The Gringo: A Memoir Read Free Page B

putting you on doxycycline for malaria prophylaxis, instead of Lariam. Lariam sometimes makes people have psychotic episodes.”
    Actual doctors back home had told me as much, so I nodded in agreement. She added that since I’d “dealt” with some of the “problems” she mentioned, my Peace Corps file would be labeled such-and-such. (Here she quickly rattled off a combination of letters and numbers that undoubtedly corresponded to some government code for people who’d once succumbed to teenage angst and consequently been prescribed one or several antidepressants.)
    “What’s that classification mean?” I asked.
    “It’s just, you know, the way we’ll mark you—I mean your file.”
    “Do other people see this?” After my application ordeal, I’d become somewhat of an expert on the medical privacy laws of the United States, so this piqued my interest.
    “No need to worry,” she said. “It’s just a classification on your file.”
    “I understand that, but should I be concerned about who can see that and find out my medical information?”
    “Oh, no, sweetie. And—whoops,” she said, looking at her watch in a grand gesture, “time’s up!”
    Somewhere during that conversation, I surmised that keeping the medical office completely informed about my health might be a high-risk activity.

CHAPTER 5
    B efore leaving for Ecuador, a friend back home introduced me to an older man who’d been a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America in the ’80s. In addition to serving there, he’d later lived in Ecuador for several years. One night in Boulder, we sat down over beers and he told me about his experience, including the horrors of what training was like in those days. He described a hard-core boot camp–like affair the Peace Corps used to weed out the weak. It even took place on a military base where they could see soldiers doing their own training on an adjacent field. (In those earlier days, training was held inside the United States, and upon swearing in, the volunteers flew to their country of service and went directly to their sites.)
    In preparation for building latrines or digging wells in Central America, Peace Corps trainees had to rappel down three-story buildings, take aerobic endurance tests, and do simulated drowning exercises. It was almost as if the Peace Corps’ intent, he said, was to get as many people to quit as possible. It was literally survival of the fittest.
    When they weren’t being timed in the mile run or learning jujitsu or whatever else was included, trainees were constantly monitored by a team of psychologists. Holding a clipboard, they would come up to a trainee, stare at him or her for several seconds, jot down a few notes, then walk away.
    Some trainees cracked. Perhaps they couldn’t take the physical endurance or maybe it was the psychological scrutiny, but in the middle of an exercise, they would announce that they’d had enough and it was the last that anyone would see of them. Most, however, passed. They made it through training, swore in, and departed for their country of service, where they practiced a grand total of zero of the martial expertise they’d acquired in the several weeks prior.
    With that in mind, I went into training prepared to kick ass. In a matter of minutes, however, I discovered that training in the twenty-first century Peace Corps had about as much in common with boot camp as did a chapter meeting for the local Cub Scouts. The gradual pussification of the Peace Corps in recent decades had caused a 180-degree turn that took training from a genuinely rugged ordeal to something like college orientation, only lamer.
    So, here we are in the giant concrete building for our training sessions, where we sit on campfire-style benches and start the day off with a group sing-along.
    Here we are treated to a puppet show explaining what we should do in the event of a volcanic eruption (a serious possibility in Ecuador, which has had notable eruptions as