The Gringo: A Memoir Read Free

afterward that earlier in the day someone in our training group had indeed arrived at the hotel in D.C. only to turn around and go home hours later.
    The rest of the day consisted of even more icebreakers and skits designed to teach us about several Peace Corps policies. Writing a blog? We had to notify administration so it could get reviewed for content. Taking a vacation? Not in our first or last three months of service. Feeling sick? We’d be given medical kits upon our arrival in Quito, the capital city. And so on.
    For one of our activities, we were handed a notebook full of questions to ask one another. Some called for facts, such as what year the Peace Corps was founded (1961!). Others were more open ended, such as, “What did you do in preparation for your service?” Most people took this question more literally and said things like, “I sold my car,” or “I said all the proper goodbyes.” But one guy, walking around the room in hiking boots and a fleece vest, told us, without irony, that he’d “found inner peace.” For the next two years, everyone called him Inner Peace Mark.
    Later in the day, I found out that the Peace Corps had the wrong address for my home of record and had been sending critical information to a random address in Northwest D.C. for the previous ten months. One of the former volunteers helping with our staging said she’d take care of it, no problem. It would take them over a year to correct this.
    We woke up early Wednesday morning and they shuttled us to the airport. Our flight landed late that night at the Quito airport where the Peace Corps country director and other office personnel met us. From then on, we were known as Omnibus 101. I still don’t know the reason for the term “omnibus,” but all it meant was that we were the 101st group of trainees to arrive in Peace Corps Ecuador.

CHAPTER 4
    F or the next nine weeks, I lived in Olmedo, a tiny village tucked in a lush valley underneath the snow-capped Cayambe Volcano, which towers to nearly 19,000 feet. We were all sprinkled about in groups of four or five across various communities that surrounded Cayambe, the city where our training sessions took place.
    One of the first things we did was take language exams. After getting grilled over the phone for months on end about my transcript and language classes, I was really sweating it, thinking that my four semesters of college Spanish would be the worst in our group and that I’d be laughed out of training. On the first day, it became clear that at least a dozen trainees had no Spanish background at all.
    Training was a mixture of chaos and bureaucratic battles among program managers, program officers, program specialists, training specialists, training managers, logistics coordinators, and volunteer trainers. I’m still not sure what any of their specific roles were. They all desperately wanted to seem in charge and be taken seriously. Some tried extra hard to let the trainees and volunteers know that they “got it.”
    And it should have come as no surprise that somewhere in there was an acronym bonanza of epic proportions. It was only a matter of time before things like COS, CD, PTO, PCMO, ET, PCPP, EFT, PCV, PCT, AO, PM, EAP, and CBT actually meant something to us. (And you must make the decision very quickly whether you want to be the type of volunteer who gives a shit and uses these terms on a regular basis.)
    A gaggle of maybe a half-dozen language trainers were each assigned to one of our training communities. Their job was to not only guide our daily Spanish lessons, but also help integrate us into Ecuadorian culture. Some of these guys turned out to be jokesters and I became friendly with a few of them. One trainer enjoyed teaching us dirty jokes and swear words and giving us insights into the complicated nature of Ecuadorian women. On the latter subject, he pointed out that no women—and certainly no men—enjoyed using condoms. It was, he said, like eating a