1

WELCOME TO THE MIRACLE

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1968, before my last year at Boston University’s business school, I married my best friend, Ann. I was adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War, although I did not consider myself a pacifist. My dad and uncles had fought in World War II and I liked to believe that I would have done the same. Mine was a philosophical objection. It reflected Muhammad Ali’s pronouncement: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”¹

Ann’s father was high up in the Department of the Navy and his best friend was a top executive at the National Security Agency, the country’s least known—and by most accounts, largest—spy organization. Realizing that a job at the NSA could earn me a draft deferment, I asked “Uncle Frank” (as Ann referred to him) for help. He arranged for an NSA recruiter to fast-track me.

I endured a series of grueling interviews and psychological tests while I was strapped to a lie detector. When I admitted that I opposed the war, the interviewers surprised me by not pursuing this subject. Instead, they focused on my upbringing as the son of a teacher at an all-boys boarding school, my attitudes toward my puritanical parents, the emotions I felt growing up cash poor on a campus populated by so many wealthy, often hedonistic, preppies. Many of their questions zeroed in on my feelings about the absence of women during my adolescent years and the awkwardness I felt around them, my shyness, and my determination to get even with those wealthy preppies who came back after Christmas vacation bragging about the orgies they’d attended while I’d spent my days shooting baskets by myself in the school gymnasium. I would later come to understand that my obsession with women, my desire for material success, and my anger marked me as a man who could be hooked. The NSA didn’t care about my attitudes toward a war they knew the US was losing. All that mattered to them was that I was vulnerable; I could be seduced.

Not long after those interviews, Uncle Frank called to tell me that I was “in.”

The day after I received the NSA’s offer, I happened to stumble into a seminar given at BU by a Peace Corps recruiter. He enthusiastically described Peace Corps projects that helped build bridges between people in other countries and Americans and ones that brought potable water and other benefits to communities that lacked the resources to develop them themselves. He also mentioned that Peace Corps volunteers were eligible for draft deferments—like NSA employees. He described several places in the world that especially needed volunteers. One of these was the Amazon rain forest where, he pointed out, Indigenous people lived very much as they had in pre-Columbus North America.

Growing up in a family that reached back to the 1600s in New England, I’d been fascinated by stories of frontier life, the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, and especially the information I devoured about the Abenaki people who had survived in the deep forests as hunters and gatherers—and attacked the settlements where my ancestors lived. I thrived on books like The Last of the Mohicans, Northwest Passage, Drums Along the Mohawk, and others about frontier warfare. Like many boys my age, I idolized Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett. I dreamed of living that type of life. It never occurred to me as a child that these stories glorified colonization, a system, I’ve since learned, that occurs when a dominant group from a foreign culture takes control of local peoples to exploit their resources; steal their lands; manipulate their economies; enslave or abuse their men, women, and children; force religious beliefs, languages, and culture on them; and break their bodies through violence, imprisonment, and sometimes genocide. I was blinded by the tales fed to me by schools, books, and movies. As a project for my seventh-grade history class, I wrote a short novel about the war between the European settlers in my native New Hampshire and the Abenaki. True to my education, I portrayed the colonists as the heroes; yet my fascination with Abenaki culture was evident throughout my writings. My teacher took me aside to tell me that people still lived that way in the Amazon rain forests. She showed me a photo taken from a small plane of a man in feathered headdress and loin cloth standing next to a thatched roof hut in a forest clearing aiming his bow and arrow at the photographer in the low-flying plane. “I’ve got to go there,” I told her back then. Sitting in the room listening to the Peace Corps recruiter, I remembered that moment and I thought, Now might be the time.

I called Uncle Frank.

“The Peace Corps? The Amazon.” He chuckled. “Perfect. We can make sure you get there. You’ll learn another language, receive training in inter-cultural and survival skills. After you finish, you can come work for us.” He paused, then added, “Or you may end up employed by a private company instead of the government.”

I had no idea that he was suggesting that I might be upgraded from spy to economic hit man—a term and concept I had never heard of and would not for a few more years. Back then, I could not have guessed that hundreds of men and women “consultants” who were paid by private companies served the interests of the US government and the rapidly expanding corporate empire.

Ann convinced me that she too wanted to visit the Amazon and liked the idea of serving her country and people who needed help. We joined the Peace Corps and were sent to eight weeks of courses in Spanish, credit and savings cooperatives, and hygiene at a training camp that had once been a nudist colony near Escondido, California. At the end, we were able to pass the rudimentary Spanish test. Without realizing it and although I have no reason to believe it was the Peace Corps’ intent, I’d later come to see that I’d been prepped to carry the torch of colonialism later in my life.

They assigned us to a remote area in the Amazon rain forest of eastern Ecuador, known to most Ecuadorians as the “Oriente.” Ann would teach basic childcare. Because of my business school education, I would develop credit and savings cooperatives. Some of the literature I found in the Boston Public Library referred to the region where we were headed as “Shuar Territory” and compared it to the early American frontier. Young Shuar men (one source claimed) could not be initiated into manhood or take a wife until they had killed and shrunken the head of an enemy. Pitched battles raged between various Shuar clans and against their common enemies, the neighboring Achuar.

As our plane flew toward Ecuador’s capital, Quito, I grew increasingly excited. An Ecuadorian newspaper handed to me by a flight attendant featured a picture of a shrunken head with a caption that I translated as “Ecuador’s Savages Attack Texaco Teams.” Ferocious “Indians” pitted against the forces of civilization. This was right out of the books I’d read and the movies I’d seen. I was about to experience Davy Crockett’s life. I would not realize how blatantly racist and imperialistic this view was until later when I would come to see that the Indigenous people were fighting to conserve their environment from the wanton destruction of oil exploitation. They were struggling to protect their lives and those of their children from government soldiers and petroleum company mercenaries.

Ann and I spent another week of cross-cultural training in Quito and then were sent to the Peace Corps regional office in Cuenca—a provincial Andean city that was abuzz with rumors about skirmishes between Texaco and the Indigenous people. After a few days there, our regional director, Jim, drove Ann and me to an open-air market.

“You’ll catch the bus here. It’ll be marked ‘Fin del Camino,’” Jim said. “End of the Road.” Then he gave us last minute instructions, adding, “It’s not the official name of the community, but you’ll know you’re there when you see a sign welcoming you to ‘El Milagro.’”

“The Miracle?” Ann asked. She looked skeptical.

“That’s the translation.” He laughed. “Don’t take it too literally. It’s quite a story, though. A lost and starving gold prospector wandered for days in the jungle before he was led to this community by, he said, the voice of an angel. He called the place a miracle and people have joked about it ever since.”

Jim drove off, leaving us surrounded by a crowd of people who were dressed in ponchos, woolen skirts, and trousers and speaking Quichua,^* the most common Indigenous language of the Andes. Many of them had pigs or goats tied to ropes they held or chickens penned inside crude wooden cages. Babies cried, staticky music blared from a speaker somewhere, roosters crowed, and dogs barked. The air was permeated by a pungent odor that suggested a combination of rotting fruits, feces, and fried pork.

Although we’d been in Cuenca for several days, we’d stuck to the charming colonial parts of town. This was our first experience in what was known in those days as “El Mercado Indio.” I stared at Ann, dumbfounded, depressed. “This is unbelievable,” I said, having no idea that there would come a time when I would appreciate this type of market as being true capitalism, as opposed to the predatory type that was sweeping the part of the world we referred to as developed and was creating a failing system that would be defined as a Death Economy.

“Yes.” She gave a sigh. “I think we’re lucky to be getting out of here, heading to the jungle.”

Suddenly the other sounds were smothered by the loud and persistent honking of a horn. The crowd parted and the cab of a very old Ford truck appeared. Behind it, apparently fastened to what had once been the truck’s frame, was a long, wooden box about as high as a man. Although painted like a rainbow interwoven with flowers, the colors were faded and plastered with mud. An irregular row of ragged holes had been cut into the side; they were covered by clear plastic to serve as windows. When it pulled to a stop, we saw the sign: “Fin del Camino.”

“That’s our bus?” Ann gasped.

Men, women, and children pushed past us, their pigs, goats, and chickens in tow, and climbed up into the wooden box.

“Fin del Camino? Fin del Camino?” a man in a torn jacket yelled at me.

I nodded.

He shoved people aside and hustled us up through the doorway of the bus and inside. We were greeted by the odor of urine and sweat. I peered down the rows of crude wooden benches crammed with passengers and their animals. I felt as if I’d been hit in the gut with a sledgehammer.

The man in the torn jacket spoke harshly in Quichua to an elderly couple sitting on the front bench. Without saying a word, they rose slowly and moved to the back of the bus. “Para los gringos,” the man said and pointed at the vacated seat.

“Should we ‘gringos’ accept this?” Ann asked.

“It seems wrong.” “It does feel elitist,” I said. “But I think we ought to take it. They expect us to.” I felt guilty admitting to our privileged status, but I wanted that front seat and quickly added, “The man who put us here might be insulted if we move. And he’s probably the driver.”

We sat down and spent the next several hours in that wooden box, along with the pigs, goats, and chickens—and people whose body odor was so strong that I imagined that some of them carried decaying corpses in the grimy burlap bags that lay on their laps or were heaped along the narrow aisle and on top of the overhead shelves.

We heard the word “gringos” frequently repeated, although we could not understand what they were saying about us because it was either spoken in Quichua or a Spanish that was so rapid as to be beyond our comprehension. However, the tone of their voices and the laughter suggested that we were the subjects of a good deal of joking.

Late in the afternoon, as the bus careened and skidded its way along the serpentine road, I grabbed our paper lunch bag, frantically handed Ann its contents, and vomited into it.

The woman behind me patted my back gently and, speaking softly in Quichua, handed Ann a small basket. The man beside her motioned with his hands that I could vomit into it. It was a gesture that spoke to the generosity that I would come to learn was a hallmark of Andean people. No matter how poor they were or how much they could have resented our privileges, they were compassionate and extremely giving.

“You know,” Ann observed later, “this is the sort of travel millions of people around the world experience all the time. We in the US are very privileged. We take our amazing advantages for granted.”

That bus ride, being given the front seat, my vomiting, and the kindness of the couple behind us humbled me. We were indeed privileged. I would remember it for the rest of my life.

The land of the high Andes was not what I’d expected. Rather than picturesque, it appeared desolate. The people who lived and farmed here faced what seemed like impossible odds. Sometimes we’d pass a tiny adobe hut and I’d catch a glimpse of workers in the nearby fields, bent over, laboring to grow corn along nearly perpendicular slopes. These scenes aroused in me more feelings of anxiety. Could I cope for the next two years with this country? Did I have the stamina these people had? The ability to endure? To survive? I was afraid that I could not handle the changes in lifestyle and attitudes that would be required of me.

I closed my eyes. I tried to put this place and what seemed like a dark future out of my mind. I forced myself to think about the Ecuadorian history I’d read in books before leaving the States. The people I’d seen outside through the plastic-covered holes in the bus, the Andean natives, had been conquered by the Inca who forced their language, economic system, and culture on them. After that, the Conquistadors defeated the Inca and brought in Catholicism, Spanish, and their form of feudalism. Then I had another thought—that the United States was trying to colonize Vietnam. While it was disturbing to consider that my country was following in the footsteps of violent empires, it also made me realize once again how fortunate I was not to be in Vietnam.

Our one night on the road was spent in a roadside “inn.” Our room in the decrepit wooden building was reached by a rickety outside staircase and furnished with only a wobbly wooden stool and a wooden frame crisscrossed with rope netting. Thrown onto the ropes was a dirty, thin mattress that appeared to have been decorated by a mad artist obsessed with yellow stains. We unrolled our sleeping bags, spread them on the mattress, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

Late that night, I couldn’t avoid the need to visit what I’d already seen was a foul and rat-infested outhouse. When my feet touched the floor, it moved. Cockroaches! I jerked my feet back onto the bed. Then, Ann’s words about being privileged and taking our advantages for granted came to me. I tried to convince myself that they were harmless bugs and that everyone else undoubtedly was dealing with them. I lowered my feet and took a step, then another. My feet crunched their way through the cockroaches and down the stairs to the outhouse.

The next morning was shrouded in a mist that clung to the buildings and around the bus. Many of our fellow travelers greeted us with “Buenos días,” pleasant smiles, and curious looks. I realized that, as foreign as they and all these experiences were for Ann and me, we were equally as foreign to them. At six feet, with curly light-brown hair, I towered above most of them. Ann’s long reddish-blond hair, her jeans, and her high leather boots were like nothing any of them had ever witnessed before—except for the bus driver who assured us that he’d seen her in a Hollywood movie.

That day, our second, the bus made frequent stops to let people and animals off at paths that disappeared into the mist or at the occasional adobe hut. As the bus descended down the Andes toward the jungle, sometimes slipping precariously close to the edge of the dirt road that hung high above a violently cascading river, the homes grew scarcer. The scenery went from arid mountains to steep canyon walls covered in lush cloud forests. The homes changed to hand-hewn boards that were perpendicular, rather than parallel, to the ground.

After nearly two days of many stops and the night of cockroaches, the bus was empty, except for three drunken mestizo (people of Spanish and Indigenous heritage) men, Ann, and me. Around midday, it coughed to a standstill at a cluster of wooden hovels surrounded by dense forest.

Peering out, I saw that the road simply came to an end. It stopped at a wall of trees. The jungle took over. Judging from the piles of pickaxes and shovels and the one ancient bulldozer, this was a road construction camp. A group of ragged bearded men sat at a long board table, eating lunch. Their tattered clothes were caked with mud. Tethered to a crude hitching rail were a few horses next to a sign that read, “Para alquilar” (For rent).

We sat there at the front of the bus, not sure what to do. Our three drunk companions staggered past us with their burlap bags. Each of them shook our hands and muttered words I didn’t understand but accepted as encouragement. They addressed me, as I would be addressed throughout my Peace Corps time in Ecuador, simply as “Mister Gringito” and Ann as “Mistera Gringita.”

We climbed down from the bus. I went up to the table. The men were gawking at Ann as though they had never seen anything quite like her before. “Dónde está El Milagro?” I asked. (Where is El Milagro?) One of the men pointed at the horses. We headed for them.

“They’re tiny,” Ann said. “Not what I’d expected.”

“Used to Ecuadorians, not us overgrown ‘gringos.’” I turned to the man who seemed to be their owner and asked in my halting Spanish if they could carry us to El Milagro.

“Claro,” he said. “Of course.” He rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign of money. “Tres dólares.”

“Three dollars,” I said to Ann. “I think we should do it.”

We rented three—one for each of us to ride and another to carry our backpacks. A barefoot boy, presumably the owner’s son, would accompany us on foot; his job, we were told, was to show us the way and bring the horses back once we reached our destination.

My horse wheezed and groaned under my weight as it plodded through mud that often reached to my knees. I felt almost as sorry for that poor animal as I did for myself. But I wasn’t about to dismount and attempt to wade through the mud. I hung on with every muscle in my body.

Glancing back, I saw the boy running along a ridge above the horse trail, picking his way through trees and brush and mud, shouting at the horses, and guiding them with a long stick whenever we came to a fork in the trail. I judged him to be about ten years old. Rather than attending school, he was laboring to get us to our destination. The word “privileged” rang in my ears once again.

At one point we were drenched by a downpour like none I had ever before experienced. Although we had plastic ponchos in our backpacks, there was no way to retrieve them in time. We simply resigned ourselves to being soaked.

Late in the afternoon, we arrived at a tattered hand-printed wooden sign nailed to a tree at a lopsided angle: “Bienvenidos al Milagro” (Welcome to the Miracle). Seeing those painted words, battered as they were, I felt relieved; this horrible journey was about to end. We had reached our destination, the Miracle. I began to regain the enthusiasm I’d felt in Quito.

As soon as I saw the community, my newborn optimism collapsed. I don’t know what I’d expected, perhaps a quaint Disneyland type of village, but this was beyond quaint, worse than anything I could have imagined or would have wanted to imagine. A muddy patch of barren earth was bordered by a dozen mud-spattered huts built of rough hand-hewn boards that, like the ones we’d seen earlier, were perpendicular to the ground and looked as if they might disintegrate at any moment. Scrawny dogs barked and snarled at our horses’ legs. Naked kids ran up to us, splashing through the mud. They threw stones at the dogs and shouted at me, words I didn’t understand.

I stared at Ann. “I think Vietnam might be better.”

She gave me a small smile. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“You can go back home,” I said. “I won’t hold it against you.”

She gave me the finger.

I had the gut-wrenching feeling that we were doomed, prisoners to this land of rain and mud, horrid buses, dirty people and their foul animals. I imagined the jungle was overrun with man-eating snakes, bloodsucking insects, and life-threatening bacteria. Looking back, I’m shamed by my terribly biased perspective. I had no idea, of course, that I would find myself drawn back to this world time and again or that I would come to love this jungle and its people.

I heard a shout from somewhere: “Hola, gringo!”

A man grinning as if he’d found a long-lost relative made his way through the children, hand outstretched. “I’m Professor Mata, the school teacher,” he said in Spanish. He wore khaki slacks and a store-bought shirt; both were wrinkled and sweat stained. His smile highlighted a single gold tooth at the front of his mouth and the fact that its neighbor on the right was missing. I would discover that, other than some of his young students, he was one of the few here who spoke Spanish. Everyone else spoke Shuar or Quichua. “Welcome to El Milagro, our little school community.” He took our horses’ reins and helped us dismount. Pumping my hand, he proclaimed, “You’re the agricultural specialist the Peace Corps promised.”

“Agricultural specialist?” I dismounted, tumbled off actually, my horse and narrowly escaped falling face first onto the ground. I tried to wipe the mud off my rain-soaked pants. I glanced around at the huddle of people who had assembled to gawk at these strange aliens who had invaded their territory. “I know nothing about agriculture,” I said in my lousy Spanish.

“You don’t!” He pulled back in surprise. “But that’s what we requested.”

My intestines turned to water. “Excuse me, Professor. Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.” He pointed toward the woods.

I made a mad dash. Two hand-hewn boards stretched across a stream, with a hole between them. A bunch of leaves was impaled on an overhanging branch. Careful not to slip on the boards that were wet with clumps of brown mush that I wanted to believe was mud, I did what I’d come to do.

When I returned to Professor Mata, he was surrounded by an ever-growing crowd. Ann was pawing through her backpack, looking for something or, more likely, just trying to avoid answering questions. “If you’re not an agricultural specialist,” Professor Mata asked me, “why are you here?”

To avoid the draft. But, of course I couldn’t say that. I stared at Ann.

She abandoned her backpack and came to stand beside me. “Credit and savings,” she murmured in English.

I turned back to Professor Mata, tried to show a smile, and stumbled into the Spanish words I recalled learning at the California Peace Corps training camp. “Estoy aquí para formar una cooperativa de crédito y ahorros.” (I’m here to help you form a credit and savings cooperative.)

“Credit and savings cooperative?” he replied in Spanish, staring at me in disbelief. “You’re joking.” He frowned. “You’re not joking, are you?”

I shook my head.

He pointed at the huts scattered around us. “What credit? What savings? We have no money. Your papayas for my bananas . . .”

My introduction to US government work: they teach you Spanish and send you to a place where most people speak Shuar or Quichua; they train you for eight weeks in skills nobody will be able to use in the two or more years you are stationed there.

Over the next few days, Ann and I tried to accustom ourselves to life in the jungle. Since the Peace Corps had neglected to arrange a place where we could stay, Professor Mata offered us a tiny room on the bottom floor of his house. Although his house was small, it was the largest and most well-constructed one in the community. Built on the edge of a steep slope, the front of the house and the door looked out to what everyone referred to as “La Plaza”—that muddy patch of earth where we had dismounted our horses and where the children played soccer with a ball made from yarn; it also served as the community’s social center. The back of our house was supported by stilts taller than me. Our room had a wooden floor with several missing planks that exposed the muck below. After we became accustomed to the stench from the pigs wallowing beneath, we found those holes convenient places for peeing at night. The only problem was that our cascading urine attracted more pigs. The walls of our room were encrusted with mold but afforded a welcome respite from the prying eyes of curious locals that seemed to follow our every movement. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Professor Mata lived above us in a more substantial room that he reached by climbing a ladder. The house was topped with a tin roof that sounded like a thousand drums during the torrents of rain that fell every day and lasted for an hour or so.

As we wandered around this small community, we were struck by the fortitude of the people and by the warmth with which they welcomed us. They knew that we had come to do the impossible, form a credit and savings cooperative. Based on the country’s history of exploitation by foreigners and the current conflicts between the Indigenous people and Texaco a hundred miles or so north of us, they had every right to be suspicious of our motives; yet, at one time or another every single person came to us with a smile, shook our hands, and told us his or her name.

Professor Mata fed us twice a day in his upstairs room. His attempts at hospitality at first surprised us, given his disappointment over our lack of agricultural expertise. However, the surprise quickly turned to dismay. Meals almost always consisted of a single fried egg accompanied by fried manioc or plantains on a plate that had been wiped down with a dirty rag. The frying oil was meat based. Black and greasy and reused many times, it rendered the final product something that I found to be most unappetizing. Occasionally, he offered us a bowl of oily soup that included a piece of boney chicken or fish and little noodle-like things that he told us were a special delicacy: grubs pulled out of a rotting tree. Since Amazonian people know that river water is not potable due to the presence of organic matter from fallen trees and dead animals, they drink chicha. A kind of beer, it is made by the women who chew pureed manioc roots and spit the liquid into a bowl, allowing it to ferment. During the first week, we drank muddy water laced with foul-tasting iodine tablets from our Peace Corps medical kits. But when these gave out, the only alternative was chicha. Despite our revulsion, we had no choice but to eat and drink these things that were the steady diet of the local people and for which we paid Professor Mata two dollars a week.

Ann and I often returned to the subject of privilege. We were only too aware of the contrast between our lives in the US, which included large, well-furnished houses, grocery stores stocked with hundreds of varieties of different foods, readily available health care, and so many other amenities, and the lives of these people.

El Milagro was not a typical Shuar village. It was, as Professor Mata had said, a “school community” that had been settled by people displaced by overcrowded and impoverished communities in the Andes. They were known as colonos (colonists—a word that would later seem significant). “The Shuar don’t live in board houses like us,” Professor Mata continued. “Theirs are thatched roofed, lots of people crammed together.” He shook his head in disgust. “So primitive.” Then he added, “Many of the kids here are Shuar. They come to my school to learn Spanish and arithmetic—or because their lands were destroyed by oil companies. Or . . .” he paused, “because their parents were killed in a raid.”

“It’s true then,” I asked, “that the tribal wars continue?”

“Yes, feuds between Shuar clans and against the Achuar that have gone on for generations.” He patted my back. “But you don’t need to worry, they won’t attack us here. We’re a school community protected under their own laws.”

I had to wonder how strictly those laws were enforced.

Another factor entered my mind at this point. Three centuries of New England Yankees had steeped me in the commandment: “When you’re given a job, by God, you do it!” I’d been sent to organize credit and savings cooperatives. It was my job and, despite Professor Mata’s warning, I was determined to do it.

The Peace Corps had launched me into the jungle with a backpack filled with comic books that extolled the virtues of credit and savings cooperatives. In color. In Spanish. They were produced by the US Information Service; it was called USIS, although I came to think of it as USELESS.

Each morning, I rose with the sun and handed those comic books to the men, women, and children as they headed into the jungle to cut firewood, gather food and herbal medicines, or hunt. Ann set up a clinic where she used what she’d learned during training about hygiene to teach mothers how to wash their children’s cuts and insect bites and treat them with the mercurochrome that was included in our first aid kits.

Every evening, I stood at the center of the community and gave a speech. Between my inept Spanish and the subject—the benefits of credit and savings cooperatives—I had no idea if anything I said was understood by anyone. All I knew was that this was my job.

To my surprise, each night more and more people showed up. Some walked for hours through the jungle and returned to their homes in the black of night—without flashlights. Professor Mata had been wrong. Yankee perseverance was working! Or so I thought.

Then one morning as I headed to the edge of the forest with my pile of comic books, a little girl ran up, touched my arm, and scampered off. A minute or two later she returned to stare at me.

“Why you not dirt?” she asked in halting Spanish.

“What?”

“Dirt.” She looked at the sky. “Dirt of star.”

“Stardust,” I said in English. I didn’t know the word in Spanish. “Dirt of star,” I parroted back her words.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Why? Me. Dirt of star. Why?”

She glanced toward the forest. “My brother . . .” she indicated a boy standing in the shadows beneath the trees, “said you from there.” Her finger pointed up. “I touch you, you turn to dirt—dirt of star.” She glanced back to where her brother had been; he was gone. She raced into the forest shouting for him.

I stood there alone, absorbed by the idea that these children thought I’d come from outer space.

Professor Mata walked up to me. “People are confused about you.”

I stared at him. “I’m dirt of star.”

He nodded.

“But they come to hear my lectures. Credit and savings cooperatives.”

“That’s your perception.” He smiled. “Have you noticed that we don’t have radios here? No TVs. There’s no electricity.” He paused. “No newspapers or magazines either.” Another pause. “I’m about the only one who could read them.”

It suddenly struck me. “You mean . . .”

“You’re the entertainment.”

How could I have been so stupid? I now understood that to the children I was a space alien; to the adults, I was the equivalent of a late-night TV comedy show. Every night!

^* There are different ways of spelling and defining certain words and aspects of Indigenous cultures. I’ve used what seem to be the most common versions. In this book, “Quechua” denotes the majority of Indigenous people living in the Andes. “Quichua” is the language most of them speak in Ecuador (a somewhat different dialect from the “Quechua” of Peru). The Kichwa are an Amazonian culture who are related to those in the Andes and, unlike the Achuar and Shuar, speak a Quichua dialect. I avoid the term “tribe,” replacing it with the more appropriate “culture” or in many cases the legally correct “nation,” except when referring to the history of empires.