"Doctor Alonzo" candidly shares his story of discovery and adventure among the peoples of the Andes. With simple honesty, "Doctor Alonzo" tells the tale of his enlightenment to inspire others to be of service and for the next generation to dedicate themselves to the principles of working to build a better tomorrow.
Here, you will find storytelling interwoven with a memoir of public health, community development service, and spiritual discovery overseas in Peace Corps and nongovernmental organizations and USAID, sharing his unusual experiences across the Andes and Latin America with self-deprecating humor. Full of anecdotes and some remarkable stories from different South American countries.
You will find reflections as well on the role and place for foreign aid, on religion, and on other topics many of us spend time questioning and dealing with. For some, a provocative discussion and meditation on searching for meaning and purpose after college. A story of successes, failures, redemption, challenges, faith, and perseverance.
"Doctor Alonzo" candidly shares his story of discovery and adventure among the peoples of the Andes. With simple honesty, "Doctor Alonzo" tells the tale of his enlightenment to inspire others to be of service and for the next generation to dedicate themselves to the principles of working to build a better tomorrow.
Here, you will find storytelling interwoven with a memoir of public health, community development service, and spiritual discovery overseas in Peace Corps and nongovernmental organizations and USAID, sharing his unusual experiences across the Andes and Latin America with self-deprecating humor. Full of anecdotes and some remarkable stories from different South American countries.
You will find reflections as well on the role and place for foreign aid, on religion, and on other topics many of us spend time questioning and dealing with. For some, a provocative discussion and meditation on searching for meaning and purpose after college. A story of successes, failures, redemption, challenges, faith, and perseverance.
INTRODUCTION REVISED EDITION
Over the last eight years, finding much inspiration and motivation in public life has been hard. As some have built walls, both real and imagined, we have become isolated from the other side of these walls. The intense political polarization filters what news there is from here or the outside world. We only see a particular set of frames from the horror showreel that is unspooling.
We're adrift as a nation threatened again by an authoritarian dictator wannabe and a deranged confederacy of dunces as if drunkenly aiming to see how close they can make it to the precipice. The long-feared yet poorly anticipated global pandemic placed us into a contaminated and chaotic coronavirus where international discourse and exchanges were suspended. While much as returned, the chaos of the supply chain interruptions and consequent damage to global trade are still affecting us.
Even Peace Corps was almost completely uprooted globally for the first time in its nearly 60-year history. There are few venues and fewer means to consider the needs of the poor and developing nations of the world. Churches and preachers when they are heard from seem to be focused more on how they can rush to re-open physical spaces without regard for the public health.
I offered this book four years ago to recall simpler times. I wanted to remind us when service in Peace Corps and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) abroad offered a chance to help. When service abroad offered greater meaning and purpose. This book is for the younger generations who have seen their opportunities and futures seized from them by the viral pandemic, the virus of racism and the virus of authoritarian Trumpism. It is also for those with children or grandchildren derailed by the disruption and the deformed public discourse.
Words have power. I have some stories to share. My life took a direction I had never anticipated from the start. I served in Peace Corps a full two years thinking that I would return home afterwards. That proved not to be the case.
I saw the most abject poverty and struggled to find ways to grasp how to fight it and how to understand it. I saw plenty of action in decades of service overseas. I was shot at, arrested, threatened with expulsion. I also encountered the most unexpected surprises along the way.
I lived and worked almost four decades in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Although I have also seen crushing disappointments, I remain relentlessly and stubbornly optimistic. The rich and enlightening experiences I faced at the first steps of my career helped me shape all that came after.Â
I want to share these with you, dear reader, in a spirit of fellowship and sincerity. There are lessons and experiences that are informative and instructive. This book represents one important slice of my life story and that of many wonderful people.Â
Are you considering life options overseas? Are you interested in finding opportunities for greater meaning and purpose? Are you interested in a story of failure, redemption, challenges, faith and perseverance?
The Andean Adventures here are the first which really determined my life. Though I would go on to others, these were formative and decisive.
The Andean countries of Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru are not that far from the United States. But they also were and remain a different and unfamiliar world to most. Far less known than our immediate southern neighbors that have been targeted by those more interested in a Wall than a Bridge. Â
Feel free to let me know what you think. And since the story of Andean Adventures is one that begs a context it seems best to start from the beginning. How I ended up going to the Andes is an important part of the story.
CHAPTER 1
Early Idealism Offers
the Kindling
I
 grew up before age 10 in the Vandeveer Project, a mix of Jewish and other ethnic groups living in three-story apartment buildings in central Brooklyn. We lived not far from the famous âJunction,â the intersection of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues. My sister, my parents, and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment. We didnât think of ourselves as poor those days, but our family was working-class Jewish, and we didnât have a lot of money.Â
Neither my father nor mother had much of an education beyond high school, a year of college, if that. My father had been in the Coast Guard during World War II and then the Merchant Marine. He shunned the business of his father. Ultimately, he was a bartender, working at the Friars Club in midtown Manhattan for most of my childhood and then at the Blue Note Club. He served show business clients mostly. From them, he caught flashes of something better for himself and his family. Those flashes remained as weak embers, never to catch fire.
My sister and I knew little of our mother. She had supposedly been an orphan, but the story was patchy. My mother worked at a department store cosmetics counter and then was a telephone operator for a time before marrying. She left work then, only to return to the workforce as a clerk for a department store when we were older. When you look at the few photos from the late 1950s or early 1960s, she seems to have been glamorous, dark, and exotic. She was relatively tall and slender and looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor in those days.
The Vandeveer had historically been ethnically mixed, with a large number of Jews heading up Nostrand Avenue. In photos of my elementary school 3rd and 4th grade classes there was one Black boy, Philip, who I happened to be friends with. My parents liked Philip but worried that there were more Blacks coming after him. It was about to become, as they called it then, a âchangingâ neighborhood. This meant in the language of my parents and neighbors that the âschvartzesâ were moving into the neighborhood more and more. That was the Yiddish term they used as a non-intentional slur. But it was also a goad for instigating âwhite flightâ.
My best friend in elementary school was Charles Small. I remember him particularly because his father had a bakery on Nostrand Avenue where, from time to time, we would go to get free black and white cookies. Those cookies are such a New York thing. I think Seinfeld had a whole episode about them. What was it that made them so addictive? Nothing good, I am sure, in hindsight, but the memory remains from so long ago.
I have a strong memory from when, at age 7 or 8, I got my first bicycle upgraded to a banana seat and wheelie bike with high-rise handlebars. I think some called them ape-hanger handlebars. The bike was cool because you could do wheelies with it and it looked like a chopper bike if you squinted enough. I remember one time doing something I probably shouldnât have been doing and careening down a flight of cement stairs to the basement of a neighboring apartment building. I think I was knocked out and all scratched up, to the point of being pretty covered in blood, as I made my way back to our building and apartment on the third floor. My mother screamed when she saw me at the door, âOh my God, you look like you came back from the Vietnam War!â Luckily despite the blood, nothing was broken.
Another memory that has never faded is when a classmate at school, a tough Italian kid called Joey, who fought with everybody, got killed. He had climbed on top of one of those old Good Humor Ice Cream trucks on Foster Avenue. Somehow he fell and, I think, cracked his head or was run over. I donât remember all the details, but it is one of those child traumas that never quite fade away. It was mentioned as a lesson and warning to other kids for a long time, âRemember Joey!â
Our upstairs neighbors, the Finkelsteins, were post-war refugees from the Holocaust Nazi concentration camps in Europe. They had saved and scrimped their cash, including reparations money from post-war Germany. They had enough to do better. They ended up buying a house in another growing and prosperous newly developed area of Brooklyn called Georgetown. This new neighborhood was diverse enough for them, with a mix of only Jewish and Italian.Â
The Finkelsteins had two sons who were one year older and three years older than me. They reached out to my parents to invite us to join them and rent the top-floor apartment of their new corner house. While my father had big dreams and aspired to be better, with this, we would still be renters. But we would be living in a larger three-bedroom apartment of a private family house rather than an old prewar apartment building. The house would have a shared washing machine and a dryer, which my parents and the Finkelsteins partnered on. They were in the basement beyond their garage.Â
We moved out of the Vandeveer to Georgetown in May 1969. Almost everyone in the area was new to it. One of the most established had been an immigrant Italian family a few houses down. The entrepreneurial Frank Griseta, who I think had been a chef, bought two semidetached houses that shared a yard space in between, which he filled with luscious tomato vines, grapes, and other vegetables. We were friends with their two kids, Joey and Antoinette.
Moving there was how I got to enroll at age 10 in the 5th grade of PS 312, in the Bergen Beach area of Brooklyn. I still remember our 5th grade teacher Mrs. Alexander. The school catchment area was next to Paedegat Bay, an inlet of Jamaica Bay, which separated us from Canarsie. It actually fronted as well across the street from our new house. These were abandoned wetlands and dumping grounds for the new construction in this area of Brooklyn. With the tumult of the 1969-1970 school year, the class had an innovative ecology-minded curriculum.Â
One of the first projects that came up in the autumn of that year was a cleanup campaign for part of Paedegat Bay. I ended up being one of the main student ringleaders promoting the cleanup of the marshlands and wetlands. With the help of our teacher we contacted the Con Edison utility and contractors and complained about the dumping that had gone on. We organized over 25 kids and their parents for the cleanup effort for several days. We got Con Ed or the Sanitation Dept to send over huge dump trucks to lug away the heavy items, dumped furniture, tires, and the garbage we pulled out.Â
The father of one of my Italian classmates and friends, Anthony Vaccaro, was a City Councilman of some influence. Mr. Vaccaro liked me since he saw me as a good Jewish influence on his son. He got reporters of the press interested in the effort, and I ended up interviewed by a New York Post reporter. The paper did a write up about what we were doing and my motivations as representative of the kids. I became infamous in school with the article. The reporter quoted only me by name and used some quotes from me about how I found my inspiration. I was identified as a principal ringleader among the kids in school.Â
We got caught up in Earth Day preparations in the spring of 1970. A bunch of us raised money through sponsorships for the planned first Earth Day walk in April. We raised nearly a thousand dollars or so. Part of that was used to pay for overtime for a school bus to take a dozen of us to Union Square in Manhattan for the Earth Day marches and rally. I still remember some speakers that day. In particular, the Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson. I wrote to him back and forth after the rally about the importance of pushing President Nixon on more environmental legislation.
So began my political awakening and inspiration at ten years old. I was already somewhat precocious and stood out from the kids in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, I had a growing passion for reading, particularly science fiction. I helped out in a new neighborhood bookstore a few hours a week. My 'pay' for this illegal child labor consisted of science fiction paperbacks.
My tendency to stand out increased at Roy Mann Junior High School in the next couple of years. I was identified early as an IGC kid (âintellectually giftedâ) and fast-tracked into the SP (special progress) program. This meant I skipped 7th grade and went directly into 8th grade following 6th. In 8th grade, I took the standardized tests for the academically specialized New York City public high schools. I ended up with the choices of Stuyvesant High School and Dewey beyond my neighborhood high school of South Shore HS (where my sister would attend).Â
Stuyvesant was one of the cityâs top science and math schools together with Bronx Science. It was consistently a top-ranked school across the country. It had been a boys-only school until 1969. Luckily, Stuyvesant became âco-edâ three years before I entered its ninth-grade freshman class. Â
Going to Stuyvesant immediately cut me off from the mainstream of our neighborhood and many friends I had among the neighbors. My sister, who attended the neighborhood high school, remained a part of the neighborhood environment.
For me, going to high school usually meant a trip of over an hour each way. I would walk at least fifteen minutes for a city bus. This would take me to the end of the line of either the IRT Lexington trains or the âLLâ, which ended at Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie. I had a train ride of nearly 45 minutes if there were no delays. This was common for anyone attending Stuyvesant from one of the outer boroughs. If I was staying later for after-school activities, it wasnât unusual that I had close to a twelve-hour day away from home. It could be longer if I went to a friendâs house somewhere in the city.Â
At the storied and famous Stuyvesant High School, at the old building on 15th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, my politics became at first a bit contrarian. I was the only kid in my freshman class homeroom in the fall of 1972 to state support for Nixonâs re-election over George McGovern. Why I took that stance when my instincts were liberal is a puzzle to me to this day; I suppose I was playing with being a contrarian since I reveled in the horror this evoked in my classmates.
âGeniusâ had been my nickname throughout junior high, a sobriquet sneered by bullies and repeated by friends alike. But at Stuyvesant, most of the school fell into the nerdy category of students, who were even more academically accomplished in many cases than I was.
I had a class in comparative civilizations during ninth grade at Stuyvesant. I remember we were each assigned a country to âfollowâ and specialize in. I ended up assigned to Kenya. I collected what I could in the library and read up on Kenya, but then I also reached out to the Kenyan Mission of the United Nations up First Avenue.
I ended up being a bit adopted by them and given a wealth of material about Kenya, its leaders, its culture, etc. I became quite enamored with decolonialism, Kenya, and Africa. This reinforced my ambition and dream of going to the Peace Corps to serve and help after college.Â
I took Spanish for three years at Stuyvesant for the foreign language requirement. I took conversational Hebrew for one year for the rumored automatic âAâ. I had no idea then that the Spanish would do me in good stead. I did well enough in the sciences, including earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics. I enjoyed history and social studies. Math, particularly calculus, not so much.
I did well in English, particularly composition. Thus, I had the great fortune of being selected for Frank McCourtâs class in creative writing for two years. I got Frank's class thanks to my sophomore English teacher, Connie Miller, and the English Department Chairman, William Ince. They were impressed with the science fiction stories I had begun to write.Â
The celebrated late author of Angelaâs Ashes, Tâis, and Teacher Man was a free-spirited English teacher and storyteller in the Stuyvesant High School English department. Frank shared many of the same stories that would go into his books. He encouraged me and the entire class to tell our stories and to be authentic.
Iâm not sure how authentic my stories were. But I even managed to sell some short stories to publishers outside, notably to the Perry Rhodan science fiction series, published by Ace Books. One of my stories was even re-published 25 years later in an anthology of Forrest J. Ackerman, subtitled â50 of the Best Short Science Fiction Stories by Unknown Authors.â An amusing classification!
Science fiction was an undeniable passion of mine. It led me to organize, with a bunch of friends, a science fiction magazine at Stuyvesant that we called 'ANTARES', after the red star. Bob Kleiman and I were co-editors in chief. I found myself with the self-applied nickname âGalactic Emperorâ, shortened by others to just âGalacticâ. This, of course, was pre-Star Wars.Â
As an official student publication/club, our faculty advisor at ANTARES was our own Frank McCourt. I do no know how we got him to agree to do it, as science fiction was hardly one of his favorites. He would make fun of us at times in a good-natured way. We were in his English class, and it was like we couldnât get enough of him. His humor and humanity still managed to infuse our magazine. And his avatar was there through the comic artwork of the brilliant James W. Fry.
I cherish our first issues of ANTARES, particularly from James Fry's and others' artwork. James did a splendid satire of the life of Frank McCourt that makes me laugh to this day. He also did a number of cartoons about our key ANTARES crew of writers and artists, called SPACE ROT, a satirical take on Star Trek. If you want to have a laugh, check it online here: Space Rot ANTARESÂ
I was drawn into science fiction's creative mysteries and idealism, reading and going to science fiction bookstores and conventions in Manhattan. Despite my nerdiness, I found myself in the clutches of a buxom blonde science fiction groupie called Phoebe. She had been next to me on the line at a âStar Trek Lives!â Convention in midtown Manhattan in February 1974, a visitor from Montauk Long Island in the city.
I guess I was a charmer who had âgameâ without realizing it; almost before I knew what was happening, Phoebe had her hands on me. She also used the moniker of âAndromedaâ for better stage effect. She was ten years older than me and must have assumed I was at least older than statutory rape age, thanks to a trace of facial stubble. While Phoebe initially panicked when she found out my real age, we still had a memorable fling for the next months. I think she actually joined the army sometime later, and I lost touch.
My class at Stuyvesant included some formidable overachievers. Among them, Tim Robbins, the actor and producer, was in my grade; Paul Reiser, the actor, was in the grade ahead of us. Gail Strickler, who came from my junior high school and would become a textile industry maven and an Obama Administration trade official, was also in my grade. Jonathan Greenberg, who would become a noted writer, journalist, publisher, and social activist, was in my class with Frank McCourt. He was a fellow witness and audience member of Frankâs humor and storytelling. Naomi Oreskes, a highly respected Harvard professor and science historian, was a year ahead. Many celebrities and brilliant and famous leaders in their field were graduates, in fact.
Science fiction wasnât my only passion of course. I was also distracted by girls, flirting and fumbling with several in the first years of high school before going almost âsteadyâ with one, Karen. Karen was, for me, quite the standout temptation compared to other girls Iâd flirted with in junior high school and the first two years at Stuyvesant. She was a smart, witty, blond, Teutonic-looking âshiksaâ compared to the Jewish brunettes I had previously pursued. I enjoyed her self-deprecating sense of humor. She was also a great artist, leaning toward the fantasy elves and unicorn side of things. I suppose she also reminded me of the forbidden love with Andromeda!Â
I am sure I looked swarthy and exotic to her mother, with my Jewfro. I always got the sense that her mother viewed me very skeptically. I was sure that in her eyes she imagined some uber Jew ravishing her pure Teutonic daughter. But she was always very nice and very flexible when hanging out with Karen and me. More than flexible â she did nothing to discourage us. I would join them on summer and other holiday trips at times to Delhi in upstate New York and once to Provincetown on Cape Cod, and Karen and I were essentially left to our own devices.Â
I applied to about ten universities in my senior year, including, of course, CUNY and SUNY. My SAT scores were good generally, although not particularly stellar for the scene at Stuyvesant. Perhaps I had been overly distracted between girls and science fiction. I think I scored initially a 1330, maybe a bit around 1440 the second time, on the scale of 1600.Â
I applied to ten top-drawer schools, but really, the only private school that offered me entry and a partial scholarship was the University of Chicago. I picked Chicago because I found it appealing to be in a city that is distinct and a distance away from New York. Having a partial scholarship was important because it was clear that my father would be able to put forward little for college. I would have to be mostly self-sufficient.Â
Thanks to my friend Gerry Seidman, I got a great off-book summer job at âAmyâsâ, then a fast-casual Mediterranean food place. They had three locales, but I worked at the restaurant near Lincoln Center. I was the only American working there. The place was filled with undocumented Greek immigrant workers, so-called illegals. I came to really appreciate how hard they worked. I was taught to make falafel and babaganoush, grilling the eggplants just-so in the kitchen, cleaning the tables, filling the special Amyâs sauce shakers, and helping at the register. When I got ready to leave for Chicago at the end of the summer with some hefty savings, the Greeks insisted I have a sendoff party with them in Astoria, where there was fantastic Greek food, lots of ouzo and dancing on the tables.
My high school girlfriend Karen went to Michigan State University, which was relatively nearby to Chicago, or so I thought. MSU was in East Lansing, still a five-hour bus ride away. Though we would each make the trip once or twice at the beginning of freshman year, our relationship did not survive the distance and other distractions.
This was an insightful memoir of a man who joined the Peace Corps and went to work in South America. Iâve heard bits and pieces about the Peace Corps during the time I lived in Africa, but I wasnât entirely sure of its scope before reading this book.
The author begins by chronicling his early life in Brooklyn , including his family life. One thing I found very interesting were the demographic differences in the USA at that time. One surprising detail was that the undocumented immigrants back in those days were Greek, a huge contrast to the reality of these days.
We learn about the authorâs time in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. He describes the struggles and observations he had. I found it especially interesting to read about his experience as a Jewish-American man volunteering in conservative Catholic countries which did not really understand Judaism.Â
The author had to navigate cultural differences, learn the language, and become culturally competent. A passage that stood out to me occurs after the author attends a meeting where he explains his reasons for going to Bolivia and listens to speeches from others in the community:
âThis was my first introduction to the Latin predilection for speechifying which I would come to embrace-- why use ten words when one hundred will do? Why allow one speech when five are better?â
I appreciate the author including excerpts of his journals from his first foray as a volunteer. It was interesting to see him reflect on his youthful thoughts years later.
IÂ enjoyed this read. The anecdotes and cultural observations were particularly appealing to me as someone who loves travel and has visited South America. However, the authorâs experiences show a more authentic, unfiltered side of the continent than what I experienced.
This memoir gave me a renewed appreciation for those who volunteer in countries with vastly different cultures and languages. As the author points out through anecdotes, the work is challenging, and many volunteers end up resigning.