Description of Service- Chapter 3

Chapter Three of my work in progress. Chapter Two is here. There's no chapter One, yet. All rights reserved.

3. An Old and New World

I arrived on a warm January day. I remember those first days now as if it had all been a dream. Of course, I had never heard of San Juan or Intibucá those few short years ago, when I first arrived in this country. The serendipitous circumstances that led me out there are, in a way, a much less inspiring part of this tale than the rest. It’s a part I usually just skip.

The plane, a jet much too big for the runway it landed on, slammed to a halt amid the green hills surrounding this noisy capital city. Over the years I have become quite used to that landing, but the first time it was a bit nerve racking. Years later, one plane wouldn’t stop in time, and ran off the runway onto the road beyond, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the eventual overthrow of the government. That is yet another tale that could only have occurred in a land such as this, whose acquaintance I made on that dream-like day. But that, like much else that could be told but might not be believed, is beyond the realm of this story.

On the day I think I remember, the plane landed without incident. I would have taken a deep breath of the cool air, but I was either too anxious or the city air was too contaminated, perhaps both. Descending from an airplane directly onto the concrete of the runway provided a certain sense of liberation and adventure. For an American, such as me, taking such a step has become quite an unusual experience. Reasonably sized airports have walkways connecting the plane to the terminal. That made the runway to me a foreign, prohibited place, to be avoided except under unusual and perhaps calamitous circumstances. I still remember that first step onto the tarmac, as the first into the unknown.

I maneuvered my way deliberately through the customs and immigration areas, and out into the open in front of the airport. There, holding a sign with my name on it, just outside the exit, was a fat, short man who appeared to be about my age. He wore dark glasses and a deep frown, which did little to disguise the fact that he looked quite annoyed. I approached him.

“Allen?” he asked in a disinterested fashion, using only my last name, as if that were all that interested him. “Come with me,” he said briskly, in response to my nod. I extended my hand, but he had already turned and was walking away. I pushed my way through a group of taxi drivers and porters that seemed determined to do all they could to obstruct my forward movement. I hauled my two bags alongside, packed with my belongings for this new life, deeper into which each forward step now led me.

The man who had held the sign looked back disapprovingly as I pulled the heavy bags through the small parking lot. “You should pay someone to take your bags,” he said, nodding at the group of porters following closely along behind me. I shook my head, but didn’t reveal the reason for my obstinacy. I had brought no extra money. My new employer, the Peace Corps, would take care of all the expenses here, or so they had told me. This whole experience, the choice to leave my well-paying job in banking in the United States, to come here to work as a volunteer helping small businesses grow, meant throwing caution to the wind, I had thought. Why change the rules of the game by bringing along a financial safety net? I hadn’t brought even a dime.

The man turned away again and marched off into the parking lot. Weighted down as I was, I struggled to keep up. He stopped at a large, white Land Rover. He unlocked it, climbed inside and triggered a switch, popping open the back. Arriving at the car well behind him, lugging the bags behind me, I lifted the two suitcases up into the rear of the car, shut the back gate, and walked around to the passenger side. The door was locked. The man sat alone in the driver’s seat looking at his cellular phone. I tapped on the window. He looked up at me, again with a look of irritation, and signaled with his thumb towards the back of the car. “Get in the back” I think he said. Though I couldn’t hear him through the closed glass, I understood clearly enough when the back gate popped open again.

I walked around the back, climbed over my suitcases, shutting the hood behind me, and took a seat sideways in a reclining position on the fold down bench, next to the luggage. The man swung his shoulders around towards me, and extended his arm across the empty back seat. “Give me your passport,” he said.

My hesitation to follow the abrupt command seemed to irritate him further. “I need your passport right now, it is the rule,” he said, beginning to raise his voice. “You must follow what I say - the rules - without questioning,” he snapped, again frowning at me. For a moment, I looked at him as he stared back at me with the intentness of a drill sergeant. I conceded, looked down, and, fumbling around in my bag, extracted my passport. I held it in my hand and studied it for a moment. I knew that, as my sole identification, it represented my ticket back, and I wasn’t anxious to part with it. Without it, the reality of being here, perhaps for a long time, was more concrete. My freedom would be limited.

The fat man continued to stare at me with growing impatience. I handed it over. Document in hand, he turned without saying anything. Haphazardly tossing the passport into the glove compartment, he backed the Land Rover out of the parking space, rammed the car into gear with a jerk, and drove, much too quickly, out of the airport parking lot.

It was obvious this man wasn’t interested in conversation, so I stared out the window at this new scenery. Everything, from the surrounding mountains and hills to the litter strewn paths beside the road, seemed so green. And yet, on those hillsides, there was not a tree in sight.

The people I observed from that privileged perch, secure in the sealed and locked rear of that new Land Rover, looked more alive, going about their daily activities on the roadside, than I felt, trapped behind that sterile glass. The freshly washed window panes of the pricey machine created a transparent but formidable barrier, separating me from their exotic lives, as if they were part of a television documentary, and I watching from my living room.

The sun was bright, but I wouldn’t have known if it was hot outside because of the air conditioning blasting on me from the front of the car. The fat man, nonetheless, was sweating. Perhaps from his current state of irritation, I thought, or perhaps from a generally irritable character. I chuckled to myself at the cleverness my insight.

“Something funny back there?” The man asked with frown, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I’m surprised you’ve already found something to laugh at in our country.”

I had no idea how to respond to such a comment, or indeed the coming battle that hastily drawn conclusion would foreshadow. I did know this man’s continued terseness made me uneasy.

“What is your name?” I asked, trying out a basic sentence in Spanish, partly to demonstrate that I didn’t have any contempt for this country I had just become acquainted with. But he ignored my question. It was a simple phrase in any language. I knew I had the words right, but the man just kept driving. I asked him again in English. Surely giving his name was too simple a request to refuse.

“Oscar, I’m Oscar,” he said after a delay of a minute or so, glancing quickly at me through the rear view mirror, as if watching to make sure I wasn’t about to make a break for it. “I am your boss here,” he added immediately, as if he had been looking for the chance to tell me that for some time.

“OK,” I said slowly, finding the addition of those details a bit forced and extraneous. “Nice to meet you, Oscar. I’m Kawil.”

“I know who you are,” he snapped back. “You are the one who has arrived late and made this unnecessary trip to the airport my work, on a Sunday no less,” he continued. So now at least I knew the immediate cause of his obstreperousness.

“Yes, sorry for that,” I replied cautiously, thwarting his obvious attempt to kill the conversation, and my nascent quest for information, there. “But I couldn’t do anything about the airline schedule. So where are we going, Oscar?”

Speaking in English was already beginning to bother me. The cryptic comment Oscar had made about laughing at his country had hit home, not because it was on the mark, but because I already knew I needed to be as culturally sensitive as possible. From the onset, I wanted to fit in. Obligating a person to communicate in my language in their country, even if it was this curious, rude fat man, seemed like an imposition, and at any rate would certainly make me stand out for all the wrong reasons. And it was clear Oscar already felt imposed upon by the situation.

I did speak some Spanish. But my fluency was limited to the niceties learned in classes, and on the streets back home playing soccer with the immigrant Mexicans. It was sufficient to communicate, but not to adequately convey exactly what I meant. Otherwise I might have asked this man, with a degree of subtlety that I only now manage after years here, what exactly was going on.

On that trip, unable to find out from Oscar where we were headed, I first realized the implications of that lack of language ability. So we rode the rest of the way in silence, and I in the dark as to where we were going, or how long the trip might take. It was clear that we had left the city and were headed up a steep, winding road into the hills. As the journey wore on, I shuffled around uncomfortably in the back of the Land Rover, which clearly wasn’t designed for a full sized person. As I was wondering why I couldn’t have sat in one of the many available seats made for an actual human being, we finally pulled into a small, picturesque town next to a lagoon formed among the hills.

The paved road became a bumpy, cobblestone track, which eased down a steep hill, then curved along the hillside. Oscar parked there, in front of a small iron gate, just across from a whitewashed Catholic church facing a wide, green valley that opened in front. Oscar, saying nothing, got out of the car and walked over to the gate, leaving the back door locked. A group of children stopped their play in front of church, to run over to the car. They began to point at me and laugh. I must have looked helpless and out of place trapped in the back of that unusually large car, with the luggage. I sighed and turned my gaze out over the valley below. The view from that turn in the road, which swept across a panoramic vista, was my first of the scenery with which Santa Lucia, perched on the mountainside above the capital, is blessed.

It was several minutes before Oscar emerged with an old woman, her dress covered by an apron, a dishtowel slung over her shoulder. They were followed closely by a teenage girl. Oscar opened the back door, and spoke to the woman.

“This is the gringo that will stay with you,” he said in Spanish. He turned to the girl. “These are his things,” he said to her, nodding at my suitcases. The young girl came forward bashfully and began an attempt to extricate the smaller of the two suitcases. I leaned forward, and helped push it down, where it fell with a thud to the ground. I wanted to get down from the car, to stretch my legs and to help, but Oscar’s wide frame, his back turned to me, was a notable impediment.

Then the old woman stepped up to the back of the Land Rover, casually pushing Oscar to one side even as he continued to speak to her. She smiled at me. “I’m Marta,” she said in Spanish. “Welcome to your home, at least for the next three months, during your training.” She put her arm out and feebly helped me down from the car, and ushered me towards the gate, as her daughter struggled with my luggage.


Those first few weeks went by quickly. Ideally, I would have been slowly learning the skills that I needed to adapt to life as a rural advisor living on my own in the countryside. I would have only three short months in Santa Lucia to prepare, and then I would be sent off on my own to work.

It turned out that Oscar was not my boss, as he had described himself in the Land Rover on that first day. In fact, we shared a common supervisor, a rickety old man who worked from an office down the hill, as the locals in Santa Lucia would say, in the capital. I saw that man, who really was my boss, only once, on a day early on in the training period, when I had been brought to the office for a medical checkup. Asking around, I was referred to a quiet, crumbling old wing of the expansive building, where I found the head of the small business development program asleep behind his desk. Waking up unhurriedly at my unexpected arrival, he pulled my resume out of a dusty file, which he had tucked away in a rusting old filing cabinet. He glanced inquisitively at it for what must have been the first time, and then expressed mild surprise at my work experience. For some reason, his enthusiasm was heartening to me. But that would be my only encounter with him. That he was Oscar’s boss as well explained what gave Oscar the impression of being in charge back at the training center.

As the training instructor in the field of small business consulting, Oscar’s job was to teach our group of six new volunteers in the field. “You’ll be competing against each other here,” Oscar announced at the first meeting of the group. “The best performers, in my estimation, will get the best assignments. Others may have less desirable postings. All this will depend on my reports and decisions.” He paused, clearly for effect, and then began his monologue anew. “And others,” he said, as he turned and made eye contact with me, “will be going home, if I determine they do not fit the proper volunteer profile.”

“You gringos,” his opening speech continued, “are no longer in the comfort of your homes.”

I struggled through those first days of training. As Oscar’s speech indicated, the approach of the training staff that Peace Corps had contracted was paternalistic and demeaning, and revolved around the constantly perpetuated stereotype of the foreigner lost in this complex new world. I didn’t feel like having a babysitter. I had expected to lose myself in the new experience completely, not to be reminded constantly how out of place I was. Most of all, I expected to be treated with respect, as a professional who had come to do a serious job.

But that respect wasn’t forthcoming. If most of my fellow trainees were unsympathetic to my plight, others seemed to fit the stereotype created for them: a group of soft, overeducated, underachieving strangers out of touch with the reality of poverty. Many, happy to accept the defined haplessness thrust upon them, even began to refer to themselves with the forced moniker of gringo. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, among the crowd of future volunteers, the one who I shared most in common with was also the only one who could not justifiably be called, or call himself, a gringo. Miguel was Puerto Rican, and if he didn’t share my opinion on everything, he at least knew how to listen and think independently.

“Oscar’s just like everyone else in this country,” Miguel said, after a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one could overhear, and in turn misconstrue, what he was about to say. We had gone to the local restaurant for a drink, after another day at the training center ended. That day, as on many, we sat apart from the other groups of trainees, an action which aroused suspicion and irritation. But we had important matters to discuss. “He’s just releasing the sociological tension that comes from years of lack of access to consumer goods.” Over the coming years, Miguel’s elaborate theories about cultural misunderstandings would prove entertaining. Here was one of the first.

“Well,” I said, slightly amused by his roundabout tack, “anyone can serve as verbal punching bag for people here. That requires far too much patience for me.” We slowly sipped on our beers, and I continued. “I mean – I need to be an active part of the conversation, if there is going to be one - not the passive recipient of cross-cultural angst that could be directed against anyone. It’s a question of self worth. I just want to get to the point where I don’t stand out, and I can do my work, and just be another person. But that means not letting myself be defined in this stereotypical mode of a gringo.”

“I don’t know. You, and the rest of the gringos,” Miguel said with a smile, knowing how I hated the word, “stand out here.” I stared at Miguel. He looked up, before continuing. “You know we don’t use that word in Puerto Rico. We say ‘yankee’.”

“It’s not the word itself that bothers me,” I explained. “I’m sick of being categorized, and the use of that word is the central tenet in the categorization process. It’s completely racist, if you think about it.”

“I don’t think so,” Miguel replied, unconvinced. “It’s just a simple linguistic tool for saying foreigner.”

“But they don’t call you a gringo.” I had already gone through these arguments in my mind one hundred times, and was glad to finally have an outlet for my thoughts. “They don’t call Asian people gringo.”

“That’s true,” he said with a smile. “There are like four races here – countryman, gringo, black guy, or Chinese. In my case I’m Latino.”

“Right. What I’m saying is the overuse of those words furthers a simplistic understanding of race and culture that over generalizes and separates everyone into large, polarized groups. You can only be one thing, and that thing is your race, as determined by the color of your skin. Everything else about you assumed from there. “

“What I think is stupid is separating everybody into either foreigner or local,” Miguel said. “I’m Latino. I share a lot with these people. But still I’m categorized as a foreigner because I’m not from this country. The world ends up polarized into groups of six million, the number of people this country, on one side, and six billion, that is, everyone else in the world, on the other. As if everyone not from here shared common characteristics. It’s such a small way to view the world.”

Miguel trailed off, so I continued where I had left off. “So this whole gringo word problem is really part of that larger problem of poverty and cultural misunderstanding. Just look at the kids around here. They have all been conditioned to yell gringo at anyone with light-skin. They say the word then put out their hand. Even kids sometimes just old enough to speak. They all know that word. Why do they do that? Because they’ve learned it. It’s a conditioned behavior that’s paid dividends once or twice, earned them a coin or a lempira or two. So by accepting that word, and that treatment, you’re just part of the problem of entrenching that dependence and poverty. I’m not going to be part of the problem I came here to try to help solve.”

“Hold on,” Miguel interrupted, “that’s way too complicated to try to explain to anyone around here.”

“But that’s just it,” I said, eager to continue. “These people at the training center, they are the bridge between us and the people we will be working with. They should be connecting us, not building artificial barriers to separate us. Take that gringo adaptation speech which they’re constantly giving to the community.”

“You mean the one where they explain how we’ve left behind all our comforts, our luxury, to come work here with the poor people?” Miguel laughed. “My trainer actually said we had left our TVs and sofas at home to come work here. It does make us look bad.”

“Right, they act like we should be accommodated for those so-called sacrifices, as if we are some kind of lost foreigners that need help. Well if it is that way, what are we doing here in the first place? I, for one, came to help, not to be helped. And to help I need to be accepted as a serious person, not a helpless, hapless, lost gringo. So that type of introduction doesn’t do anything for me.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Miguel added. “Imagine being Latino and still not fitting in. I mean, I’m Latino, just like them, but still I don’t fit into the stereotype. I mean, I grew up in poverty, not like this, but close enough to understand what’s going on here.”

“At least you speak the language well,” I said. “Try saying all this without being able to express your opinions properly. It feels infantile to the point of exacerbation. It makes me physically tired.”

“You might think the language helps,” Miguel replied slowly, “but I stand out just as much as you do. I don’t know how they know I’m not from here, but they know. I mean, yes, my accent is different, maybe I dress differently, but I don’t think it’s that. I just don’t know what it is, but people here know who is a foreigner – they just detect it.”

“The physical judgment is hard to understand, but you’re right, there’s no way to disguise it,” I said contemplating the problem. “The more you fit in, the more serious you will be taken when you go to work. But it’s hard to fit in, when people are more interested in you as a novelty, or someone that can give them money, than a serious worker. I don’t get it either. I’m not blond with blue eyes like those guys over there,” I nodded at the table behind us where a group of volunteers were talking loudly in English as they gulped down beer. “Sure, I have light skin and clear eyes, but there are more than a few people here with the same features. The guy who works on the bus looks just like me.”

The waitress, who was proving to be a favorite of Miguel came by to see if we needed anything. As she turned to walk away, more slowly and dramatically than necessary, the topic of conversation quickly changed to lighter issues. Miguel and I had quickly noticed that we shared common interests, among others observing the deep dark eyes and voluptuous figures of the women here. While the other volunteers, most of them in their mid-twenties, seemed to have enveloped themselves in a self-contained orgy, it was less than a revelation to me, and none at all to Miguel, that all our social relations need not be with the other volunteers. We finished our beers, and, the sun having set, decided it was time to head back to our respective houses for dinner. “Anyway,” I said, as we got up, “this has made me think. I’m going to take it up tomorrow with the people at the training center.”


“You’ve been here for two weeks. You don’t understand anything about the culture.” It was more a rant than a simple statement that came from director of the training center the next day, when I went to have the conversation that I had told Miguel I would.

“It seems to me like a simple issue,” I replied in disbelief. “It’s not a cultural issue at all. I don’t like being called gringo, and I want it to stop. You claim this is a professional environment and yet you let the instructors call us racist names.”

“It is insensitive of you,” he continued as I gnashed my teeth and squinted in irritation, “to object to a word we have always used to describe foreigners. You gringos understand so little about other cultures. You are the one who is a racist. There’s no way you’ll fit in here if you don’t accept things the way they are.”

“But isn’t that why we are brought here?” I asked, trying to ignore his assertion, and sensing a hole in his logic that needed immediate attention. “To help change things?”

But the fat man behind the desk only smirked in proud irritation. “You are brought here,” he said, “to serve the community and the country. Not to question the authority of people like the trainers, or me – people who know much more than you ever will. If you’re not interested in learning in the way we propose, perhaps it is best for you to go home.” His cell phone rang, and he answered it, turning his large office chair around, his back to me. I got up and walked away.

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Everyday at the training center was a similar frustration. Everyone was constantly being judged and evaluated on what could only be considered the most random and inane of criteria. To exacerbate to the problem, the judges were unfair. Oscar would make notes of perceived offenses in what he called the “permanent record.” Each time I questioned his domineering leadership style, or the relevance of the material he assigned, such as the time he sent us home with hours of accounting journal entries to practice, I would receive a written warning.

One afternoon he called me into his makeshift office after lunch. It wasn’t the first time. “Your fellow volunteer, Sally, who has been doing a tremendous job of cultural adaptation, tells me you have been drinking alcohol at lunch today,” he began.

“That is possible,” I replied, not understanding what he was getting at this time.

“That is clearly in violation of our cultural rules,” Oscar continued. “Public intoxication is not fitting of a volunteer.”

“What are talking about? First of all, I’m not intoxicated. Second, my host family offered me a beer at lunch. They had some extended family visiting. Sally only found out because I just told everyone about the lunch – how good it was.” That had been less than five minutes earlier. Apparently Sally had made a bee line for Oscar with the news.

“At any rate,” Oscar said, taking out the little book where he documented offenses, “in our culture, it is not proper.”

“How can you say that,” I replied, quickly losing my patience, “when it was your countrymen who offered the beer to me? They drank with me!”

Oscar stared at me. “Are you questioning my authority as the boss here?” he sneered. “This is not your country, gringo. Your list of offenses is growing long, and soon I will have no choice but to send your case to the director.” Seeing that I was being provoked, I stood up and walked quickly out of the office. I tossed the light screen door open in front of me, and walked through. The door was much lighter than I had expected, and it slammed emphatically behind me.

“Don’t slam that door!” Oscar called after me. “Get back in here!” But I was already on my way out of the training center.


At Dona Marta’s home on the hillside, things were different. Marta and her daughters had a way of making me laugh about my linguistic inadequacies. They seemed to know, poor and humble as they were, that no one is perfect. They had lost, or never shared, the pretext of pretending to be, from which their professional countrymen at the training center suffered.

“What’s wrong, little American?” Marta asked that day when I came through the gate, earlier than usual, and found her working in her garden. Marta never called me gringo; she had quit using that word immediately, and permanently, the first time I told her I didn’t like it. I had tried to explain why I took offense, in what was still very broken Spanish, but there had been no need. If I didn’t like that word, she said, then it wouldn’t be used in her house.

In return, I became more flexible about other things, like eating corn flakes in the morning with warm milk, after separating out the small roaches I always found in the cereal. I also learned to try to say what I wanted to say, and not to be ashamed of failing, and in that way I slowly improved my Spanish.

Over the three months I lived in that crumbling old house on the mountainside in Santa Lucia, as Doña Marta would cook up refried beans and corn tortillas for me over her wood burning stove, I would stare out the open kitchen door at the blue sky, and down over those green hills to the distant capital visible in the valley far below. And I would slowly piece together her story from fragments of a language new to me. The language she used conveyed none of the trivialities one could learn in Spanish classes, but rather the pieces of lives and events that, woven together, comprised the proud history of several generations of a humble family. That is how I perfected my Spanish, and it explains why my diction and understanding grew to be as oblique as the history of that place where I learned, and those who taught me.

Dona Marta lived as so many others in the countryside, alone with her children. With her two remaining single daughters, who still lived at home, she inhabited the mud-walled tile-roofed house that stretched out intrepidly along the hillside in a straight line of rooms, built in the manner so common in that country, one by one over the last century, as family size necessitated and finances provided. The home had first belonged to Marta’s great grandparents that many generations ago, and she had never known any other. The capital being so close, and growing gradually closer, if not in distance then in time, as transportation and roads improved over the years, Marta’s siblings had emigrated one by one, leaving her, the oldest daughter, in charge of the homestead, which they visited on holidays.

If the house had grown years ago to accommodate a larger family, it now seemed an unwieldy and dilapidated relic of a more hopeful era. The kitchen, on the far end of the hill from the gate, near the outdoor bathroom, gave way to a bedroom where Marta slept, behind a curtain hung from the ceiling, with her two daughters, adolescent Anni and the older, but still single, Jenny. The next chamber was a living room, adorned proudly with the finest mementos of all the family’s generations, including the greatest prize, a black and white photograph, framed in old mahogany with golden trim. The picture, Marta said proudly, having taken down from its perch to consider it more closely, had been taken years ago in far away Madrid, of a distant uncle, standing next to the King of Spain. She could never fully explain the circumstances that led to that meeting.

The last room, the end room next to the small iron gate that opened to the courtyard in front of the church, had become surplus years ago. It was used for storage, and sat vacant until the fortunate arrival of the Peace Corps, intent on renting what accommodations there were to be had in the small and hotel-less town for living quarters for soon to arrive trainees. As such, it had been reserved all those years, as Marta explained, for me, and was painstakingly cleaned and arranged before my arrival. It was furnished simply enough with a bed, nightstand, and shelf. Perhaps the most interesting feature was the door that opened directly to the walkway in front of the house. “All of the older houses had that feature,” Marta told me when I expressed interest in the house’s design, with every room opening to the next and to the outside. “The home is a family dwelling, for all to share, inside and out.” Since no one transited through the end room as they did the middle rooms, that space provided me a degree of privacy that proved to be a luxury. Other trainees, who had arrived earlier, had been inserted into newer homes, where they often shared a room with a number of children, or a single uncle. That was generally considered preferable to the dilapidated old room I lived in, which had been left unfilled until the last, with its stained, crumbling mud walls and arching tile roof above. Everyone who saw it expressed their sympathy. But I was happy in that room, in the house of Dona Marta.

Across the path that ran along the front of the home Marta kept a garden, which she prized highly. With Jenny off at work in the capital below, and Anni in school or lost with her teenaged friends, she spent her lonely afternoons tending its manicured plants and flowers from across the region. I found her there the day I returned home from that heated exchange with Oscar.

“You look quite upset,” Marta repeated. “What has happened?”

“It’s the people at the center,” I told her bluntly, having not yet learned to pose my words in an adequately circumspect manner. “I’m not sure what is wrong with my instructor, but he is quite irrational.”

“That fat man who came here with you the day you arrived? He’s an imbecile,” Marta said, surprising me with her own bluntness. Perhaps she had been drinking with family more after I had left. “I wish my countrymen could stand to have a good job and a good salary and not become like him.”

“You know him well then?” I asked.

“Not so well,” Marta said. “But I know his type. He and the director came around when they were searching for places for the volunteers to stay. They talk down to the people here as if we were stupid, just because we are poor, and they have good jobs. They said my house wouldn’t do, because it is old. Then they came back and said they had a last minute addition to the group, and you would be staying with us.”

“I’m not sure it’s about poverty, they talk down to us as well,” I said.

“They don’t have a very high opinion of foreigners either. He told me that the money they pay me, which is more than enough, would not compensate for the burden of hosting a gringo,” she said, wiping her brow and gazing into the hills beyond the church. “Sorry for the word, but that’s what he said. I remember his words. I tell you this because we have come to understand one another,” she continued, “unlike your teachers, who assume understanding because we are countrymen, but understand nothing.”

“Don’t worry Marta,” I said, leaning on the gate and staring at the bright blue sky. “I understand what you are saying. I’ve learned more from you than from those people at the center. I mean at least the cultural training they give-”

She interrupted with a deep laugh, such as I had never heard from her. “Cultural training? How could one learn from such a proud man, how to deal with people, I mean real people, from the countryside? These people from the upper class in the city, how can they ever hope to teach that, when they can’t do it themselves? No my son, stick to your ways, and you will be better off.

“We may have needed the money,” she continued, “but now I have met you and I can say, I would have taken you in for free, it is not at all as they said. We may not be countrymen, but there is much more in common between the two of us than with his type. Now come in and have something to eat. It will calm your spirit.”




When boredom got the best of us, as it would in that small town over the course of three months, Miguel and I eventually began venturing down to the capital. Leaving Santa Lucia was forbidden by Peace Corps rules. It was a lose prohibition that no one paid much attention to, and we missed the excitement that couldn’t be provided by that parochial mountain town, especially on weekends.

It was an easy trip down the hill to the capital. The local bus made the journey, which was more like a freefall down the steep hill, hourly on weekdays. That ride brought liberation from the frustrations of the training environment, and a rush of exhilaration that came with gaining back some degree of anonymity in the larger, less observant capital. Stepping off the Santa Lucia bus onto to the congested, hazy streets of the capital was like stepping back into the real world, even if that bustling version of it differed significantly from the any world I had known before.

We got into the habit of leaving Friday evening under the cover of darkness. We would spend the night out, returning early the next morning. Marta, when she noticed, never seemed to care. We were also lucky to come across Jorge on one such nocturnal adventure. The night we met him, he was alone at a bar, sucking on a cigarette, beer in hand, much too solitary and relaxed to stand out. It was still early that night, and the three of us were the only ones at the bar. As Miguel and I spoke, in Spanish, as I always insisted we do, so as to stand out less, when we were in the city, the thin figured man eyed us circumspectly from across the room. He finished his cigarette, tossed the butt onto the floor haphazardly, picked up his beer, and came over.

“Peace Corps?” he asked as he sat down next to Miguel, with a level of assuredness more robust than his thin frame.

I frowned. I had already become suspicious of approaches like these. Miguel, always more optimistic about the benefits of speaking to strangers, responded. “That’s right.”

“I’ve known a lot of people in Peace Corps,” the thin man said without delay, as he began to recite a list of names we had never heard.

“Congratulations,” I said sarcastically, already a bit irritated. “We don’t know any of those people. We work on our own.”

But the man was clearly undeterred. “Surely you’ll know some people I know as well,” he insisted. “Anyway, you should be careful in this bar. There are many thieves, and girls who will try to take advantage of you for your money.”

“They might get a surprise when they learn we have no money,” Miguel laughed.

I laughed too, but it wasn’t clear the man was listening to the other side of the conversation. “Don’t worry,” he proceeded. “I’ve known many people in Peace Corps. I’ll keep an eye on you. I’m Jorge,” he said, offering a half-full pack of cigarettes instead of his hand.

Not so interested in either of his offers, having already escaped one level of supervision just to be there, and being non-smokers ourselves, Miguel and I continued our evolving discussion of the socioeconomic manifestations of the unusual Central American circumstances that led to the phenomenon of having a preponderance of beautiful women living amongst a population of short, ugly men. Seeing that we were determined to get to the bottom of the issue, Jorge sat back and listened, and before long, he had caught on.

“I see,” he interjected, “you guys are different from the usual volunteers. You come out for the same reasons we do,” he said nodding at a group of girls who had just come in the door.

Jorge’s persistence paid off quickly, and by the end of the night, despite my continued reticence, he and Miguel were acting like old friends. When we decided to go, Jorge offered us a ride across town for a late night snack of baleadas. The sun was rising as we got back in his car, full and tired.

“Where to now?” Jorge asked.

“Back to the bus to Santa Lucia,” I said. “We need to get back. You know where it leaves from?”

“You’re not staying in a hotel?” Jorge asked. “You can’t go back to the mountains on a Saturday morning, there is too much to do on a weekend in the capital.”

“As much as we love the nightlife in the capital,” Miguel said, getting right to the heart of matters, “we can’t afford to stay long on the small living allowance we get from Peace Corps.”

“Don’t worry, my friends,” Jorge said. “You’ll stay at my house. I have extra beds, and we can buy food at the supermarket and cook it. It will be inexpensive.” As we would learn, there was no sense in arguing with Jorge once he had a plan. He was already driving home, down a road neither Miguel nor I was familiar with, so the matter had been settled.

That would be the first of many weekends at the home of Jorge Luis Raudales, a quiet young man, a little older than Miguel and me, but certainly no more mature. He was a chain smoker and serial worrier, but enjoyed the capital late nights and a good time as much as we did. He also preferred the company of those not exactly like him, an uncommon characteristic in a land of stereotypes. And he did have a car, and a house, which were very useful traits.

Jorge lived alone in a marginal neighborhood, named after former American President John F. Kennedy, on the outskirts of the city. He didn’t like to speak much about his family. It was clear from what he did say, and the occasional calls from the US, that his mother and three sisters were quite different from him. When they called, it was invariably to order Jorge to do something, or to ask about the completion of a previous order. Jorge tried his best to miss such calls, and always preferred for someone else to answer the phone.

That inclination was a manifestation of his general preference to be left alone, and he was quite happy by himself in his deteriorating house. But it was clear from that first weekend that he enjoyed our company anyway. We had to argue to get him to let us take the bus back up to Santa Lucia on Sunday morning. It seemed he would have had us stay on indefinitely.

“What do you think of Jorge, really?” I asked Miguel, as we rode the bus back up the mountainside. “It’s a bit strange how he took to us so quickly, don’t you think?”

“He just seems like a nice guy, looking for friends,” Miguel said, trying to sleep after the previous two late nights.

“I mean, it doesn’t feel quite right to me,” I continued. “It feels like he wants to be our friends because we are foreigners. He talks about all the people he knows in Peace Corps – even though I’ve never heard of any of them. I’m not sure I want friends like that.”

“Let me ask you something Kawil,” Miguel said, temporarily rousing himself from a half-slumber, in the vein of a person who realizes that waking up for the moment will allow them a longer, undisturbed slumber at later time. “All those nice looking girls you were talking to last night, the ones who gave you their phone numbers, you think those girls saw something deep within you that instantly attracted them to you?”

I smiled. “That’s just physical attraction my friend. You know that.”

“Well I don’t hear you complaining about them,” Miguel said quickly. “I can’t see how Jorge is any different. Everything in this world, here - every relationship in this country - is a matter of convenience. You just have to recognize what is convenient for you.”

We wouldn’t get the chance to go back down to Jorge’s many more times. It wasn’t long before I realized that even if everyone else was breaking the rules, with justice being metered out so arbitrarily at the training center, I was putting myself in danger by doing so. I gave up those weekend trips. But Jorge was never far away. He would often come up to Santa Lucia to visit, sometimes showing up unannounced at the restaurant. We learned that he would stay for a beer even when we weren’t there, and he would drop our names when approaching other trainees. Unfortunately for Jorge, he was slow to realize that mentioning us to the other trainees probably reduced his chances of making new friends. His primary motivation, or the convenience that drove him, as Miguel put it, was meeting foreign women, an undertaking which too frequently manifested itself in shameless episodes that would be considered stalking elsewhere. Despite that inconvenience, our friendship would last long past those days in Santa Lucia.


So things improved slowly.

But it was already too late. After three months, when the time rolled around for each volunteer to be assigned his work site for the next two years, the Peace Corps officials, who normally would have had the input of a project manager, had had no other contact with us but that garnered through Oscar. They read his notes.

“We would have liked to put you in a larger city, working with a bank, but we’re concerned about your temper and cultural sensitivity,” the director told me, as he explained the work that awaited me in the remote town of San Juan, Intibucá, with Oscar looking on in satisfaction. “Your training review suggests you may not be able to handle yourself in an urban environment.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, shocked at the news, quite annoyed, and deeply concerned. The Peace Corps had said they wouldn’t put anyone in a place with no electricity, or more without a telephone for emergencies. San Juan, they told me, had a population of about five hundred, was seven hours from the capital by bus, and had no electricity or phone.

“You have a long series of transgressions,” the Peace Corps representative said. “You laugh at the misfortune of others, such as the first day you were picked up from the airport.”

“What?” I gasped in confusion.

“I have told them about the first day I picked you up from the airport,” Oscar said, with a feigned air of concern, “I was very concerned that we passed some poor people on the street and you began to laugh at them.” I remembered that car ride distinctly. I had laughed, but at Oscar’s attitude, and at my sorry state in the back of that car, but not at all at the poverty.

“I would never do that.”

“You slammed the door on me after I tried to meet with you about drinking during training, about cultural sensitivity, and you walked out on the director while he was speaking to you about sensitivity as well,” he continued.

“You have displayed a great deal of inability to adapt to the culture here,” the director continued.

“Have you asked the family I live with about this? They will tell you…” but the director again interrupted.

“We are not going to discuss this further. The training staff has made their evaluation. We are excited about your partnership with the cooperative in San Juan. We have placed Sally in La Esperanza, with their main office. She will be helping us to coordinate your work, given the remote location of your assignment.” She looked at Oscar, then at me. “That’s your assignment. You can accept it," she paused as she smiled, before completing her thought. "Or you can go home."