The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (36 page)

One former volunteer, recruiter, and country director recently criticized the PC in
Foreign Policy
magazine for its “unwillingness to decide if it is a development organization or an organization with a mission to promote world peace and friendship.” A 2013 congressional report also acknowledged the tension, noting that administrators’ conflicting views on the roles of diplomacy and development tend to affect whether they feel the PC should recruit more specialists or generalists. For my part, understanding how to evaluate the PC’s success was the key to interpreting that quote that had echoed in my mind for years, Thompson’s seductive assertion that a writer could do just as much good as a volunteer.

Burdick and Lederer, the authors of
The Ugly American
, would undoubtedly say that Shakespeare himself could
write a few good articles on South America and still not accomplish as much as a cadre of committed people working hand in hand with the locals. But of course, both those authors and Thompson were writing from a pretty entrenched Cold War perspective, which assigned “the locals” a choice between grudgingly tolerating the Americans and grudgingly tolerating the communists. In that context, the more delicate questions about the PC’s mission would have been easy to ignore. Was the Peace Corps ultimately discouraging communism? Well, then it was working, and there wasn’t much reason to chase down further rabbit holes of evaluation. With those days long gone, however, it wasn’t clear to me just what any of them would suppose that an “unaffected American” should be doing with himself these days in a country like Paraguay.

George Ritz is about as unaffected an American as they come. A few days after Easter, I climbed into a muddy Toyota pickup with the guy, packed for a weeklong trip out of Asunción and into the green sweep of the Paraguayan
campo
. George was an associate director of the PC in Paraguay from 1982 to 1987. These days he spends about a month in the country every year, during which time he thinks very little about diplomacy and quite a bit about improving people’s lives.

Genial and fit at sixty-five, George is a slight guy with wide-lensed glasses and the kind of square-edged, mustache-less beard that inevitably calls to mind the Amish. Until recently, he was a forester for his native state of Maine, working long, lonely hours in the remote northern woodlands at the very tip of New England. He worked in forestry for the Peace Corps, too, first as a volunteer in Chile in the late 1960s and then again during his directorship in
Paraguay (where he literally wrote the book on Paraguayan tree species, still used in the country’s universities today). When he left Paraguay at the end of the 1980s, with his wife, Sylvia, and a young son and daughter in tow, George didn’t imagine that he’d ever be back. Then, in 1995, his daughter, Andrea, died of sudden-onset diabetes. She was twelve years old. George and Sylvia established a memorial fund and funneled their grief into the construction of two small clinics in the remote Paraguayan countryside—places where the kind of highly qualified, rapid-response medical care that Andrea had received in the United States was hopelessly out of reach. These days, there are five Andrea Ritz Clinics operating in eastern Paraguay, supported in part by donations and staffed by the country’s Ministry of Health. The Ritzes and their Paraguayan partners have helped build schools and pipe in water and electricity, and George makes annual trips to stock medicines, gauge communities’ needs, and make “house calls” to even farther-flung villages on the edges of the clinics’ reach.

“None of this was here twenty-five years ago,” George said on the way out of Asunción, gesturing out the windows at what still felt like a pretty central part of town. “A lot of the road we’ll be driving on today wasn’t paved either. This country’s made a lot of progress since Stroessner.” He paused. “Well, in some ways. Less progress in others.”

Also in the truck were Dr. Laurel Parker, a twenty-eight-year-old ER doc from Connecticut, and Cessar Fernandez, head nurse at the clinic in the village of Cerrito, which would be our home base for the next week. George had introduced Cessar as his “Paraguayan brother,” a stylish guy of thirty-five with blond highlights and a silver chain around his neck. Cessar had greeted me warmly and tossed my backpack into the bed of the truck, next to two huge, tattered suitcases
filled with prescription drugs and supplies. Meanwhile, Dr. Laurel—as the other two called her in front of patients—was a childhood friend of Andrea’s. This was her second volunteer trip to Paraguay, her first since finishing her residency the year before. She and George had managed to get the drug-filled suitcases into the country without any customs hassles, which George assured me was an auspicious start in a country famous for its vast and often corrupt bureaucracy.

East of Asunción, the Paraguayan landscape took on the color and character of the Kentucky hill country. Low forested ridges and humplike buttes interrupted vast fields of sugarcane—row upon row of wild green tufts bursting from woody stalks. A few cattle wandered around in open pastures. Paraguay is an overwhelmingly flat country, with no great mountain ranges to speak of, but after a couple of hours, we came within sight of Cerro Peró, a wooded peak that’s the country’s highest point at just shy of 2,800 feet.

“In Guaraní,” said George, “they call that mountain Yvytyrusu, which basically means ‘big pile of dirt.’ ” He chuckled contentedly. George speaks fluent Guaraní, and he seemed happy just to have the strange words rolling around in his mouth. Every so often, he shouted a guttural phrase or two at Cessar, and they both laughed liked crazy.

We stopped for lunch at Cessar’s sister’s place in a city called Villarrica, a small agricultural hub about 100 miles east of Asunción. Fifty years ago, George told me, the town was the terminus of the paved highway east of the city, very literally the “end of the road,” beyond which the country would have looked much like it had before the Jesuits showed up in the sixteenth century. Thompson had come here to attend a meeting of a banned opposition party in the lead-up to one of Stroessner’s sham elections. He didn’t have much to say about the town back then, only that the
revolutionary assembly there didn’t amount to much. The dissenters in Villarrica were “quite sincere,” he wrote, but four out of five of them were teenagers, and many seemed just as eager to get out of Paraguay as they did to overthrow the dictator.

To hear George tell it, simply attending an anti-Stroessner meeting back then took some balls. His recollection of Stroessner’s Paraguay is a world full of corruption and paranoia, where the government paid citizen-spies to report on their neighbors’ political and personal “crimes.”
Pyraguës
, a Guaraní word meaning “hairy feet,” was the nickname for such trolls. One acquaintance of George’s worked in the Paraguayan Forest Service by day but moonlighted as a snitch, spotting and reporting homosexuals gathered in the city’s main plaza. Then there was the old man who ostensibly hawked brittle, yellowing magazines from a newsstand in front of the Peace Corps offices.

“The guy never sold a single issue,” George said with a laugh. “He just sat there watching who was coming and going.”

Stroessner has been out of office since 1989, when he was finally overthrown by a military coup, but Paraguayans are still living every day with his legacy. George mentioned, for example, how “El Excelentisimo” prevented the import of iodized salt, part of a calculated effort to lower his nation’s collective IQ and keep the population docile. As a result, George said, we were likely to see many patients with cretinism and goiters in the coming days—hyperthyroidism affects Paraguay more than any other nation in the New World. The country’s bloated bureaucracy is itself a holdover from the days of the dictator, when political cronies were rewarded with cushy jobs in post offices that never actually sent or received mail. George also warned me to be subtle about
taking notes, since many of the older folks might still panic to see a stranger standing in the corner with a notebook, listening and jotting things down.

We left the pavement at a town called San Juan Nepomuceno, named for the patron saint of silence and flooding—two pretty common phenomena in the sparsely populated and low-lying countryside. Thereafter, the road wasn’t even dirt, just a red and soft-pack clay so sculpted with ruts and divots that the truck had to veer back and forth to make any forward progress. George worked the clutch like a cartoon witch stirring a cauldron. Eventually, the road itself became little more than a rut, a kind of surreal corridor hemmed in by palms and other shaggy matter. Hanging from the trees were what seemed to be wisps of white garland, and I asked jokingly whether somebody was putting up welcome decorations.

“It’s cotton,” George said. “Paraguay’s first cash crop. Middlemen load it up in dump trucks to take it to market, and they always leave some behind when they graze the trees.”

The branches stretched out over the dirt path, forming a shaded corridor with cotton dangling everywhere, like threads off a torn cloud. It was beautiful, really, and I said so.

“Well, you can call them welcome decorations if you want,” said George. Just then, the truck careened through a particularly yawning trough, sending the front bumper bouncing, a cascade of mud over the hood, and the four of us slingshotting forward like crash-test dummies.

When the truck righted itself, George turned around and grinned. “Welcome to the
campo
,” he said.

By late afternoon we weren’t far from Cerrito, but before arriving at the clinic, we had a house call to make. Three years earlier, on her last visit to Paraguay, Dr. Laurel had seen a young patient with a congenital heart defect
whom she’s since taken to calling “the Blue Boy.” Thanks to a lack of oxygen in his blood, the Blue Boy’s skin was the color of cobalt. He was distinctly blue from head to toe, a condition called cyanosis that indicates severe valve and/or vessel damage. Without a risky and expensive heart surgery, his life was unquestionably in danger. Recently, though, Dr. Laurel had swapped e-mails with a surgeon working for a Paraguayan nonprofit, and the surgeon had agreed to operate on the Blue Boy for free. So our first task in the
campo
was to find the Blue Boy and have a talk with his family.

We stopped the truck in front of a cinder-block schoolhouse, where a few dozen wide-eyed kids ran to the fence to have a look at the gringos. George and Laurel’s arrival was already the talk of the township, and most of the students had probably felt the chestpiece of Laurel’s stethoscope during her last visit. The kids pointed eagerly up the road to where the Blue Boy lived, and within a few minutes, we were parking in front of a crooked clapboard house with a corrugated tin roof. Outside, bags of cotton were piled up next to a lime tree, waiting for the dump truck to haul them away. A tall teenager looked up from the moped he was fiddling with and stood up to greet us shyly. His parents weren’t home, he apologized, but they’d be back soon. He asked for us to wait outside while he fetched his brother.

So the four of us stood quietly in the yard, surrounded by a menagerie of chickens, dogs, and one shockingly white kitten. When the Blue Boy stepped out of his house a few minutes later, he was wearing plastic flip-flops and the striped jersey of the Paraguayan Fútbol Association. He was unmistakably blue. Not solidly painted, like one of those performance artists, but tinged and vampiric, like a comic-book villain who might shoot ice out of his fingertips. His features were fine and angular, and his dark hair close-cut and spiky.
He looked to be in his very early teens, although I suppose his growth may have been stunted. The Blue Boy looked delicate, but not frail.

“Buenos tardes,”
he said to each of us with a shy smile and a handshake. When it was my turn, I half expected his hand to feel clammy, but of course it didn’t. He seemed to recognize at least George and Cessar, and he talked quietly with them for a few minutes in a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní. How had he been feeling? Had he been going to school? The Blue Boy said he had a toothache recently and showed Dr. Laurel a small infected spot on his jaw. Nobody mentioned why we had come, and after a few minutes, the conversation hit a lull. The Blue Boy leaned quietly against the lime tree while George and the medics conferred in English. Everyone agreed that he looked slightly better than the last time they’d seen him. I took a short inventory of the detritus lying around the yard: a naked and armless baby doll, a pile of roofing shingles, a toy truck made from woodblocks and bottle caps.

When the Blue Boy’s dad pulled up in a rusty pickup, he didn’t seem surprised to see us. Cessar had been on and off his cell phone all day, speaking Guaraní, and I’m guessing that the father knew we were coming. He was exceedingly polite, shaking everyone’s hands and asking his sons to bring some wooden chairs from inside. At a nod from his dad, the Blue Boy excused himself, and we all sat down.

For the next few minutes, George and the father did most of the talking, with the occasional word from Cessar. They spoke mostly Guaraní, but I picked out a few words of heavily accented Spanish, and George played the conversation back for me later. Your son’s condition is very serious, George told the man, probably not for the first time, and he needs an operation or else he will die. The father looked
George in the eye, seriously and respectfully, while George told him about the surgeon in Asunción. George was calm and not the least bit pedantic. He sat with his knees splayed and used his hands for emphasis, his palms faceup in a way that said he was offering advice and not giving orders. We can find a way to get you into Asunción for a consultation, he told the man. We can do something to fix this.

The father wore a baseball cap and what had once been a white dress shirt, now faded to a dingy brown. He smiled very slightly as he spoke. The last time the medics had proposed something like this, he said, it was very expensive, a hardship on the family. In Spanish, I heard him use the phrase “heart machine.” They had taken his son to the city to use the heart machine, and nothing had improved. He was describing an echocardiogram, George and Laurel later explained, a test to see the extent of the boy’s valve damage—not a treatment, but that distinction had been lost on the family. No, the father continued, his son was a smart and capable boy. He had to stop and take a breath sometimes when he walked more than a few meters, but he was going to be OK. He didn’t need any difficult or risky procedures.