The Voluntourist by Ken Budd

Author:Ken Budd
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

I’m back in the cabana when Wayne returns from working with Anita’s group.

“It’s Scotch o’clock,” he says, flinging his backpack on the top bunk.

“That makes me so happy,” I say.

Like an old married couple, we talk about our days, using the long shelf under the window as a bar. He pours the Scotch as I pull the foil off the water pitcher.

Wayne has just about recovered from a stomach bug he and Charles picked up in Quito. Their mistake, they believe, was drinking the ice in their happy-hour mojitos. They also ate balon de verde, a local delicacy made from green plantains and, as Charles put it, “the bits of pig you might normally throw away.”

“I actually brought a stool softener here,” says Wayne. “What was I thinking?”

Charles is still having issues. Three days ago he switched from Imodium to Cipro, a prescription antibacterial drug. The pills are working up to a point—he can hike the trails without waddling into the rain forest with cramps—but each morning starts with, well … explosions.

“Man,” said Wayne one morning, groggy, still in his sleeping bag on the top bunk. “It’s like the Fourth of July.”

The evening Scotch poured, I sit on my bed, and Wayne shoves aside stuff on his lower bunk and takes a seat. He changes shirts. I ask him about the large tattoo on his back between his shoulder blades, which looks like a Celtic cross. “That was a tough time in my life,” he says. “I wanted to make a statement about what I believe in.”

I decide not to pump him for info, and he doesn’t volunteer it. We chat, and instead of the past, he discusses the future. He and his wife want to have children next year. He wants anywhere from two to four, since he came from a family of four.

“Do you have kids?” he asks.

“No, no …,” I say, sparing him the history.

I can see that Wayne will be a great father. He’s like Adam and Terry in some ways: fun, positive, a strength that comes from a clear sense of self. Before I left for Ecuador, Terry told me that his son Clarence, now three, was starting preschool. Terry writes a blog, and wrote about the day: “As we walked up the sidewalk toward his preschool, my eyes filled with tears as I thought that he is no longer completely ours—he also belongs to others. It was all worth it four hours later when I picked him up—he saw me come to his class, yelled ‘Daddy!’ and ran into my arms. I love being a dad.”

As I take these voluntourism trips, a lot of people—all of them parents—say they wish it were them. That they were traveling to Asia or South America. But they would never trade parenthood to see the world. I would trade these travels in an instant.

“I know this is painful for you,” a friend once said. I was surprised to hear the P-word, because I don’t think of it that way.

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