canoe ride, as he’d done with me on my site visit. Toward the end of the day, he made everyone gather around in a circle while he read off a list of rules. He started by reiterating that as the president of the Association of Guides of Humedal La Segua, he would be making all the final decisions that weekend. His reading of the rules lasted well over half an hour—an impressive ratio of rules-to-camping time, considering the students would be there less than twenty-four hours. With everyone fighting heat exhaustion, we finally took turns introducing ourselves.
As the budding ecotourism devotees listed off their credentials, I began to feel enormously sad. Here we were in a country where tourism, for the most part, began and ended with a cluster of islands 1,000 kilometers off its coastline, yet someone along the way had thoroughly convinced them just the same that this was the answer. Not only that, but ecotourism (everywhere, not just in Ecuador) was becoming one of those overused phrases that no one knows the actual meaning of, like “all natural” or “clean coal.”
I looked around at all this—the students, the wetland suffering from drought, overfishing and deforestation, the USAID tents. Could turning this swamp into a tourist haven ultimately help this community in the long run? Probably. But in a world where people are literally starving to death, I didn’t see the virtue in tens of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars going toward bird watching in one of the most depraved corners of that small country.
That night I helped build a giant campfire and inevitably someone handed me a guitar and demanded that I play “Hotel California.” It was about the twentieth time this had happened to me since arriving in Ecuador. Before I had a guitar, people would just ask me to sing it. Now, every time a group of people got together and a guitar was anywhere in sight, they would badger me into playing “Hotel California,” just like the asshole at every concert who insists on yelling “Free Bird.”
The night ended with Juan spiking an Ecuadorian flag into the ground and leading a chant about ecotourism. We all went to sleep, and the next morning we packed up the stuff and the students took off.
Back at the farm, Juan’s aunts and uncles called me a faggot because I slept in a camping tent with other men. I explained that all twenty guys there, including their nephew Juan, slept in male-only tents. They only laughed more and called me a faggot again.
For nearly a month, the tension I’d been feeling caused me to clench my jaw, making it sore day and night. I had a bad feeling all over my body. And try as I did, I couldn’t shake a thick, putrid, overwhelming sense of doom.
CHAPTER 18
A fter the campout, I sulked for a while. It was the third week of June. During those days, one of the aunts living in the house (the mother of Sandra and the pregnant teenager) mentioned that a white truck was frequently stopping in front of the property and looking around. As soon as someone spotted it, she said, the truck would speed off down the highway.
We all agreed this was suspicious. The only white truck I’d ever come across in my time there was when I was walking along the road one evening and it slowed down and swerved over next to me. A drunk guy hung out the window and said, “Hey, you motherfucking gringo. What do you want, huh? Cocaine? Marijuana? Huh, motherfucker?” I said nothing. The truck sped off as the idiot riding shotgun launched empty beer bottles at me.
When the aunt told me that we were “being watched,” I asked her if there was anything we should do about it.
“No,” she said. “Nothing will happen to this house. Plus, Homero has a gun and he’s kind of like the family vigilante.”
“Good. So he’s here to protect us?”
“That’s right,” she said.
Returning to my room that night, I saw that yet again someone had tried breaking in. This had been going on for three straight weeks.
As the budding ecotourism devotees listed off their credentials, I began to feel enormously sad. Here we were in a country where tourism, for the most part, began and ended with a cluster of islands 1,000 kilometers off its coastline, yet someone along the way had thoroughly convinced them just the same that this was the answer. Not only that, but ecotourism (everywhere, not just in Ecuador) was becoming one of those overused phrases that no one knows the actual meaning of, like “all natural” or “clean coal.”
I looked around at all this—the students, the wetland suffering from drought, overfishing and deforestation, the USAID tents. Could turning this swamp into a tourist haven ultimately help this community in the long run? Probably. But in a world where people are literally starving to death, I didn’t see the virtue in tens of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars going toward bird watching in one of the most depraved corners of that small country.
That night I helped build a giant campfire and inevitably someone handed me a guitar and demanded that I play “Hotel California.” It was about the twentieth time this had happened to me since arriving in Ecuador. Before I had a guitar, people would just ask me to sing it. Now, every time a group of people got together and a guitar was anywhere in sight, they would badger me into playing “Hotel California,” just like the asshole at every concert who insists on yelling “Free Bird.”
The night ended with Juan spiking an Ecuadorian flag into the ground and leading a chant about ecotourism. We all went to sleep, and the next morning we packed up the stuff and the students took off.
Back at the farm, Juan’s aunts and uncles called me a faggot because I slept in a camping tent with other men. I explained that all twenty guys there, including their nephew Juan, slept in male-only tents. They only laughed more and called me a faggot again.
For nearly a month, the tension I’d been feeling caused me to clench my jaw, making it sore day and night. I had a bad feeling all over my body. And try as I did, I couldn’t shake a thick, putrid, overwhelming sense of doom.
CHAPTER 18
A fter the campout, I sulked for a while. It was the third week of June. During those days, one of the aunts living in the house (the mother of Sandra and the pregnant teenager) mentioned that a white truck was frequently stopping in front of the property and looking around. As soon as someone spotted it, she said, the truck would speed off down the highway.
We all agreed this was suspicious. The only white truck I’d ever come across in my time there was when I was walking along the road one evening and it slowed down and swerved over next to me. A drunk guy hung out the window and said, “Hey, you motherfucking gringo. What do you want, huh? Cocaine? Marijuana? Huh, motherfucker?” I said nothing. The truck sped off as the idiot riding shotgun launched empty beer bottles at me.
When the aunt told me that we were “being watched,” I asked her if there was anything we should do about it.
“No,” she said. “Nothing will happen to this house. Plus, Homero has a gun and he’s kind of like the family vigilante.”
“Good. So he’s here to protect us?”
“That’s right,” she said.
Returning to my room that night, I saw that yet again someone had tried breaking in. This had been going on for three straight weeks.
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