Rhoda Brooks - The Barrios of Manta: A Retrospective on 50 Years of Ecuador, the Peace Corps and the Evolution of an International Family

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.

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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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 encouragementtheir 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 shapeand whose keen insights helped clarify many pointsand 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 DadAltha 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

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? Its 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 wayimmersing 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 friendsand from the cultural conveniences wed 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 didnt 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 difficultiesboth broad and specificthat 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