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needed a toilet, I had to use the outhouse. It was behind the house, through a maze of chickens, pigs, and used diapers strewn from the second-story windows. Between the hornet nest and the cockroaches and the spiders, the outhouse indeed scared the shit out of me. In addition to the other obstacles between the front door and outhouse, I had to cross through a labyrinth of barbed-wire clotheslines. The wire was at just above head level of my Ecuadorian housemates, meaning it was right at decapitation height for me if I wasn’t careful.
    All of this—the room, the outhouse—excited me in a way. If it weren’t so dreadful , I thought, it wouldn’t feel like the Peace Corps .
    Back inside, Juan handed me a lock for the plywood door that had the weight and girth of one normally used for luggage. He said good night. I crawled under the mosquito net, dripping in sweat, and read a biography of Jim Morrison by the light of my headlamp.
    At about 5 a.m., I heard Juan pawing at the door. He wanted to take me out onto the wetland and see what we’d be transforming into an ecotourism paradise during my two years. The wetland was just on the other side of the road from the Mendoza farm. It was the only road in La Segua and doubled as a highway connecting the major inland city of Santo Domingo to the coastline. Every so often, amid the cow herds, snakes, and school children on rusty bicycles, a bus would speed through town at seventy miles an hour, kicking up a cloud of dust that barely settled before the next one screamed past. At the first and only town meeting I ever attended, one parent stood up and suggested they buy concrete mix and lay down a few extra speed bumps on the mile of road stretching through La Segua.
    “Our kids are in danger,” he shouted above a crowd that was murmuring disapproval. “I’ll buy the concrete myself if it makes our kids safer.” Others in the room shouted him down. Another person said, “Yeah, but then we’d have to slow down our trucks every time we pass over the bumps.” (The word they used for speed bump, chapa muerto , translated to “dead cop.”)
    This morning, Juan and I crossed the highway, ducked under a barbed-wire fence, then walked another hundred yards through tall dry grass toward the water. The entire time, he explained his vision for the wetland. He had already secured funding from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. He was quite proud of this, despite having no idea that USAID was associated with the U.S. government. It actually took me several minutes to figure out what he was talking about because acronyms are customarily sounded out in the Spanish language, so he was referring to it as ooh-sigh-eed .
    In short, he wanted to get a long dock built, extending from the road out to the water, complemented by a three-story bird-watching tower. He wanted several canoes to take the tourists around the lake. He kept referring to “the tourists” as if they were some giant, all-powerful, all-knowing bloc of white people who would come en masse to spend money there. A couple of times, he referred to them as “your people.”
    “Then the tourists will walk down this way, following me,” he would say, or “Then the tourists will stand here and listen to me . . .” It always ended with said tourists handing over money to Juan and heading on their merry way. For the most part, he had a point: White people from rich countries do like to spend lots of money to visit poorer countries, where they stare at things and climb to the tops of places and wear fanny packs and overpay for stuff, and then return home and tell all their friends so they can do the same. I’ve been to many of those places.
    But this was not one of them.
    The wetland was indeed beautiful. There were birds (Juan’s uncles used to shoot them) and fish (Juan could tell you exactly how many species) and the biggest iguanas I’d ever seen (Juan said they’re delicious). The water