The Gringo: A Memoir by J. Grigsby Crawford

United States Peace Corps, and basically how absolutely fantastic it was to be Larry the Therapist. And since we were already there—also sitting on the floor barefooted, while Larry sat high in a chair looking out over us—he thought he might as well tell us about the beautiful son he and his wife had raised and how that son was now facing the terrors of indecision over whether to attend law school at NYU or the University of Michigan.
    Larry the Therapist’s wife interrupted him midsentence several times, once to share an anecdote about their dog eating the next-door neighbor’s chicken. Larry got back on track to finish, saying that he was sure his son would make the right decision by “listening to the voice inside his head.” And that, he said, was what we volunteers should do during our once-in-a-lifetime experience in Ecuador—we should “listen to the voice inside our head, because it’s usually right.”
    Larry the Therapist’s session came to a climax with an activity in which we broke up into pairs and talked about our reasons for joining the Peace Corps. The goal of the activity, said Larry, was not to just listen but to actually listen . He pointed out—and I couldn’t have agreed more—that most of the time when we listen to someone talk, we’re not really listening at all to the actual words, but thinking instead about other things, like what we’re going to say next.
    We went around the room one at a time and shared the answer our partner had given. One of the two married men in the group joked that he was there because his wife had made him. Everyone laughed except the wife. (They ended up quitting after seven weeks in site.)
    Larry announced that we’d run out of time, and the session broke up.
    That night after dinner we had a talent show and I played Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on the guitar.

    IN THE WANING DAYS OF training, we came across so many new acronyms and manuals that we needed other acronyms and manuals to explain what was going on in the original ones. Several training sessions were dedicated to introducing CAT, or Community Assessment Tools. It was a project we needed to complete in our first few months at site. We would have to interview every household in our village to see what the community had (or lacked) in terms of resources. Busy work, said some; essential for community integration, said others. After putting it together, we were supposed to present our findings, preferably in a PowerPoint presentation, at a conference of volunteers and counterparts five months hence. Even though we had already been assigned to communities with counterparts who had requested us for specific jobs, this was aimed toward helping us figure out what other projects we could do. I imagined how strange a “needs assessment” was going to look in my community, where people lacked running water but had TV sets and cell phones that played MP3s.
    All of this was explained in a PowerPoint presentation that demonstrated what our own PowerPoint presentations should resemble. In conclusion, said the program officer, CAT was designed to give us “structure in an unstructured environment.”
    We were told about our quarterly VRFs, or Volunteer Report Files, which tracked the progress of our program objectives. We spent more time being taught how to log in and fill out the Excel spreadsheet for our VRFs than we did learning about compost the day we took a field trip to the integrated farm.
    If any of us failed to remember that this was the twenty-first century Peace Corps, we were sadly mistaken.
    I also spent those final weeks of training living in utter fear of the medical office. A young woman in our training group I’d made friends with was abruptly kicked out when Nurse Nancy discovered that she had been taking an antianxiety medication the Peace Corps didn’t know about. My friend had told the Peace Corps—during the same hellish medical clearance process I