The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen Page B

the money system didn’t seem to help. “There was no poverty in the jungle until they introduced money, and all the sudden there’s poverty,” he says. “And all the diseases that come with it. And you look at people and they’re not happy. They have all these goods, and they’re unhappy.”
    Suelo’s doubts deepened as he began his assignment in the remote Andean village of El Hato, population three hundred. Armed with an identification card with the title of “Health Extensionist,” Suelo arrived ready to teach first aid and nutrition.
    “Usted es doctor?”
said the villagers. You’re a doctor?
    “Not exactly,” he replied, struggling in broken Spanish to explain
extensionista de salud
.
    The first order of business was to rent a home. Suelo had envisioned a dirt-floor hut just like the natives had. But the villagers wanted to rent him the concrete box of an abandoned health clinic.
“Usted es doctor,”
they insisted.
    Whether or not they believed his protestations, the locals made clear that the only edifice for rent was the clinic. And soDaniel moved in. In a chain of events that could not have been better scripted by a writer of television sitcoms, as soon as he unshuttered the doors, the patients arrived in droves, having walked miles over mountain passes, and presented Daniel with their phlegm, sprains, and rashes—ready to barter milk and chickens for his services. After a few months of pointless protest, Suelo decided that since he couldn’t beat them, he might as well join them. He traveled to Quito, and with his meager stipend and his mysterious ID card, loaded up at the pharmacy on antibiotics, aspirin, acetaminophen, Benadryl, and epinephrine, as well as a handy paperback written by a former Peace Corps volunteer,
Donde No Hay Doctor,
on how to administer care when there’s no doctor for miles. By the end of his term, Suelo had treated innumerable maladies, sent a few serious cases to the nearest clinic, and armed with nothing more than clean towels, a pail of hot water, and
Donde No Hay Doctor,
delivered three healthy babies.
    “They wanted to walk around and, like, do stuff,” Suelo says of the laboring mothers he encountered. “So I let them. I recommended that they squat, and they did, and the baby slid right out into my hands. The last one I did, the baby almost hit the floor.”
    Medical triumphs notwithstanding, Suelo felt a deepening disillusionment with Western efforts—both religious and secular—to improve lives in Ecuador. A woman he’d befriended at the clinic required surgery that would cost two hundred dollars, but the family was poor, chronically in debt, and the husband earned only a dollar a day. Suelo wrote to his college friend Tim Frederick, asking him to take up a collection at his church in Boulder, hoping the congregation would send the cash immediately, without any questions or board meetings. “That’s the way Christianity should be,” he wrote, “the way Jesus taught it.”
    Although the money arrived as hoped, Suelo continued to feel that the system of delivering charity was flawed beyond his ability to fix it. He wrote to Tim Frederick, “I feel very strongly, now more than ever, that any influence I have on these people should be on the individual level—helping and sharing knowledge on a one-on-one level, with my life, not with set programs.”
    Meanwhile, his sexual confusion raged. Daniel continued to strike up close friendships with women, partly because he genuinely liked them, and partly because he hoped Miss Right might marshal his hormones to march to the correct drummer. He reported in a letter to Tim Frederick, “I have had most of my fellowship with a girl, Corinne, who used to be involved in Intervarsity and is a Lutheran. We played ‘hooky’ from training one day and spent the day in Quito going from one cathedral to another, praying and talking about the mysteries of the Universe. I was on a spiritual high for days