Yeah, it's been a while. Right around 7 months. Well let's just say that I haven't had the privacy needed to foster constructive thought or to truly express myself for that matter. Sorry.
So while in El Salvador I applied for my dream fellowship. Said fellowship was not going to inform me of my status until March or April. My gig in El Salvador finished in December. Well my friends, that's when I started searching for some short term gigs. I fortuitously stumbled across this opportunity to work for an organization called GSE. It's a pay-to-volunteer organization founded by a couple of trust fund babies in Marin County that brings rich kids to Nicaragua and Ecuador every year to do a bit of reforestation and sustainable gardening whilst providing untold opportunities to update their Facebook profile pictures and share albums showcasing their incredible first time abroad experience with titles like "Todo es posible en Ecuador!!!!!!!!!!".
I've been around international development since Penn, both in the classroom and in the work place and this pay-to-volunteer model is pretty much Satan in the flesh. From the volunteer side, I've always wondered why the hell one would pay upwards of $2,500 to work abroad for a week. "Oh but it includes airfare and food," they tell me. Yeah, well back out the ~$600 flight and the balance can get you through two months in these countries. And from the "recipient" side, the burden of dealing with roving packs of ignorant white kids without any viable skill set often outweighs any positive result associated with their work. Stories documenting this phenomenon abound, like this one so I'll keep my thoughts brief. Just think - why do American kids that have never left the classroom need to come down to build a church in Haiti? Or is a 108lb. American sorority chick the most effective at planting trees in tropical Ecuador? One could argue that the financial injection provided by this influx of tourists help the local economy, which is true to a certain extent, but you'd also have to take a peak at management's salaries where you'd realize that the injection pales in comparison to rich white jesus's salary. Oh right, it's about education of the rich white kids. WTF are they learning that they couldn't do in a much less intrusive, profound way? Like I don't know, just traveling by themselves for a few weeks. The fact is that no matter how you look at it, having rich white kids come down to poor countries for photo ops with lil brown babies and a sweaty brow in the jungle is just not going to get it done if development is the end goal. And if we're trying to educate kids about the environment, social issues, other cultures, whatever, I can now tell you that this is the worst possible way of attempting to do so. Particularly when the staff is as ignorant as the students in relation to those topics.
So with these hesitations before I even started, why did I go? Am I a hypocrite? Yeah, a bit. A sellout? Let's just say this gig will never see the light of my resume. I mean hell, with 4 months to kill it was a juicy paid vacation in a part of the world I had never been to. They asked me to be a camp counselor, essentially arranging brief excursions for kids and babysitting them on the beach and in the forest. Can you really blame me?
I get down to Ecuador and quickly realize that this is simply the most pathetic, poorly-organized company I've ever worked for. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded but I instantly felt swamped in incompetence, surrounded by people that had seemingly never worked a real job and led by a bumbling caveman wannabe hippie. The gravy of all this, was, of course, the thick layer of arrogance and superiority many of the workers employed to mask their lackluster qualifications or experience. We'll talk more about this, in conjunction with the white savior complex, in a bit.
A few of em repeatedly told me how "taxing" or "complex" this job was. Instead of just telling you that these people are obviously idiots that have never worked an actual job, I'll just give you the deets of a typical week for me in Ecuador and you can decide. Please keep in mind that my expenses were on the company and I also got a salary, albeit modest, during weeks such as this.
Saturday
6am - Wakeup to sound of soft drizzle, chickens and barking dogs
6:30am - Have coffee and fried rice
7am - Arrive at market and buy 15 lbs of shrimp, 25 lbs of chicken, 30 lbs of beef and 30 lbs of Mahi Mahi; continue to buy ~100 lbs of produce and other assorted items
8am - Catch bus to Quito. It's about an 8 hour ride which is a bit of a kick in the nuts but not so bad.
4pm - Arrive in Quito and meet up with Jenny, aka La Prima, fellow guide and dear friend now (not part of the incompetent insolence crew)
4:30pm - Arrive at bar #1 and have a few beers
6pm - Arrive at bar #2 and start double fisting rum and beer
8pm - Realize how wasted we are and need for sustenance.
8:30pm - Get sushi
9:30pm - Get to hostel and pass out
Sunday
5am - Wakeup hating life
530am - Catch taxi to Quito airport
6am - Scarf down bagel sandwich and coffee while waiting for students to arrive
6:45am - Students emerge from customs and I call our chartered bus
7am - Load onto bus and head back to the coast
12pm - Stop for lunch and make various phone calls
3pm - Get back home and chill for a bit
5pm - Brief walking tour of the city and sunset beers
7pm - Dinner at our house
9pm - Sneak outside, smoke J and head to bed
Monday
6am - Wakeup
7am - Breakfast
9am - Work session in the community transplanting trees. My work primarily involves moving bag of heavy materials from one point to another. Then I must up end bag to pour said materials on ground.
11am - Make various phone calls to arrange transportation and water delivery
11:30am - Unload water jugs from truck and put in house.
12pm - Lunch
2pm - Tour of various sites in town. I do a bit of translating.
4pm - Eat ice cream. I teach kids how to say strawberry in Spanish.
5pm - Sunset beers
7pm - Dinner
9pm - Sneak outside, smoke J and head to bed
Tuesday
6am - Wakeup
7am - Breakfast
8am - Market run
8:30am - Call cooks to organize their work
9am - Work session at local high school doing more of the same. My work is largely the same though I also help carry transplanted trees from outside of the greenhouse to inside the greenhouse. I sweat. We have ice cream afterwards to reward us for our arduous work day.
12pm - Head back to the house for lunch in the back of a truck. Kids take many pictures because riding in truck is so novel. Yay. Smoke a cigarette while working on my tan.
1pm - Lunch. Ceviche - today's a good day.
2pm - Head to mangroves. Reforest mangroves by crawling through the mud then go on a boat tour of mangroves and bird sanctuary. See a boa in the mangroves. Coo brah.
5pm - Head home. Dip out en route to buy moonshine.
6pm - Casual beers at the house per direction from the head honcho.
7pm - Dinner
8pm - Couple more casual beers and I break out the moonshine.
8:30pm - Multiple students and I borderline blackout. Talk about life and post-college plans.
9pm - Passed out in bed.
Wednesday
6:30am - Wakeup feeling surprising decent. Student next to me (in hammock not bed) has wet herself. Champion.
7:30am - Breakfast
8am - Make calls to organize hostels and transportation
9am - Get in truck and head to beach where we do reforestation
10am - Get settled in and get ready to work
11am - Arrive at the reforestation site and begin work. My work revolves between macheteing my way through the forest and carrying bags of heavy materials from one spot to another spot. Must be wary of poisonous snakes, scorpions and tarantulas.
1:30pm - Finish work and head back for lunch
3pm - Free time to swim in ocean
5pm - Start drinking moonshine.
6:30pm - Start bonfire
6:45pm - Half drunkenly splash around in ocean at sunset
7pm - Dinner
8pm - Moonshine and bonfire while talking to students
9pm - Walk down the beach and blaze face.
10pm - Bed in hammock looking out at ocean
Thursday
Repeat of Wednesday
Friday
6am - Wakeup and run on beach
7am - Breakfast
9am - Work in forest.
12pm - Lunch and swim time.
1pm - Board truck to take us home
2pm - Shower and relax at home. Get ready for "cultural event" and trip with students
4pm - Get ready for event that I created with Meg - a dance/cooking/local drink class for pregame session
6pm - Pour gasoline on everyone and light em up during dance/cooking class
9pm - Get in party truck. Buy booze en route. Party in the back of truck on way to local beach town.
10pm - Arrive in Canoa and check in.
10:30pm - Head out to party
11:30pm - Smoke J handed to me
12am - Help monitor the students, do a bit of dancing and then realize I'm hammered
12:30am - Crawl into back of friend's truck for impending blizzard. Partake in snow storm.
1am - Emerge with new sense of power and continue monitoring students
3am - Pass out
Saturday
Spend most of day recovering then repeat the night.
Sunday
Recover before hopping on bus back to Quito with the students to drop them off.
Not the most stressful job I've ever had. Actually not something I'd really call a job. So let's talk about the Holy Trinity of incompetence, or the 3 employees that for whatever reason tried to kill my buzz during these 4 months.
Starting with the boss, aka el jefecito, or the trust fund baby caveman. He's really just a giant 14-year-old that has never worked for anyone but himself which probably explains why he's an absolute farce of a leader. I remember after I interviewed with him thinking that homeboy hadn't managed to master the English language, spouting off non-existent terms and misusing words left and right. But his narrowed-minded white savior complex is really what got me. His belief that these people really need him to come down and plant trees and his conviction in that bringing rich white kids down makes a meaningful difference. This arrogance and self-righteousness of course spills into his interaction and treatment of local populations. Whether it's instructing people how to work, "to be more productive like an American", nickel and diming small business owners or overworking people, he never ceased to amaze me. He expected local laborers, working 8 hours/day in the forest and camping on site, to buy their own food AND cook it for themselves when they were earning below minimum wage per day. Why? Oh, we don't have it in budget. I was scolded for giving our neighbor $2 for helping move wood for 45 min.
Ah, yes, "it's over budget" was his favorite line. Unfortunately, not being a full retard as I am, I was quick to teach him that you must first define a budget to then be over budget. Simply claiming that we're over budget to hoard money for yourself doesn't cut it. Just like when he was complaining that I was significantly over budget on food costs, I asked him to tell me what the budget was because I knew exactly what I was spending. When he did so, he realized that I was actually 25% BELOW budget. What a genius. I even had to show him how to use Powerpoint.
My favorite line of his was when he told me that one of the best parts of the job in his view was that "you get all these like hella young girls that are like hella cool and hella interested in the environment and shit and they just get obsessed with you cuz you're like the group leader and stuff." Ah, right, even better, using his white savior complex to con girls. Kinda like David Koresh meets George W.
Right. Next up is La Gringuita, perhaps the most self-important, anal-retentive little rich white girl I've ever met. You know, the type of eco-centric half-stupid girl that thinks everything is like SOO stressful and SOO tough. Like writing a college paper. OMG she was SOOOO stressed out. Or like booking flights for students. OMG like SOOOOO many things going on.
This perverse way of life of course translated into a false sense of superiority and leadership. Which was really odd because she brought next to nothing to the table. When I interviewed with her I actually thought she was no older than a college junior, not a 28 year-old. Not just that she is completely ignorant about Latin America and life in developing countries, but that she treated everyone like a slave that was there to be monitored and controlled. From inventing rules for the students (like check-ins to go swimming), to for whatever reason thinking we had to obey her every desire she is simply and utterly insufferable. She even tried to scold locals for feeding our dog leftover scraps from dinner, saying that dogs must only eat dog food. Good thing she doesn't speak a word of Spanish because the locals had some truly choice words for the lil gringuita from her lil rich white bubble about life in Ecuador.
Which brings me to her complete obstinacy in the light of her worthlessness. She doesn't speak Spanish. Fine. But she refused to accept that, instead suggesting that she understood everything and only had a tad of trouble expressing herself. So, for example, during one meeting in Spanish, when she was being assigned a list of tasks, several of us tried to translate for her and help her out. She reprimanded us saying she didn't need help.
The task list continued and her glazed look of being lost grew. We tried again. Shut down again by her yelling. So we told the Ecuadorian leading the meeting that she said she understood everything and didn't need our help. "Alright," he chuckled, "So what did I say?"
"Uh, sí," she replied. "No, I just gave you a list, what are some of the things I said?"
"Uh, sí," she whispered questioningly. And so it continued, in awkward tension, with her refusing to admit she was incapable.
Just like after several other failures and obvious shortcomings, I started doing half of her job for her, handling close to 90% of logistics of her job. Did I get a thanks? Nope. Just fluff about her superiority and how I was lazy. Shocking, that in the face of such incompetence, she continued to be an ungrateful cunt.
Ah, yes, and now for my favorite. The bearded little bitch as I refer to him. This 28 year-old mommy's boy that still lives with his parents in Marin county. He surfs and grew out his hair so he likes to play the "I'm a super chill child of the Earth" card. But don't let his looks or his 4 song repertoire on the ukulele fool you - at heart, he's just a lil bitch.
Upon first meeting him, we exchanged mini bios of ourselves, as you do and when he said he lives with his parents still, he was quick to mention that he actually lived in their guest house so it was pretty much like he lived on his own. Nah you lil bitch, you still live with mommy and daddy no matter how you slice it. Not gonna lie, he intimidated me at first. He fired off a question, asking me how my Spanish was, with an air that made me assume he was either native or close to it.
Wow, was I wrong to make that assumption. When he speaks Spanish he sounds like a mix of Keanu Reeves in, well, anything he's ever been in and Brendan Fraser in Encino Man. Not to mention his Spanish is so riddled with errors it's hard to understand what he's actually trying to say. Like when he fell and was trying to say that he fell, only to say that he had shit himself. We laughed. He didn't get it. Poor lil bitch.
Bearded lil bitch is what I call a pothead armchair scientist. Essentially a worthless half-retarded piece of shit that sits on his thumb smoking weed and watching Planet Earth that somehow believes himself to be an expert in natural sciences because of his "hard work and dedication." He repeatedly touted his expertise in all things nature-related, primarily through siting his undergraduate marine biology degree. Oh yeah, lil bitch? And what have you done with that degree aside from quote David Attenborough to high school kids? You use that degree much as a part time sushi maker? Or how about as a part time gardener? Oh wait, you call it landscape artistry. Please you lil bitch. It's called gardening.
Speaking of gardening, bearded lil bitch saw himself as a god amongst men, as the leader of a group of local laborers working on reforestation in the forest. He bossed them around with his garbage Spanish, spoke down to them, and floated around our house with this air of self-importance because he was doing God's work or something. Ah, if only he could understand Spanish better. Homeboy was the butt of quite a few jokes regarding his work - seems like he's not just a lil bitch in life but that he cuts through the forest like a lil bitch too, with local laborers having to follow in his footsteps and clean up his work. Hmm, sounds EXACTLY like innumerable white savior stories I've heard. Ignorant lil bitch.
This was his fifth year doing this camp counselor gig I believe, and he proved incapable of doing anything in terms of planning or logistics. "I'm the fun guy" was his routine line. No, my friend, you're just an incompetent douchebag. Just like the gringuita, I almost always had to coordinate all the behind the scenes stuff for the lil bitch and to my chagrin, he proved every bit as ungrateful as his ignorant white companion. I'm not sure if it was a factor of stubbornness or sheer stupidity, or likely a combo of both, but he too shared this air of superiority in the face of insurmountable evidence proving otherwise.
Like when we had to travel to another town to renew our visas, the two "almighty leaders" decided to drive us in a 70s Land Rover. Genius lil bitch over here couldn't get the car into 3rd so we were humming at 60mph+ in 2nd gear for the better part of an hour when the engine sputtered, stalled and forced us to pull over. Steam immediately started billowing from the hood. I got out and noticed a puddle under the car. I reached in to test what the liquid was and was quickly reprimanded by the dubious duo, who "informed" me that it was "just" water and that they would take care of it. I'm no mechanic but I've been around my fair share of busted radiators. A maxed out heat gauge, steam and water under the car generally mean a problem with the radiator.
But nooooo, insisted the lil bearded bitch and la gringuita. The car needed oil. Alright, I thought. So I sat back, watched them struggle through their garbage Spanish to buy motor oil. Soon we were on our way and they said, "aha! see, no more steam after we put in oil."
Yeah geniuses, that's cuz you burned out all the water. We pull over to a mechanic shop and in about 3 seconds the mechanic diagnoses the issue - cracked radiator.
Anyway, he fixes the radiator but we blow the fix by the time we get to the town. At this point these idiots are risking my life so I recommend we go fix it again. Nah, we'll just keep adding water. The heat gauge is probably broken they say. Ten minutes down the road and we've blown through all the water. Again, I recommend we wait at least 30 minutes. Nah, we'll wait 10 says the lil bitch. This time the hood nearly blows off and I kindly inform them that they are currently melting the engine. Surprise surprise I decide to hitch a ride into town for help as their grand idea was to call AAA. Hahaha rich white morons. Anyway, a few of us made it home that night hitching a ride and we left the hellacious couple to figure out the problem they created.
Being such a "chill brah", it was really curious how much of a worthless lil bitch he is...I mean he really couldn't do ANYTHING relating to organizing the trips for the kids. Yet he was the most judgmental, whiny, spoiled lil bitch I've ever met.
He's busy reading his lil fantasy novel while dinner's served. He comes down and there's tons of food but we've already eaten all the beans. What happens next? He throws a temper tantrum like a lil bitch at the dinner table.
He orders coffee and they only fill it 90% of the way. What does he do? He goes back to the counter and claims that it's ridiculous, much like a lil bitch.
We're working with the students in the forest and he gets assigned to plant trees instead of use his big boy machete and big grrrrrr manly muscles to cut through the forest. What does he do? Whines like a lil bitch.
He doesn't like the music we're listening to. Does he ask us to change it? Nah, he just makes snarky lil comments like a lil bitch. Apparently, he thinks everyone should just smoke weed and listen to reggae.
He finds a hair (ONE HAIR!) on his bed at the hostel. Come on guys, what do you think he did? Of course, what else but whine like the lil bitch he is.
The ride I booked for him is running a bit late, as you do in Latin America. How does he handle it? Oh right, he pouts like a lil bitch.
Well, aside from the Holy Trinity of incompetence, I had a good experience overall. I mean I met some cool people, dicked around in the forest and beach for a bit. I can't really say gained any meaningful work experience, but hey the students were not nearly as bad as I had feared and it was a cool way to kill 4 months.
I'm working in Guatemala right now, enjoying it, and I got accepted to that fellowship so I'll be headed to Mexico for the year starting in August.
