Reality Hits

Though every week I feel like I could tell you all many things about the amazing on-goings of my town, sometimes I tend to leave out the harder stuff. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like to write about it, or if I don’t want you all to know about it.

This week my uber-cute 11 year old cousin spent the night at our house. I came down for breakfast that morning, trudging around my new book-of-choice. It was a book by Robert Baer, a retired CIA operative that spent twenty years traveling the Middle East and Europe and fighting the war on terrorism at a grassroots level. Included in the book are a few pictures, most notably one of the U.S. embassy after its bombing in Beirut in 1983, and one of the twin towers smoking on September 11th.

Chela asked me flat-out why people like the terrorists hate Americans. It was 7:00 in the morning and my whole family had their ears perked for a response.

Not having a kid or ever have explained this topic to a youngster, I had to think of an appropriate, kid-friendly response. I threw in the thought that the United States represents a lot of things some people don’t like or don’t understand and one of those things is our liberalism (I then defined liberalism). Some people are really conservative (a.k.a. lacking women’s rights among other things) and between their language and culture, they think that they should kill us.
So that was interesting and much unlike my usual breakfast conversations. It did make me feel good though Chela replied that she didn’t think I was evil. One point for Peace Corps volunteer!

Later that day, I went to a going away lunch for this nurse in my town that I think is rather attractive and sad to see go. While waiting for my health post to get their act together and leave I poked my head in to see a man that had just been brought to our health post and was hyperventilating. I asked my counterpart what was up and what I thought she said was that he had fallen in the river and almost drowned. Well, that’s reason enough to get upset. It wasn’t until a little later that I really found out what happened after asking a few more questions.

To celebrate Earth Day, the man (actually a high school teacher) took his class from the city for a “nature walk” in my annex town next door. Everything was fine I guess until a group of kids snuck away to go look at the river (the one I used to bathe in before hearing there were alligators). I’m not quite sure how everything happened but one of the boys ended up in the river and disappeared. I don’t know if he fell and couldn’t swim (most people can’t even though we’re next door to the beach and river) or if he got caught in a whirlpool but he wasn’t seen again and the kids ran back to the teacher to tell what happened. The boy was presumed dead and lost when the teacher had to inform his parents an hour later.

The parents, told that their son had drowned but there was no body to prove it, told the teacher if he couldn’t find their son, they’d kill him.

That’s why he was hyperventilating in the health post. Out of grief and fear.
Three days later people found the boy’s body washed up next to the Tumbes bridge 5 miles downriver. To be honest, I’m amazed they even found it.

Not until then did I realize how dangerous the river Tumbes could be. Between a 15 hour period, its height can rise 10-15 feet from the rainwater that washes down from the mountains out towards Ecuador and when it’s swollen, it runs like Great Falls. During the dry season, people cross it all the time, on horses or just by swimming to get to their banana fields but I guess this time of year is different. I just find myself feeling badly for the teacher who thought it would be nice to take his students on a field trip on his day off.