Barrios of Manta

Rhoda Brooks

Description

In February 1962, Earle and Rhoda Brooks, a young sales engineer and his schoolteacher wife, left home and friends in Illinois to serve as members of the Peace Corps in Manta, Ecuador. This book is an account of their life in the Peace Corps. The first book ever written by Peace Corps volunteers, it is a revealing chronicle of personal involvement, of people from vastly different cultures learning to know one another on the level of their common humanity.Earle and Rhoda begin their story with their decision to enlist as trainees in President Kennedy's people-to-people grassroots aid program. They describe their jubilation at being accepted, the initial testing in Chicago, and the briefings in New York. With warmth and humor, they recount their experiences during the four-month training period in Puerto Rico. This was a time of trials and learning, of physical exertion and mental and emotional challenge. Of the 100 men and women who had formed their original group, 61, including Earle and Rhoda Brooks, graduated from trainees to volunteers.Earle and Rhoda were assigned to a community development project in Manta, a small fishing village on the coast of Ecuador. Here they would spend two years, working with the people, helping them to help themselves.The Brookses' story of Peace Corps life in Ecuador is no simple success story, no tale of triumph over staggering odds, rather it is one of beginnings, as these two young Americans put all their skills, knowledge, compassion, and ingenuity into an effort to provide humanitarian grassroots help in alleviating poverty and disease.Their story also shares what they learned from their humble fisher-people friends and neighbors. From their rich and varied experience emerges a picture of Latin American life far different in focus, and in many respects, far truer, than that of learned economists and political pundits. It is an intimate, human picture of a land filled with paradoxes and beset by problems that yield no easy solutions. It is a picture of a quest for learning and sharing, not on a soapbox or in the press, but in the hearts and minds of the common people.Now, in 2012, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps and fifty years after their decision to join the Peace Corps, Rhoda Brooks has created a new Foreward and Afterword, to highlight the intervening years during which she and her husband adopted two Ecuadorian youngsters, ages 2 and 4, and brought them home to Minnesota. She tells of the growing up years of Carmen and Koki (Ricardo) in a suburban community west of Minneapolis, the birth of their biological son and the adoption of a mixed race daughter three years later. Brooks explores the challenges and opportunities presented in the raising of their bi-racial family, the pain and sorrow of the untimely deaths of her husband Earle and their daughter, Josie, as well as the excitement and apprehension generated by the return to Manta for a visit when the children were in their teens. Brooks continues the Afterword with the return to Manta of her five Ecuadorian grandchildren who, then in their teens, went to explore their roots and meet their own biological grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. She concludes the final part of her story with an update into the lives of her seven grandchildren and the arrival of new great grandson, Brooks.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Travel writing
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Untreed Reads
• Date de parution: 07 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611873771
• Langue: English

Extrait

Barrios of Manta
By Rhoda and Earle Brooks
Copyright 2012 by Rhoda and Earle Brooks
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1965.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
http://www.untreedreads.com
A DEDICATION—
To Viliulfo,
whose vision, devotion, and untiring work have inspired hope for the future of his country—
and whose invitation made it possible for us to share
in the lives of his countrymen,
and to the people of Manta.
DEDICATION 2012
To my children, Ricardo, Carmen, Ned and Josie
Who have shared the living of this Peace Corps journey
And whose continued love, care and support have surrounded me in the telling of our story.
The Barrios of Manta
A Personal Account of the Peace Corps in Ecuador
Rhoda and Earle Brooks
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are indebted to many people for making this book possible, but most deeply to John F. Kennedy, during whose administration the Peace Corps was born. Our warmest and most heartfelt thanks go to David Boyer and his wife, Sharon, for their sensitive appraisal of the manuscript material and for their encouragement and suggestions by telephone and mail during the months of writing. The National Geographic Society helped us in many ways; we are grateful to its editor, Roy Hoopes, himself the author of a Peace Corps book, who, on our return from Ecuador in April, 1964, first suggested that we could write a book about our experiences; and we owe a great debt of thanks to Gilbert Grosvenor, Chairman of the Board, for most generously making available to us the National Geographic Society photographs taken by Dave Boyer in Ecuador. We have many friends in the Peace Corps headquarters in Washington who provided assistance, especially Paul Conklin, whose perceptive photographs tell a part of the story that words cannot, and Cappie Crystal, who so willingly aided us in researching information on the fast-changing numbers of Peace Corpsmen at work across the globe.
We are grateful for two loving mothers who, with pride and devotion, saved every letter and bit of information we ever sent home, and whose scrapbooks, along with our own personal records, made up the bulk of source material for this book. A debt of gratitude must also go to the late Lilo Linke, who, during a visit to Manta just before her death in 1963, gave us a copy of her book, Ecuador, Country of Contrasts (Oxford University Press, 1960), which has been a source of factual information. For their contributions to the book in supplying accounts of their work we thank Jane Phillips Cody and Bill Boyes, and for the sharing of their pictures as well as for their support and friendship, we thank Bob Flint and Joni Neill. We owe our thanks also to Walter Bunge and Joyce Steward for their professional guidance, and Pamela and Charles Hearn for their helpful assistance. Editors Edward Burlingame and Lee Hochman of The New American Library have given unendingly of their patience and encouragement—their counsel and hard work have been invaluable. To all these people we are deeply grateful.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Vida Dorn, our hard-working typist, who spent countless hours of diligent labor putting the manuscript into legible shape—and whose keen insights helped clarify many points—and we are most grateful to Jim Pines for his enthusiastic appraisal and excellent suggestions.
And above all, we owe more than we can ever repay to “Mom and Dad”—Altha C. and Fred M. Smith, under whose roof all five of us were welcomed, sheltered, and sustained during the exciting months of writing; and to Koki, Carmen, and Ned, whose reward for sharing their parents with a typewriter might someday be the enjoyment of reading this story.
2012
In preparing this book for an ebook publication, I am deeply grateful to my agent, Joy Tutela, of David Black Agency, New York City, whose tireless work and creative suggestions were extremely helpful, and to K.D. Sullivan and Jay Hartman of Untreed Reads, San Francisco, for recognizing in this manuscript an idea whose time had come for re-publication in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps.
Rhoda Smith Brooks
Earle G. Brooks
CONTENTS
Foreword
Prologue: A Fisherman’s Baby
Out of the Pot and Into the Fire
A Little House on the Beach
The Casa Del Obrero
Barrio Miraflores
Fifteen Boys and Fifteen Pounds
Pass the Hat
Tio Sam
Good Morning, Compadre
Direct-Line Foreign Aid
Community, Country, and Communism
Around Our Neighborhood
The Bubonic Plague
Americans Abroad
The Peace Corps in South America
From Bricks to Hot Lunches
Gringo, Don’t Go Home
Epilogue: Peace Through Understanding
Afterword
Photos
FOREWORD 2012
THE PEACE CORPS is fifty years old; an anniversary that dazzles me! I was just twenty-six years old and my husband, Earle was twenty-eight when we joined fifty years ago. Now I am in my seventies and Earle is gone, yet I still feel the impact of our experience as strongly as I did on the day we first walked the dusty streets of Manta in Ecuador. What we learned can scarcely be measured. What we shared in skills and understanding has never been quantified, but the impact of those two years on our lives was monumental.
In 1961, when we volunteered for the Peace Corps’ inaugural group, some of our friends and acquaintances chided us: “Why are you doing this? It’s just a ‘Kennedy Kiddie Korps.’” We joined because we felt drawn by the idealistic goal of giving something of ourselves for others. We joined because we needed to live this goal in a practical way—immersing ourselves in a totally new culture, and sharing what skills and knowledge we could each day. We joined because we wished to make the alluring Spanish language our own and because we wanted the personal experience of life in South America, a continent that neighbored our own but which, at that time, was a different world in every other sense.
The hardships of living a simple life among our fishermen neighbors were tougher than we expected, the linguistic challenges more difficult, and the initial lack of response to our effort was disheartening. Two years is a long time to be away from family and friends—and from the cultural conveniences we’d known our whole lives. Our Peace Corps assignment was “to work with a host-country counterpart in community development.” We had little understanding of what this meant other than “to help the people help themselves,” which is an admirable mission but didn’t provide a hint of direction when we were on the ground.
The following account of our time in Ecuador will tell of all the ways Earle, myself, and the community discovered challenges together and worked to solve them. Those two years opened our eyes to the difficulties—both broad and specific—that the world faces. We also discovered, invented, and stumbled upon so many ways such problems can be solved when people work together. In the half-century since Earle and I first arrived in Ecuador, the Peace Corps has perfected the logistics of putting willing volunteers in the places that need them, but the truth is that there are always new problems to discover, and it is only by confronting them that we can hope to solve them for further generations.
The Barrios of Manta was the first published memoir of the Peace Corps by returned volunteers, but it would not be the last. When it was written, it was our attempt at explaining a new idea to Americans. Today, the Peace Corps has solidified its place in the history of our country. The Peace Corps experience had an incalculable influence on myself and Earle, as it has on the more than 200,000 who have served since.
President Barack Obama, in his inaugural speech on January 20, 2009, reflected ideas that inspired the first Peace Corps: “As the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself, and America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.” It was just fifty years ago that President John F. Kennedy implored us to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” The Peace Corps is still a viable and robust institution. It has weathered ten presidential administrations and multitudes of world issues, and has remained open to a new generation of volunteers. Like those who have gone on before them, Peace Corps Volunteers continue to enhance America’s role in revealing our common humanity and ushering in a new era of peace.
Sometimes I think, “What would my life be like if we had not joined the Peace Corps?” The answer, of course, is embedded in one of those conjectures that can never really be known. But I do know that the Peace Corps experience completely re-set the course of our lives from the day we volunteered. This book, re-published on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps, is the story of what this has meant to each of us personally and as a family, and of the ever-widening ripple effect on the world around us.
PROLOGUE
A Fisherman’s Baby
FOR HALF AN HOUR we had lain in our borrowed bed, listening to the pitiful crying of a baby next door. In little gasps and whimpers, the crying filtered throug