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Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle QUOTES

Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle QUOTES

1 " Well, it had been a good many years since I had thought myself very lovable, and I escaped to some degree this trap of shattered ego. I was lucky; I had found a village of people so poor and simple, so engaging, that I had been more interested in my feelings for them than in what they thought of me. And frankly, after eighteen years of farming in the Sacramento Valley, that terrible life-consuming rat race, I was desperate enough to accept almost any human relationship on almost any terms. Love is love, I decided. Just take it and don't analyze it away. "You're my friend; you're good; you give me pennies," some nameless kid from down the beach told me. My God, what is love in this whorehouse world of poverty? And was I shocked because I could buy love or because I could buy it with pennies? "

― , Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle

2 " I broke one terrible night when Rufo, Ramon's younger brother, arrived at the house begging me to bring medicine for Ramon and Ester, who were suddenly burning up with fever. Carrying aspirin and a thermometer, I walked up the beach through the waves at high tide, under a billion blazing southern stars, the most furiously beautiful night of my life. But the contrast of that night with the utter squalor of Ramon's house, the sweating bodies, the delirium, their childlike faith that now that I had come everything would be all right, the pathetic collection of objects they had piled in bed around them - a plaster of Paris dog with half the paint peeled off, a rusty flit gun, a jar of watermelon seed, a pail of ground corn for the chickens, a pair of worn-out gringo shoes, all their treasures - so knocked me out that walking back along the beach I began to cry as I hadn't cried since I was six years old. What finally made it funny was that I couldn't stop and h ad to stay on the beach for almost an hour, embarrassed to go wailing through the sleeping streets of Rio Verde, announcing that I was cracking up. "

― , Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle