loved to play as well along with his brother, Emerson.  It was a constant party.  My 'mother', Isabel, and I also developed a close relationship.  She wasn't used to a man in the house washing dishes and sweeping the floor.  Her husband, Arsenio, as is the custom, worked all day delivering milk and came home ready to be served food.  I think Isabel deeply appreciated the way I entertained her kids and also pitched in around the house, and I realized just how much she cared about me when, at the family appreciation dinner we had when we were graduating from our training class, she broke down crying.  We asked the different families to say something about their volunteer, and in the middle of talking about how I played with her kids and helped around the house, she couldn't speak anymore and she started to cry.  It was a very touching scene - one I will never forget.  I get just as weepy when I think about the meals she prepared for me, the way she'd go into my room and straighten up every day, and the generosity she showed me time and time again.  And this is the beauty of the Peace Corps - you often enjoy a peaceful, respectful cultural exchange.  I left the my family changed, as they were too.  Here is a journal entry from a rather interesting day with my family:

"I spent the entire day in my bed being deathly ill.  It all started around 11 at night when I couldn't get warm to save my life.  I had the chills.  Then things just got progressively worse with time and I spent the day with a bad headache, an exhausted and noxious body, and an upset stomach.... The interesting thing that happened today was a sort of Shamanic ritual performed on me by my mother.  She came in the room with everyone else around and took an egg and rolled it over my stomach and my head really fast.  She was doing it until the consistency of the egg's insides sounded like water.  Then she covered me with a blanket - covering me head to toe.  Elizabeth brought in a bundle of medicinal plants from outside and she beat me through the cover with the plants, being sure to get all my parts - stomach, face, back, legs, back of the head.  It was truly a trip and it kind of makes me glad to have been sick today.  Plus, I do feel better now than I did before the ritual."

I was actually perfectly fine the following day!

Mi Familia

Little Vanessa and her Pup

While in training, the US was aggressively trying to pass free trade agreements throughout South America.  Several countries stood up against it, including Ecuador.  Now having a leftist government, Ecuadorians do not worry as much about US hegemony, but during my training, the people had to make it clear to their more conservative government that they didn't want the US deal to go through.  Headed by the indigenous community, strikes and road blockades rose up all over the country to send a clear message that the government should not pass the free trade agreement.  This left us volunteers immobile and a bit uneasy.  We were employees, after all, of the US government.

I was treated with nothing but grace during the strikes.  There was one time where I had to travel from one town to the next, and it involved crossing a road-block with the people of my town, Cariacu.  I nervously approached and asked, very politely, if I could pass.  The man I addressed looked at me coldly and said, "No."  I said it was okay and started to turn around and suddenly everybody started to laugh.  Then the man said, "Of course!  Siga no mas!"

In the end, the US pulled out of the agreement because of a dispute between Ecuador and Chevron.  US politicians wanted to show their solidarity with big-US-oil business and stopped potential dealings with Ecuador when Chevron filed a suit of 1.6 billion dollars against Ecuador, charging that Ecuador did not pay the agreed-upon price for oil made in documents dating back to the 1970s.  This is a separate lawsuit from the one filed since by indigenous communities (the real victims in all this) seeking 27 billion dollars for the environmental disaster Chevron left when it exited the country.

Paul and the Gang

I'll continue to talk about my experience in the Peace Corps in upcoming blogs.