Ecuador: Good Intentions
By Mindy Herron

It's summer on the equator. It's always summer here. I can't see because of the sweat that's combined with the sunscreen that's now running into my eyes and stinging them like fire. I'm wishing for water, or shade, or maybe a half-gallon of gasoline to set this whole field on fire and be done with it.

I ’m building a garden, or at least, that's what it will be when I trouble-shoot a slight irrigation problem combined with the tarantula problem. Three days digging and clearing in 120-degree weather and all I can see is five feet of cleared ground. I want ice, lots of it. I want to forget about setting a good example for my neighbors who watch me night and day like a ticking bomb that may explode.

I want an ice bath and a nice American television program to watch. I want to write Peace Corps a letter and praise them for how effectively they fooled me into believing I would be helping the people of Ecuador. I want to tell them about the 74 insect bites and the rash hiding under the waistband of my underwear. I want to explain how I haven’t enjoyed a solid bowel movement in over five months, and how I can’t remember what air conditioning feels like.

The Ecuadorians have known all along where this would eventually lead, this garden, this lame attempt at civilizing a jungle. The townspeople, they know, but they’ve only watched me in amusement as I squeeze every ounce of strength out of my body just to keep digging, pulling, cutting. And now I know why Ecuador will never be a major world power, or why any other country on or below the equator will never lead a great war. It’s the reason for siesta in Mexico, the reason why third-world countries can’t get it together and build giant manufacturing plants for car parts and amazing silver slinkies.

Ecuadorians will always be poor and lazy and without giant SUV's to drive them to a supermarket, and they can blame the sun for all of it.

I've spent three eight-hour days pulling and clearing and being assaulted by over-sized insects the likes of which would give American children nightmares for weeks. I’ve accomplished two things: carpal tunnel is the first, having to dig and weed pull with an old broken shovel. The second is the realization that Ecuador is hot, and the heat here equals eventual death if not treated like something that will kill you.

My neighbors knew this, all of it. They’ve walked by my little wooden house daily, shading themselves with a giant banana leaves and shaking their heads at my apparent stupidity. They’ve known that the jungle doesn’t give, that it doesn’t allow white girls with degrees in Classics to saunter in and tame it with sustainable organic gardening techniques that look excellent on paper but burst into flames once applied in the real world.

They aren’t stupid, they’ve been letting me learn the way you let a baby touch the outside of the hot stove, just once, just long enough for it to burn a little, so I’ll remember for next time. And I resent it, I really do. I need to prove their smirky faces wrong. I want to show them how hard a little white girl can work, how I can hold my own in one hundred percent humidity. I’m no lame-ass North American quitter!

I hack and clear with my shiny new machete with the orange handle and the sun blisters the back of my neck so that it will never be the same soft skin I had before Ecuador.

I spend hours ripping up Papa Chinas and their little potato spuds that give me a heinous rash all up and down my arms. I alternate between nodding at the neighbors who pass by and guzzling the bleach corrected water I store in a gigantic Nalgene bottle. I smile, I grimace like someone passing a stone, I scream in agony when stung by a wasp so big I can’t understand how it survived past the Jurassic. And when I am done, when I have cleared a small patch of jungle and created six mounds of earth where I may plant seeds, I am rewarded, with absolutely nothing. No congratulations, no ‘job well done, Gringo-woman.’ Nothing. All I hear is the buzz of insects trying to make their way inside my ear canal.

I pick up my garden tools and fetch the water bottle that has rolled under the house and watch as the sun simmers like a hot pink yolk over the palm trees out yonder. I am alone in my house and I can hear the kids playing volleyball inside the covered concha. I feel a little stupid, to tell you the truth. I feel like I’ve spent the better part of a week giving myself tendonitis and learning new and wonderful ways to kill the tarantulas I didn’t know could live in the ground.

What I really want is to talk to someone, in English, Spanish, Pig Latin, whatever. I want someone to come over and tell me what a good job I’ve done with what little I’ve had to work with.

I poke my head out the door of my house, call buenos noches a little too enthusiasticallyto the workers coming in from the sugar cane fields. I wave frantically, like someone lost at sea. They all look up from whatever conversation they’ve been having, smiling because they were laughing about some Ecuadorian joke that I wouldn’t understand anyway, and they wave back to me with the blades of their rusted machetes.

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