Living Poor

209 Pages·2005·0.94 MB·English

by  Steve Solomon

MORITZ THOMSEN

Living Poor

A PEACE CORPS CHRONICLE

Seattle & London
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Copyright © 1969 by the University of Washington Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-89492
Printed in the United States of America
For
STANLEIGH ARNOLD
and for
EAMON PRADO C.
ORESTES PRADO C.
ROSA VICENTA ESTUPIÑAN
Preface

FOR THOSE of us without fifty thousand dollars or so to invest in a
pack trip through the Himalayan passes, the Peace Corps is
perhaps the last great adventure available to Americans over
eighteen years of age. The physical world has been mapped; but
in the last analysis the Peace Corps is an intellectual exploration,
the chance (if you are patient enough) to enter in some degree
into the hearts and minds and feelings of alien peoples with
exotic cultures. The final discovery, that we are all ultimately
alike, is a hard-earned revelation. And it is well worth the
trouble. The Peace Corps experience is, of course, more than
intellectual. During my first year in Rio Verde I think I read only
two books; life was so full, so emotionally stirring, that reading
seemed like a gray and tawdry substitute for all that surging life
around me.
It may seem to some that this story is scarcely typical of the
Peace Corps experience. Actually, there is no typical story to tell.
The Peace Corps exists as a vehicle for acting out your fantasies
of brotherhood and, if you are strong enough, turning the dream
into a reality. One of the amazing things about being a Volunteer
is that you sometimes go whole weeks without being aware of
the Peace Corps at all. I used to wake up in the mornings to the
noise of roosters in the town and the sound of waves and palm
fronds clashing dryly in the wind, and think, utterly amazed and
unbelieving, "My God, I'm in Ecuador." I was just another person
in a poor village working out my own problems and frustrations,
making friends and enemies like one more citizen of the town.
Yet even though each Volunteer makes his own story, the
basic problems of fate, poverty, hunger, disease, and ignorance
are pretty much the same. And the Peace Corps still exists as the
great adventure and the great challenge for individual Americans.
A good part of the following material was first published in
the pages of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. Why, I don't
know. I got the idea of writing the pieces one morning as I was
washing down a hog pen while I waited for my Peace Corps
invitation, and I presented myself that same afternoon—still in
Levis and jumper, and still, no doubt, exuding that subtle aroma
so closely associated with my trade. I was very gingerly and at
arm's length passed from desk to desk and ended up in the office
of Stanleigh Arnold, the Sunday editor, who thanked me for my
offer and told me that the Chronicle was buying no free-lance
material. Thanks, but no thanks.
The rest of the story simply doesn't make sense. I went into
Peace Corps training, began to write about it, and sent the articles
to Stan—who published them.
One of the nice things that developed out of these articles, in
addition to a friendship with Stan, was a communication with
people in the Bay area. I began to get letters from people who felt
involved with the town of Río Verde. Some of them were so
involved that they joined the Peace Corps; some of them sent
checks. This will, I hope, explain how we ended up with a farm
and a tractor. It was through the goodness of friends I didn't
know, have never met (and whose addresses, unfortunately, were
stolen in a series of robberies before I left Río Verde).
One final word of explanation to any Ecuadorians who may
tend to find this book offensive to their national pride. Ecuador,
slashed and fragmented by the double chain of Andes peaks,
fractured by canyons and rivers, separated town from town by
mountain and jungle, is ten thousand different countries. Every
village is a world entire; Río Verde in its Pacific isolation was
one of those worlds—in no sense typical and in no sense
untypical.
To my knowledge Río Verde has only been mentioned once
in the literature of South America. I ran across this description of
the Río Verde coast written by Agustín de Zarate in his classic,
The Discovery and Conquest of Peru. It describes some of the
impressions of Francisco Pizarro and his little band of cutthroats,
and I hope it helps to explain my occasionally obsessive
preoccupation with food:

The Spaniards also greatly suffered from hunger, for they found no food
except the fruit of some trees called mangroves, of which there are great
quantities on this coast. But these are very tough and tall and straight, and
since they grow in salt water, their fruit is salt and bitter. But necessity
compelled them to feed on this fruit and on the fish that they caught, and on
shellfish and crabs, for maize does not grow anywhere on this coast. They
rowed their canoes against the main sea current, which always runs north
whereas their course was south. And all along the coast Indians came out
against them, shouting and calling that they were "banished men." They
taunted them with the hair on their faces, saying that they were the scum of the
sea, and that they could have no other ancestry since the sea had thrown them
up. "Why do you wander the world," they cried. "You must be idle vagabonds
since you stay nowhere to work and sow the earth."
M.T.

March 4, 1969
San Francisco, California
Contents

Part One: 1965

Part Two: 1966

Part Three: 1967

Part Four: 1968
Living Poor

A PEACE CORPS CHRONICLE
Part One: 1965

I GOT my Peace Corps application at the post office in Red Bluff,
California, put it on the table in the kitchen, and walked around it
for ten days without touching it, as though it were primed to
detonate—as indeed it was—trying to convince myself that for a
forty-eight-year-old farmer the idea of Peace Corps service was
impractical and foolhardy.
I had read that a Peace Corps Volunteer would live at the
level of the people with whom he worked and that they would be
poor. Well, I could do that; I had been living poor for years. I had
read that the Peace Corps was desperate for agricultural people.
Good. That's all I knew. I had raised pigs, corn, alfalfa, beans,
and pasture, had laid out orchards, leveled land, and put in wells.
And I liked farming. I liked being outside; rows of growing corn,
cattle grazing on green pastures, the dusty excitement of a grain
harvest—these things were like music to me.
Finally I filled out the application and sent it to Washington.
And I was accepted; Sargent Shriver wanted me to go to
Ecuador.
* *
At the State College of Montana at Bozeman where we
trained, there was only one rule, at first: it was illegal to bring
liquor on the campus. Later, toward the end of the training
program, they made another rule: it was illegal to throw cherry
bombs at the P.E. instructor. This one was promulgated mainly
for Joe Burkett, a twenty-year-old Texas goat farmer who had a
wild sense of humor and who, in the old tradition of the wide
open spaces, wanted to do funny things like stealing the latrine
we made and putting it on the lawn in front of the girls' dorm. I
don't know why he wanted to kill that certain P.E. instructor, but
he almost blew his head off more than once. When you were
talking to Joe, everything was as funny as "a turd in a punch-
bowl."
And you know how funny that is.
Our schedule began at 5:45 each morning and lasted until
9:30 at night. After that, if we so desired, our Spanish instructors
were available to work with us. Actually, though, by 9:30 we
were so tied up from being run around all day that we usually
headed for the nearest tavern where we drank pitcher after pitcher
of beer and sang songs.
It was a fantastic schedule—what they called a "structured
program"—and after the first three days we realized that it was
planned that way on purpose. If there were any psychotics who
had sneaked through the Washington screening and the Treasury
Department investigation (and there were a couple), the Peace
Corps wanted to find out fast, and if we were breakable they
wanted to break us in the United States. They told us the story
about the Peace Corps trainee who had come to Bozeman the
year before and who had learned the first sentence in the Spanish
book—"The students arrive at the door," "Los alumnos llegan a
la puerta"—and who had become deranged almost immediately
from the pressures put on him. He went around repeating "Los
alumnos llegan a la puerta" in answer to all questions put to him
and screamed it all night in his sleep. We laughed at this story,
but it was uneasy laughter because by the end of the first week
we were all dreaming horrible stunted things in Spanish and
screaming them in our sleep through those short, short nights.
We started taking psychological tests, and the laughter got a
little raucous. "Have you ever talked to God?" "Do you think
your private parts are beautiful?" But these damned things went
on for weeks, tests so long, boring, and complicated that toward
the end we were too confused and punch-drunk to lie. We
listened to an endless series of two- and three-hour lectures by
experts from all over the world who flew into Bozeman and
crammed us with information—the geography, the history, the
politics, the religion, the customs, the attitudes. It was interesting,
but it was hard to keep our eyes open, and we felt that perhaps
we should be spending more time in practical pursuits, like
learning how to make a chicken coop or a latrine out of bamboo;
unfortunately, there's very little bamboo in Bozeman.
We began to learn Spanish under a system based on tapes, a
system so intense and concentrated that by the end of the first ten
weeks we were using a vocabulary roughly comparable to that of
Cervantes (1547-1616) and using it practically twenty-four hours
a day. What was amazing was that with this tremendous
vocabulary about all we could say with any degree of confidence
was "Los alumnos llegan a la puerta." We twisted and mauled
that beautiful language into a million distorted shapes and
watched our instructors, sensitive and dedicated people all,
wither and age before our eyes.
The training program was broken into three different phases.
At the end of each period, in a ritual compounded equally of
drama and torture, we were handed envelopes, the contents of
which held our futures. One envelope contained a mimeographed
form which read: "Congratulations. You have been selected to
continue training." The other envelope said something like this:
"Good try, old man, but will you please report to Dr. Peabody."
Dr. Peabody was the dragon in our lives, a Peace Corps
psychiatrist who evaluated all of the information about us and
whose opinion was final. He was the only one at the college, for
instance, who, theoretically, ever saw the Treasury Department
reports. We did not especially like Dr. Peabody, resenting his
power and feeling that if we were psychotic it was the Peace
Corps's fault. Hell, we were all O.K. when we first got to
Bozeman.
In all three phases of our training we were studied and
appraised like a bunch of fat beeves about to be entered in the
state fair. Men standing behind trees watched us; dark figures
hidden in the grandstand at 5:30 in the morning as we staggered,
groaning, around the track watched us. Our instructors watched
us and filed daily reports; the psychologist and the psychiatrist
watched us; mysterious little men from Washington in black suits
whose names we never learned appeared from time to time and
broodingly watched us. Each week end we went on camping trips
where we were watched by our camp leaders. Boy, were we
eager; we hauled in firewood by the ton. The doctor and his nurse
watched us; our discussion leaders watched us; our athletic
coaches watched us. Even the kitchen help watched us, and we
were so naive at first that we even thought that they, too, filed
daily reports on our eating habits, or whatever it was they were
watching.
The directors referred to their training program as a period
of training and selection, but it might more properly be described
as a period of deselection. Our group started out with thirty-eight
trainees and ended up with twenty-four—almost a 35 per cent
cut. It was cruel but efficient. In one sense the training period
was basically not concerned with training at all; rather, it was a
period of structured tension, of subtle and purposive torture in
which it was calculated that the individual trainee would be
forced to reveal himself. The purpose of the program was not to
change your character but to discover it, not to toughen you up or
to implant proper motivations for Peace Corps service but to find
out what your motivations were. Many potentially good
Volunteers have been eliminated from the program, a lot of them
because they never figured out what it was trying to do.
The training was designed not only to reveal you to the
Peace Corps but to reveal you to yourself. At any of the three
deselection days, therefore, while the majority of those
deselected felt the most terrible and guilty sense of failure (like
the washed-out cadets of pilot training just after Pearl Harbor), a
few felt relief. At Montana the sadistic little drama was arranged
so that deselection letters were distributed on a Friday morning at
6:00 A.M., directly after thirty minutes of violent physical
exercise, as we returned, panting with exhaustion, to our dorm.
The girls must have arrived a moment or two before, because as I
was handed the envelope with my name on it someone over in
the girls' dorm began to scream. It was a scream of terrible
heartbreak and disbelief, and though I had never heard this girl
scream before I immediately identified her. She was one of the
older trainees, a schoolteacher who, without realizing it, had
brought a batch of personal problems with her.
The scream somehow made everything real; we were all
trembling. We crept into corners and tore open our letters.
"Congratulations, you are invited to continue," etc., but someone
had locked himself in the toilet and begun to cry, and Gary from