Free The Gringo: A Memoir by J. Grigsby Crawford

family I lived with forbade me from walking alone outside the property after nightfall. It was also why they got incredible looks of concern on their faces when I would leave to go jogging down the road in the mornings.
    “Be careful,” they said. “People will hurt you.”
    Also, since I’d arrived, there’d been a string of armed robberies at houses in La Segua. They took place farther down the road toward the coast—it was a distance of less than a mile, but the family talked about “farther down the road” like it was a different universe.
    “Is this something we should be worried about?” I asked.
    “No,” said all the aunts. “This family has respect in this community, so no one would ever even try to come onto our property and hassle us.”
    Sandra told me that back in December, a few months before I arrived, they’d had a spree of gang-related broad-daylight murders in the streets of Chone. It got so bad that all bars had to close down for a few months. I’d talked about this with Juan, too. Even he was afraid to be outside after dark—in Chone or La Segua.
    Was this something we should be worried about? I asked.
    Again, the answer was no. Things had toned down since then.
    Still, almost weekly we heard news of someone in a nearby community getting decapitated after a drunken argument and a machete fight. These stories, like the shootings, were verifiable in the local newspaper and usually the result of long-standing family rivalries or revenge for such high crimes as letting a cow wander onto someone else’s property. Sandra talked about these other places like they were hell on earth; I’d been to a few of them around the outskirts of Chone, and they looked about the same as my community.
    What it all amounted to was that people in the region seemed to be adept at living up to their reputation for barbaric violence. Back in training when I’d heard that this area was the “most dangerous part of the country,” I thought it was more of a folkloric warning—the way people talk about the Old West. I assumed that stories about people resolving their conflicts with the same tools they used to clear brush was something that happened either back in the day or farther out in the boonies. Apparently this wasn’t the case.
    But apparently I had nothing to worry about.
    Sandra also liked sharing general wisdom and life advice with me. She said I should find myself a woman there and stay forever. Then came the generic conversation about girlfriends I’d had in the past and the sexual habits of gringos. When I told her it’s not unusual for gringos to have sex before marriage, she looked disgusted. “We—people here—don’t have sex before marriage.”
    The following day, Sandra’s unwed, pregnant sister arrived from out of town for an indefinite stay at our house. The pregnancy was seven or eight months along, and the sister had turned fifteen just a few months back.

CHAPTER 13
    W hen Juan disappeared for days at a time, his departure was quick and mysterious. I’d wake up and he’d be gone without a trace.
    But when he was around, he was ubiquitous: He would ask me for money; knock on my door at 4:30 a.m. to ask if I could do his cousin’s English homework (I told him not to knock that early again unless there was a life-threatening emergency); ask to borrow my camera indefinitely; stare at me without a word, nostrils flared and eyes glazed over, as I ate dinner; and watch me through my window while I slept as he “fed the chickens” at the crack of dawn (I caught him doing this several times).
    After going away, he’d always reappear a few days later and announce that we had lots of work to do. Periodically, his group of guides would get together at the Mendoza house. Juan would do all the talking. Mostly the discussion revolved around setting the agenda for other meetings that would happen at an unspecified time in the future.
    At the first official meeting of the Association of Ecotourism