Costs A Lot To Live In Decent Poverty

"And what about that decent poverty that Ramon and I claimed to have freely chosen as a guiding principal? We were still practicing it, though with a little less enthusiasm; we could seldom describe our poverty as decent. What we were learning was that it costs a hell of a lot to live in decent poverty."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Poor People Don't Worry About Tomorrow

"Santo’s house was so crowded with people that there were many days when there was very little to eat and no money at all to buy food. Poor people don’t worry about tomorrow; all of life’s problems can be squeezed into one day."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Too Poor To Boil Drinking Water?

"Still, I was looking for another Ramón all the time, someone with the intelligence and discipline and the desire to break out of his infinitely complicated cycle of deprivation. And still, like an old record caught in a groove, I continued to yell at the mothers with their sick children: “Boil your drinking water; boil your drinking water." It was stupid advice, for now I knew that, being poor, they had no extra pots for boiling and storing water and that their children must die."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Labor Laws That Creates Migrant Workers

"The coastal machetero is forced by the labor laws of Ecuador, passed to protect his interests but achieving just the opposite, into the animal life of a migrant worker. The law states that after three months on any farm the worker is entitled to certain rights and benefits, extra pay which amounts to fifteen months of pay for twelve months of work. The only practical result of such a law is that after three months the worker is fired. And sadder still, from the employer’s viewpoint, at the end of two months, knowing that he's going to be fired it at any moment, the average machetero turns into a gold brick."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

A Wage That Barely Pays For The Food We Eat.

"The average farm worker in the coastal areas is a very special kind of man, a kind of hero, actually. In the traumatic break that occurs when he has decided to move away from the domination of his family and make his own way, he has, in choosing to be a machetero, made a tremendous decision; the other alternative was to be a thief. Very broadly speaking these represent the two alternatives that offer themselves to a young man with no more than three or four years of schooling, trained to do nothing but paddle a canoe or slash at weeds, and faced with a bleak future. It is a thankless life; a machetero is the national garbage, the lowest form of human life. And he is the man who produces the national wealth. No one chooses to be a machetero on a permanent basis.... The average, bright young machetero lasts about three years; he makes a wage that scarcely pays for the food he eats to give him the strength to keep working.... When he needs a new shirt or a pair of pants he makes elaborate plans, floats loans, eats a little less food for a couple of weeks." (Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Modest Expectations Hard To Fulfill

"How modest their expectations and, in this brutal land, how impossible to fulfill."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Teach Youth Before 12 Years Of Age Or It's Too Late?

(Ramón a black Ecuadorian) he had told me that the Peace Corps would never accomplish a thing in the way of change until it began to work exclusively with the youngest of the nation’s children; by the time a boy was twelve he was set in his ways for life."

(Moritz Thomsen. The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Mutual Pity In Cross Cultural Relationships

"We first became friends probably out of an almost identical sense of pity for one another. Any American can, I suppose, imagine my pity for Ramon. It was grounded in the contemplation of an intelligent and ambitious youth chained by circumstances to crushing and lifelong poverty in a poor country that offered no future to its ineptly educated citizens. Ramon's pity for me was just as basic as he watched me moving about, confused and frightened in his strange world. I was unable to communicate with anyone about anything but the most animal needs of survival. Except for bananas, and I didn’t know the Spanish word for them, I was unable to identify a single fruit or plant. I couldn’t catch a fish or paddle a canoe or net a shrimp or weave a piece of rope out of a vine or find my way on a jungle trail or even walk on one for more than fifty feet without sinking up to my knees in mud. I couldn‘t machete out a patch of weeds or fix a leaking roof. I couldn’t even cook a pot of rice that didn‘t come out like a great mass of glue. Jesus, I couldn’t even walk a hundred feet without shoes. Ramon found my ignorance so overwhelming that he could hardly bear it; he was confused between tears, depression, and anger. Chances are when I macheted down a tree it would fall on me, hopelessly entangling me in its spiny branches; paddling across the river I was almost inevitably swept out into the rip tides where the ocean breakers crashed onto the sandbar. In the middle of all this, to hear me speak of my four years at university filled Ramon with an incredulous impatience, and about the third time I mentioned my educational qualifications for arriving to overturn his life, he asked me if, in view of my obvious ignorance of everything that he had taken for granted since he was three years old, I would please
lay off the higher education bullshit."

(Moritz Thomsen.The Farm On The River of Emeralds)

Obliterating Time With Ecuador

"Once you stop fighting and give into it there is a special beguilement about living in the tropics that lulls and disguises, that obliterates the passing of time." (The Farm On The River of Emeralds Moritz Thomsen)

Situations To Horrible To Handle

"Three days after that violent night in which one or two students were shot, my body in its own unique way informed me that I had experienced a devastating trauma. I have come very gradually to recognize the delayed physical symptoms of events that shake my soul. I have always reacted the same way to those big things in life that fill me with fear and make me wonder if I have stepped into a situation that I can’t handle."
(The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers. Moritz Thomsen)

I Thought I Knew Ecuador

"But I was fully awake and perhaps as fully awake as I had ever been in that town. I had come back to a place that I thought I knew (1969), to discover that either I had never understood it or that it had completely changed and that that tranquil coastal town throbbing at night to the beat of music and through whose streets one wandered.... was now a town that boiled with repugnances and rage. It had always been that way, of course, but the rage had always been secret and disguised as resignation. And tomorrow it would be disguised as resignation again for the town had lost; it had been overwhelmed by the power of guns and by the determination of the military to ruthlessly terrorize the people in the first beginnings of their revolt."
(The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers. Moritz Thomsen)

I’ve Seen Women Weaping And Beggars Smiling

"l have lived too long with poor people to sit now in the middle of all this jewelery and the electronic crapola and the whores and the gangsters who want to own it, eating overpriced food, listening for eight hours straight to Muzak’s plastic ... music not to feel a profound disorientation. l have seen that smile of total joy when a poor man is offered bread; women weeping because someone has loaned them the five dollars they need to take their dying child to a doctor. I have seen people react with happiness at the thought of owning the very simplest of things: a piece of rope, a pot, a fishhook: have walked through villages of fifty houses where the most valuable thing was a fifteen-dollar radio.

How can those little children of Ramon's thread their way through this new flood of vulgarities that is about to engulf them without losing the way, without becoming infected by this future of instant gratifications and easy, false solutions."

(The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers. Moritz Thomsen)

Free From The Muddying Of Life's Waters. Just Give It Away!

"I walk up and down hall examining everything carefully in the brightly lit cases, delighted to discover that there is absolutely nothing there that I would wish to own. l had spent forty years modestly collecting this kind of garbage and then, let us hope, grown wiser, the next twenty years giving it all away...... Twelve years in the jungle had isolated me from the flow of time's changes,' from the muddying of life‘s waters."
(The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers. Moritz Thomsen)

The "Image" Of Poverty... One Photo Reveals All To A Village

"The incapacity of the poor to see the pattern of their lives is occasionally breached. I took a color photograph of Wai and his family standing in front of their house, and when the people of the town saw it, it had the curious power to make them weep. It was just a picture of a man, like any other in the town, with his eight children formally lined up in ascending order, his pregnant wife, and his mother. But there was something awful in Wai’s rags, in the tilt of his head, in the foolish pride that showed in his mother’s face for the voracious horde of naked kids. The picture summed up his whole life, a symbolic rendering of his past and future. The people would look at it and gasp. “Oh, my God, poor “Wai.” Perhaps for just a moment they saw themselves. Wai, of course, was the poorest, but not by much. You could measure degrees of poverty in Rio Verde with one pot or one woven mat or a dollar's worth of fishhooks."
(Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)

The Cost Of Your Cheap Bananas And Coffee

"In South America the poor man is an ignorant man, unawareg of the forces that-shape his destiny. The shattering truth —that he is kept poor and ignorant as the principal and unspoken component of national policy—escapes him. He cries for land reform,  a system of farm loans that will carry him along between crops, unaware that the national economy in almost every country sustained by a one-crop export commodity depends for its success on an unlimited supply of cheap labor. Ecuador needs poor men to compete in the world banana market; Brazil needs poverty to sell its coffee; Chile, its tin; Colombia, its cacao and coffee, and so on."

(Living Poor : A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)

Happy With A Biscuit ... Many Don't Have One

"When you sit down to the table and are given three soda biscuits and a cup of instant coffee for supper, you at first want to break down and cry like a baby and later, if you are strong enough, begin stamping your little feet on the floor in baby rage. What stops you is the knowledge that not only in your village but in villages all over the world there are families who are eating less than you, if they are eating at all." (Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)

Politics For The Poor... A New Crook?

"The Ecuadorian government, a military junta, fell one day with riots, shooting, and mobs of determined students marching in the streets of the main towns. (The government fell because of these student demonstrations, and the students were furious because they weren’t allowed to run things.) That day I was helping Ramon and Ester split strips of bamboo for a new chicken house about a hundred feet from the ocean in the shade of a large ebony tree. Ramon had his radio outside, and we listened to the birth pangs of the new regime—the patriotic speeches and screeches, and the sound of martial music. But after a while he turned it off. It didn’t seem to have much do with Rio Verde. “Well,” Ramon said, “the old gang made its millions; now a new gang wants to rob us. You know, it will be the same for us whoever wins. We are completely forgotten here in Rio Verde.” (Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)

Living Isolated Overseas..... Has Advantages

Has it's advantages too........

"Living in Rio Verde was in a very real sense like living in another world. The “real” world of change - of riots; revolutions, politics, and business - only began to begin in Esmeraldas at the end of that twenty-five miles of bench and ocean that separated the two places. It was, for me at any rate, in many ways a profound experience to be isolated from that world that we had been taught to believe was the real one and to be absorbed into a world every bit as complicated but whose main realities were the tides, the planting seasons, the winter storms, the betrayals of neighbors, and the fight to stay alive."
(Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)

Do The Love Me .... Or My Stuff? :-)

Need a sense of humor while living in the 3rd world.....

“Oh God," Loren Finnell said, “the worst thing about Ecuador is the day you have to leave your town, with everybody hugging you and crying and their faces all screwed up and streaming with tears. I could never go through that again.” “Yes,” another more realistic Volunteer said, “in my town they were crying and wailing, and five minutes later I caught one of my best friends stealing a pair of scissors.” He shook his head, half laughing and half crying as he said it, not quite sure after two years in which world he‘ was living—that familiar Yankee world, where your best friend does not steal your scissors, or the more pragmatic Latin one, where a friend can be equally as heartbroken that you are leaving as that your scissors are leaving."
(Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)

Peace Corps Workers Are Just Boozers?

"The things that PCV’s see and work with are the unknown, the unexpected, the unheard-of, the unteachable, and the unrecorded experiences of life of millions of people who have nothing to say about the shaping of their countries. It is my strong hope that the “important” things will be supplemented with the wealth of knowledge stored up by PCV’s returning to the U.S.

A sad, yet humorous, situation often occurs when volunteers go into a larger town to “get away from it all” after many days, weeks, or months in the backlands. Having arrived by truck, broken-down bus, or even on horseback, the PCV looks for good food and a nice place to stay. He might have saved a little money or received ten dollars for his birthday, and he wants to have a little fun. So he is seen by tourists, politicians, visiting professors, consulting experts and advisers, businessmen, and high—level government people, letting off steam and relaxing from pressure. He is rarely seen hard at work because these other people seldom visit the out-of—the-way places where the work is being done. So they say, “They don’t do anything but sit around the street cafes and drink beer.” Or, “They are a bunch of young college kids out to have fun.” One rather outspoken government employee even told me that “they are arrogant and rude. They think we should all run into the streets and love everyone we see; that’s foolish.”
(The Barrios Of Manta. Rhoda & Earle Brooks)