The Gringo: A Memoir by J. Grigsby Crawford

doors to introduce myself. Generally, people were excited to talk to me. A lot of the time they were baffled by the questions, so I ultimately entered homes on the pretense of the interview but ended up just sitting down with them to explain who I was and why I was there. Some couldn’t contain their awe at the prospect of an American coming to live in their community and work with them for a couple of years.
    Once or twice, the people never invited me inside, and I stood on their doorstep asking the simple questions. Then they’d bark the question back to someone inside and wait for them to yell back the answer—even when I asked things like whether they had an indoor bathroom. At one house, I was so intimidated by the way a family looked at me as I stood at their door that I wrote down their names and ages, told them that was the entire interview, and left.
    To most of the families, I described some of the projects I could get involved in—vague things about compost and fertilizers that I’d sort of learned during training. They nodded their heads enthusiastically. Next I’d mention that my primary job there was to work with the group of guides on the wetland, at which point people would clam up. Were they aware of who the group was and what it was doing? Sure, they nodded. But they would never say much about it.
    I found out some interesting facts during my interviews: The wetland was actually divided up among fiftysome owners, the majority of whom were not Mendozas. And most of those landowners made up an organization—a cross between a cooperative and a homeowner’s association—that got together to make decisions on matters pertaining to the wetland. Many of these people lived on the edge of the wetland and owned a section of land going into it, where they fished or set up a shrimpery. Others just lived somewhere between La Segua and Chone and owned a parcel of the wetland, either leasing it to fishermen or keeping it as a piece of real estate.
    Also, a decade before, another group of guides had attempted to exploit the wetland for tourism. They had no success and dissolved.
    Walking back along the highway in the pressing heat after a day of interviews, I experienced my first true bout of loneliness. It began in the pit of my stomach and reached out into the rest of my body. It felt as though the life had been sucked out of every one of my muscles. Everything seemed to be piling up: It was hot, it was dirty, and now even my internal organs felt lonesome. I went back to the house and sat in my room playing Johnny Cash and Van Morrison songs on my guitar.

    THE NEXT TIME I SAW Ignacio, I told him about my interviews and what I’d discovered about the co-op of landowners. “So there are all these plans to open up the wetland to tourism, but have any of you from the group of guides spoken with the head of their group?” I said.
    “No, we don’t need to,” he said.
    “That’s not a little strange?”
    “Strange how?”
    “Maybe,” I said, “it would help to coordinate with them in some way—to tell them what we’d like to do so they can help us and there’s no confusion.”
    “Listen to me,” he said. “Those people already have the land. They have everything they need. They have land and they have money.” He made gestures with his arms out toward the wetland. We were standing in a cloud of dust waiting for a bus to come by. “So why would we have anything to do with them? No, no, no. Juan and I—we work for the people around here who don’t have anything. They’re the ones who need our help because they don’t have land or anything like that.”
    “Oh.”
    “Now you see what I’m saying.”
    We both stared down the road in silence.
    “Okay, so what’s the plan to help these people you say need the help?” I asked.
    “That’s easy: When we get the tourism dollars, we’ll do small projects for them here and there—gardens, things like that. You can help us with that,” he