BACK TO SCHOOL

Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military genius who defeated the Arab armies in the six day war

The global peace was at very serious risk, as there was a danger that the Soviets could react aggressively to the embarrassing defeat of their allies’ Soviet equipped and trained armies, therefore, the presence of the top diplomats of the world was necessary and they surely came to meet at the UN and they had to eat at the very dining room where I was busing tables. As a result, I was able to meet personally, serve bread and water and even talk one on one with several of the most important people in the world in those days, among them UN Secretary General, U Thant; US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, the Minister of Foreign Relations of the USSR Alexey Kosygin; Abba Eban, minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the UN (the author of the final Resolution) and a long list of names I had forgotten since. June, 1967 is perhaps one of the most interesting months I´ve ever lived through. The hot war stopped as the cannons were silenced, for awhile, in the Middle East as a result of those meetings, though the cold war between the superpowers continued for many more years…and real peace is nowhere to be seen in the Palestine and Israel lands

Israel still holds all the territories taken in the six day war, except the Sinai Peninsula which was returned to Egypt after Anwar Sadat had the courage to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Sadat paid his courage with his life a few months later, when a fanatic assassinated him during a military parade in Cairo, while Egypt, Israel and the world were celebrating the newly achieved peace!

Just as to become the icing on my personal cake in the month of June 1967, on June 30, as I became 25, five beautiful bunnies at the Playboy Club actually sang the happy BD song for me, and gave me a piece of cake with a lighted candle on top. I was thrilled, a picture was taken by the club’s photographer with the bunnies surrounding and throwing kisses to me. That great photo is now missing and I would pay anything to recoup it. My wife Fanny swears she doesn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of that photo, and I have to believe her, of course…



This is how The Bunnies looked like when I worked at The Play Boy Club, in NYC, in 1967


In mid May, 1967, I completed the sixth level of ESL at The New School for Social Research (“TNSFSR” or “The U”), and immediately took the TOEFL test to register for academic courses in the following semester at the same school. Having approved the ESL test with relatively high marks, I decided that I would keep my night shift job at the Playboy Club and would continue to take day time classes at the U. Following is a brief history of The U.

The New School for Social Research was founded in 1919 by a group of intellectuals teaching at Columbia University in NYC during the First World War. Fervent pacifists, they took a public stand against the war and were censured by the university’s president. The outspoken professors responded by resigning from Columbia and later opening up their own university for adults in New York’s Chelsea district as a place where people could exchange ideas freely with scholars and artists representing a wide range of intellectual and political orientations. Throughout the almost 100 years since its foundation, The U has maintained the original spirit of its founders and free thinking is the most important principle to which the school adheres. The Huffington Post ranks The U among the "The Top Thirteen Non-Traditional Colleges" in the United States. Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, Eleanor Roosevelt and the famous screen writer Tennessee Williams are among its more famous alumni.

The New School for Social Research had a "student-directed curriculum", which did not require undergraduates to take general education courses. Instead, students were encouraged to explore before focusing on a major, selecting topics that were of interest to them. Students were expected to be the primary designers of their own individualized education. I took full advantage of this system and decided to focus on Economics with emphasis on micro economics, business planning and administration.

I decided to test waters and dared to take 18 credits in the summer, and did just fine; The department of Economics used to offer a broad and critical approach to the study of economics, covering a wide range of schools of thought, including Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics as well as the classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo and Marx; I finished the summer classes with a GPA of 3.3 which qualified me for financial assistance covering approximately 30% of my tuition and fees. That was certainly a great financial relieve for me. Over the following semesters that financial assistance was not only maintained, but increased to over 50% of the total tuition and fees.

By October that year and thank to my greatly improved English, my friend Jorge Alberto Terreros, suggested me that I should apply for a job as a waiter in the night time shift at the Canterbury Restaurant in the heart of the Broadway theatres’ district in the lower floor of the Edison Hotel on 47TH St. at Broadway. My application was approved after an interview with the manager, and I was immediately hired. I started to make more money than I ever thought I could. Not only was I a New Yorker in many ways and my horizons were opening faster than I had ever expected, but I felt that I could do more, however, my sweetheart, Anita, started to complain that I was not seeing her enough. She lived in Hackensack, NJ, about forty minutes away from NYC, by bus, and I was visiting her only on weekends for a few hours as my schedule was pretty tight. Not that I did not care about her, I did care a lot about her, but I just did not have the time to see her more often and/or for longer periods of time. It wasn’t the ideal situation for either one of us, but it was what I was able to do under the circumstances.

I have to go a few months back: when I arrived in NYC in late January, I had advised Anita that I was coming to NYC, so when I showed up, unannounced in her place the first weekend after my arrival, she was extremely happy to see me at her door. I told her about my plans, which included going to school and I requested her not to let her father know about my presence in NYC. We agreed fully on that, but I made it clear that our dating had to be limited to weekends and holidays, which she also agreed upon. A few weeks later I advised her to register for Saturday classes at the same school I was attending in NYC, which she did and tried it for about a month, but her stamina and desire to improve her English were not as intense as mine. She soon quit studying English. Anita’s English was only basic and her work did not allow for much improvement as she was working in a perfumes’ factory nearby the place where she lived, making a salary of $44/week. She was interrelating mainly with Latino (mostly Cuban exiles) people; therefore she felt that she didn´t need much English anyway

In my next posting: SWEET AND SOUR NYC

KNOWING THE WORLD THROUGH NYC

The UN building in NYC, the place where I worked as a busboy in 1967

Dishwashing I did for almost two months, and a lot of it, for which I was being paid a salary of $50/week. In the meantime, I had been almost obsessively preparing myself with my own English books from school trying to uncover my hidden English which I learned throughout high school and college. At the end of February 1967, I was feeling less uncomfortable moving around in NYC, I was beginning to understand the NYC English and to make myself understood with short and heavily accented short sentences taken from my books. At this point, I decided to visit The New School for Social Research in the lower Manhattan area, near Union Square, and registered there for evening classes for the spring semester of 1967. After an admission test to determine the level of my English, I was admitted to the 3rd level, of a six level program, and started classes at the beginning of March.

After a week of classes, a school officer came one day and interrupted our class and called me to her office. I was kind of scared as I did not know what was the reason for this call, however, after a few minutes of tense waiting, the lady started apologizing for a mistake they had made when evaluating the level of my English, and told me they were relocating me to the 5th level class, to which I was directly led after the meeting. The teacher in the new class welcomed me with an accent that was not familiar to me, and which I later learned was a British accent. The classes were tough, very tough for me now, and included a lot of homework plus listening and comprehension lab classes on Saturday mornings. No one was allowed to speak any other language but English in the classroom, and for me it would have been almost impossible to do so anyway, because all my classmates but one, did not speak Spanish, as they were all Europeans from France, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Greece plus two Israelis. One of my classmates, the only one who spoke Spanish was from Argentina and he was a member of the Argentine diplomatic delegation to the UN.

My English classes started to pay off very soon. By the end of March I was already having a lot better communication with people around me, at work and in school. A proof of my improved English came one day in a much unexpected way, as I was arriving to work one morning and said “hi” to a young African American who was my team mate at the dishwasher machine in IHOP. In answering my “hi”, he said to me “what’s up Rafael?” and I answered back with a clear, noticeable British English accent, “nothing in particular, Joe”. Joe´s reaction was instantaneous and unexpected, he started to laugh his heart out repeating, “ha, ha, ha, nothing in particular, ha, ha, ha”; “nothing in particular, ha, ha, ha”, and he added, “where in hell did you learn that Rafael?, ha, ha, ha”., “you´re not supposed to use that kind ‘a English here, Rafael!”, “that´s fancy English you are not supposed to talk!. I laughed my heart out too, but deep inside my mind, I knew it was a compliment to my improved English.

A week after that, I said good bye to Joe the dishwasher and to the old ladies who waited on the tables at the IHOP in Roosevelt Ave, Queens, as my friend Jorge Alberto Terreros had helped me getting a new job as a busboy at The Playboy Club of New York, near the corner of Park Ave. at 59th St. Believe it or not, I was going to work helping the famous Playboy bunnies in their work waiting tables to club members ordering cocktails. The playboy Club consisted of seven floors of fancy bars in the heart of NYC, right across the General Motors Building and very close to the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. It catered only to members who had a special key, and their guests, who were given a provisional paper key as they came in.

I loved my job, I had to work at night from 5 PM to 1 AM, and as a result, I switched my English classes to day time classes. I loved my job for several obvious reasons, but mainly because I interrelated with better English speaking people and therefore I was practicing at night what I was learning during the day; I was making now about $75/week as a base salary and, in addition, we got a 90 bucks "tips check" on a biweekly basis, I had a good dinner at work, and, last, but not least, I was interrelating with the good looking bunnies at the club and other interesting people, including captains, bartenders, bar boys and other busboys. As a special bonus, I was able to watch the great midnight shows intermittently, as played by the bunnies.

In mid May, as classes at the U came to a recess, my friend Jorge Alberto Terreros got a part time job for him and one for me at the main restaurant of the United Nations building on First Ave. at 42nd St. It catered to the official delegates to the UN from all over the world, as well as to officers of the many UN agencies headquartered in the same building.

At the beginning of June, 1967, the six day war broke out. Egypt, Jordan and Syria, supported by all the Arab countries which helped them with cash, supplies and logistics, suddenly invaded Israel from the North, South and East, and in the first three days of war, they were about to render Israel to its knees. Israel was able to call its reserve army and by the third day of the war, it strongly reacted. In the three following days, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) commanded by Moshe Dayan, smashed the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies, and left Israel in control of the entire Sinai Peninsula, Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in what is historically known to be one of the most sweeping military victories of all times. The results of this war have affected the geopolitics of the region to this date.


Union Square in NYC, near The New School for Social Research



By the sixth day of the war, the Arab countries and their main ally, the Soviet Union, were desperately asking for a cease fire as the Israelis were just about to obliterate the three enemy armies and penetrate deeper into their enemies’ territories. The Soviet Union and its diplomatic allies called for very urgent meetings of the UN Security Council in NYC, to have an immediate Cease fire put in place. This brought the cream of the cream of the world’s diplomatic corps to NYC and to the UN. The Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution No. 242, which mandated “the immediate cessation of hostilities, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, in which every State in the area can live in security”. This resolution and its almost total disobedience by the states involved, has been the basis for any and almost all discussions about peace in the Middle East ever since

In my next posting: BACK TO SCHOOL

JOBLESS ONCE AGAIN

Guayaquil and the mighty Guayas River in 2009

Computers were something totally unknown in those days, but the idea of verifiable, crossed information about tax payers was something I heard from the IRS people and liked right away. On my own initiative, and with help from no one, I started to work on a project to apply the concept of crossed information to control taxpayers. By the end of December 1966, I had developed a manual system by which, on a limited scale, our department could have information about people working in different places who had never summed up their various salaries for purposes of filing their income taxes, a classical way to cheat. That was the starting point of what is today a very efficient personal revenues’ control system in the Ecuadorian IRS.

Everything seemed to be running as desired in my life, I had a good job, I was doing excellent at school and I was dating a real darling, but, all of a sudden things started to get sour. At the end of 1966, a new government came to power in the country; and an old fashion, tricky politician became the new president of the country, his name: Otto Arosemena. He was elected by congress with a majority of one vote. Soon after, the Department of Revenue was the target of a grand scale reorganization and, once again, as it had been in the past, the new president, his minuscule political party (which had only two votes in Congress) and its political allies, took the public administration under their control and started a full scale firing and hiring frenzy, replacing public servants like us, with totally unprepared and corrupt individuals who came in, money hungry, to grab whatever they could from whoever they could. This was the way Arosemena paid his allies’ for the votes he got in congress to be elected president. In December 1966, I was removed from my position and was replaced by an individual whose “resume” included several arrest warrants for issuing unfunded checks which bounced like a basket balls around the city. The Internal Revenue Department of Ecuador went back to the old habit of being the main ally of tax cheaters, it was a 180 degrees reverse from two years of improving and modernization efforts initiated and implemented by the previous government. It was not until the end of the century, 32 years later in 1998, that a similar, but this time lasting effort was made by the Ecuadorian Government, to modernize and clean up the Department of Revenue, which for decades was more like a rats’ nest than a tax generating office.

Jobless once again, at the end of 1966, I had the saddest Christmas of my life. I was back in the streets, looking for a job, in a job market where supply exceeded demand by at least three to one. What do I do now?, I was very disappointed and sad at my dismissal, however, I did not throw my arms down, I was not going to let myself be defeated by the system, nor was I going to throw the towel before the fight was over. I decided to figure out that the fight was just starting, that I was going to fight with vengeance , and that at the end, I was going to win.

I approved the school year 66-67 with the equivalent of a 3.93 GPA, not as good as the year before, but still by far the best in my class. Between Christmas and the end of the school year I was busy looking for a job (plan A), and looking for alternatives (plan B). Since jobs were nowhere to be seen, by the beginning of January I started to think about going to the U.S. to find a job (getting a visa was not a problem in those days) and go to school. Frankly, I liked this alternative, mainly because that would allow me to see Anita, my sweetheart again, but also because with luck it would allow me to learn English, which would then open the door for me to continue studying in the U.S.
I discussed this plan with my niece Maria who had a good friend living in NYC, and asked her to discuss this plan with her friend. The idea was that I would get housing at my niece’s friend and would soon get a job, which shortly after would allow me to find my own place to live. The response from NYC was enthusiastically affirmative.

The plan was a secret between Maria, her friend in NYC, Angela, her husband Jorge Terreros, and I. I would tell my family that I’ve gotten a two year scholarship and, therefore, there would be no questioning from any one.

On January 27, 1967, I boarded a plane going to NYC, and arrived late at night. Arriving was a mix of several feelings and emotions: first, I was dazzled by the NYC skyline, an image I will never forget and which made me feel like in another planet; then, on the other hand, I was barely prepared for the terribly cold weather (20 degrees Fahrenheit), as the city was going through one of the coldest winters in decades; and, then, I felt minimized by my inability to express myself in English, not even to tell the taxi driver where to go (I handed him a piece of paper on which I had written the address), and, finally and most important, I was having my own internal doubts as to whether I was doing the right thing by coming to this unknown city and country, and possibly disrupting my plans for the future. Finally I arrived at Angela and Jorge’s at 347 W. 47th St., NY, NY, 10036, a neighborhood in the NYC West Side (mid town Manhattan), then populated mostly by Puerto Ricans, which has now been renovated and it is a nice place to live in and visit. Angela and Jorge welcomed me at about midnight on that faithful day; they were very nice, welcoming and friendly.

Jorge, who had been living in NYC for the previous 10 years, told me we would have to wake up very early the following morning because we needed to go to the Social Security office located in Harlem, to get what would be indispensable if I was going to look for a job, the Social Security card, which by mid morning we surely got. Immediately thereafter, we went to “El Barrio”, a place where I could get some snow resistant shoes, leather gloves and a warm coat, without which I was unable to move around. With the SS card in hand, and warm enough to do the needed walking, we then went to an employment office and asked for places where I could get a job. I sure got a job the same day, and it was at an IHOP restaurant in Roosevelt Ave., in Queens, and the position was as a dishwasher. I started the following morning at 7 AM. January 28, 1967, was sure enough a long and busy day for me, and, unable as I was to express myself in English, Jorge did all the talking for me. I told Jorge my next priority was to register at a school to learn English. He was very surprised to hear me saying that, because, he, himself, had never gone to school to learn English in the ten years he had lived in NYC. Jorge’s acceptable English had been learned the hard way as he moved around in the Big Apple, from job to job. As of the time of the events I’m telling you about, he was a busboy at a restaurant located at 47Th ST at Broadway, and he was happy with his job and the income he was getting from it.

In my next posting: GETTING TO KNOW THE WORLD THROU NYC

THINGS START TO IMPROVE

The three survivors from a family of seven. From Left to right: Pepe, Florcita and I

The school year 1964-1965 at the School of Economics of the U of G started in late May and I still did not have a job. I was willing to work in anything that would let me have the financial ability and independence to keep me in School. By mid June, the government of Ecuador made a call to qualifying university students who would like to enter public service in the Tax Division of the Ministry Of Finances, to submit their resumes and be ready to enter a training program which would prepare them to become tax auditors. “Qualifying” meant among other things that they had a high school diploma as “bookkeepers”, which I did not have, but many of my classmates had. A friend of mine was finally qualified to enter the eight week training program, and as a result he had to quit his job as an accounting teacher in a local private high school. He asked me if I would like to take his job, I said yes immediately, without taking into account the fact that I had just learned the very basics of accounting while preparing myself for the entrance test to the School of Economics, and that I was not really prepared to properly fill the opening.

I was between a rock and a hard place. I badly needed the job and the salary that came with it, but on the other hand I might not be prepared to do a good job as an accounting teacher. I decided that I was going to take the risk, but that I would prepare my classes day by day to make sure I was not going to “flunk” as a teacher in front of my students. I had a week to start, and a full week I studied to prepare classes for the first week. I did not do badly; some young students even told me that my teaching method was better than my predecessor’s. It was hard, but it was not excruciating. I continued working as an accounting teacher at the “Instituto Jose Enrique Rodo” for the rest of that year and the first quarter of the following school year. It actually worked very well for me because what I was teaching in my job was actually reinforcing what I was learning as a student in the first year of college at the School of Economics.

I finished my first year at the School of Economics with a point average equivalent to 3.95 and developed a reputation as “an excellent student”. By the beginning of my second year, the Government of Ecuador, made an agreement with the U.S.’s IRS in order to reform the obsolete and unjust Ecuadorian Tax system, and made another call to young students aged between 20 and 26, to submit their resumes and be ready to enter a training program which would prepare them to enter public service in the Revenue Department, under a program designed and supervised by the US’s IRS. This time, however, holding a “bookkeeper’s diploma from High School was not a pre-requisite; therefore, I qualified and submitted my resume among other 900 applicants.

The selection process was very detailed and well structured; it was supervised by Mr. Brown, a senior IRS officer. It all started with an IQ test for all the applicants, after which 50% of the applicants were discarded. The approximately 450 remaining applicants were then subjected to an eight week training program with tests taken at the end of each week. Those students who did not obtain a 70% grade average in the week were discarded for the following week and so on. At the end of the eight week program only 19 candidates were left and all were granted a position as “tax advisors” working for the National Department of Revenue. I was number one among the nineteen and we all were given our certificate of approval, together with the certificate of appointment to the new job, with a salary of 2,500 sucres a month, almost a fortune for me in those days. I couldn’t believe it, it was for real, I was a public servant having gained my appointment by my own right, fully using my own reserve of good arguments: my dedication to study and my personal determination to succeed. Everything looked brilliant, but best of all, my future.

A very interesting mission was assigned to our group working for the Revenue Department

All of this happened while still attending the second year at the School of Economics, where by now I felt like at home and actually I began to like it very much. Obviously I had to quit my teaching job, which I ended up feeling comfortable with in spite of the fact that I never had a real vocation to teach. Life had taught me an enduring lesson which I learned the very hard way: Many times you may not like what you have to do, but if you have to do it, do it the right way, and try to enjoy it, because if you don’t, you may end up out in the cold and hungry.

By July, 1965, I met Anita, a tiny 5’4” beautiful fair skinned green eyed and blond nineteen year old, born in Manabí, who was working as a secretary in our office. Anita and I had seen each other and chatted several times at the office, but it wasn’t until a couple of months later that we had a chance to get closer and dance at a party organized by one of the girls in our group. It was in this party that we felt attracted to each other and agreed to date

Our relationship soon developed into what she and I thought would be a serious thing, but her father found out that I was a divorcee and started an aggressive campaign to persuade his daughter of cutting off our relationship. Neither she nor I were willing to give up and continued to date anyway. Her father was not about to give up either, and within a few months he sent his daughter to live with a sister in the U.S. to force our break up. The separation only intensified our feelings and we started to correspond with three and four letters a week. Telephone communications were scarce and very expensive, so that was out of reach for us.

Meanwhile, a new Income Tax Law had been enacted in the country and it needed to be made known to businessmen, trade unions, students, professional associations, teachers and all sorts of groups who might be or eventually might become income tax taxpayers. Our group of 19 “tax advisors” was in charge of the task. Each one of us was assigned a number of groups and places where we would hold meetings with at least 30 people to whom we would first explain the contents of the new law, and then respond to questions from the audience.

The whole idea was to create a “taxpayers’ positive attitude toward the new law” in a country where paying personal taxes was considered little less than the dumbest thing to do. Ever since the Spanish colonial times, Ecuadorians considered tax cheating something like a national sport and, therefore, the more you cheated, the “smartest” you were considered. It was in this atmosphere of aversion to taxes that we, as a group, had to do our work. I believe we all did a superb job, and, by the end of the first six months of this program, we had gained a great reputation within the local business community and the press.

In my next posting: JOBLESS ONCE AGAIN

THINGS TAKE A DRASTIC TURN

With Fanny, my wife, in Beijin, 2002

The preparation for the entrance test felt like boot camp. Four friends and I decided that since the time was very short, we would have to study day and night, as a group, at least 16 hours a day. And that was exactly what we did. Boris Pinchevski, Luis Naranjo, Luis Abad, Wilson Vivas and I hired an Accounting teacher, a CPA by the name Pepe Flores, to prepare us in that subject, of which most of us, including me, knew nothing. This man proved to be exactly what we needed, and by the end of five weeks of intense study, we all had a very good understanding of Debits, Credits, Inventories, FIFO, LIFO, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Balance Sheets and Profit and Loss Statements. In sum, we were ready to take on the written test of Accounting. I was in charge of the math classes for the group and, from the text books we studied the other subjects, of which we had a basic knowledge from High School. I have to say we did a heck of a job preparing ourselves for the entrance tests. Everyone in the group passed the written test, except Wilson Vivas who tried again the following year and succeeded.

Math and Accounting were the subjects of the written exams. I scored 10/10 on both and was one of the 150 students called for the oral test two weeks after. The oral tests were on Ecuadorian Economic History, Political Economics and Universal Economic Geography. As the students were called in alphabetical order, I had to wait for almost four hours until my name was called. By then, 6 out of every 10 students had failed the oral test, so the degree of nervousness in the room was running high. Finally I was called; I knew I was very well prepared for the test, so I got up to the podium feeling quite confident that I would pass.

The 30 questions from the three members of the examining tribunal came one after another, as did my answers. After about 20 minutes, the chairman of the examining group stood up to make an announcement: I had been approved by acclamation! He then asked the room for a big round of applause for me. It was an unprecedented act of recognition on the part of the tribunal to the performance of a student who had responded correctly, and in record time, to each and every one of their questions. I was emotional to the point of tears. I shook hands and thanked the three men in front of me and turned around to greet my friends who had studied hard with me and had been awaiting the outcome of my oral test. We left the room and embraced one another in jubilation. We had made it!

The following day returned to Pallatanga as I needed to take care of other business. I needed to confront my parents about the decision I had made to end my marriage. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was something that needed to be done, nonetheless. I explained to them that the whole thing was a foolish mistake and that I would talk to Nancy and try to make her understand where I was coming from. By this point, my mom had become somewhat attached to Nancy, who had become a companion of sorts, but both she and my father were very understanding and concluded that I was the master of my own destiny. They would stand by whatever decision I made, provided that I would do my best not to hurt Nancy, and treat her with the respect and consideration she deserved. It took a couple of days for me to mentally and emotionally prepare myself to talk to my then-wife, and when I did, I did so in the simplest and sincerest of ways. I sat with her and told her that I felt we had made a mistake; that, quite simply, we had become infatuated with each other, and that neither one of us could possibly love each other in such a way that would last a lifetime. I told her about my goals, my irreversible decision to study and about my current inability to carry on my responsibilities as a good husband. As I talked she began to sob. It took me some time to calm her down and get through to her. Finally, I argued that splitting up would be the best thing for both of us, since our marriage had no future. “Nancy,” I said to her, as I held her hands in mind, “I’d rather you hate me for what I am than you love me for what I’m not.” And I meant it.

She cried for a long time, but eventually she understood each and every one of my words, which I spoke from the heart. In the end, she decided to go back and live with her parents and agreed to sign the petition to divorce by mutual agreement. We never had a child together, which meant there wouldn’t be yet another person hurt by our separation. I went back to Guayaquil and six months later, with the help of a lawyer friend, we were divorced. I have not seen, nor heard from Nancy since, but I really hope that she was able to start over and be happy with someone who truly loved and cared for her.

This is a chapter of my life that I have spoken to no one about, and writing about it some 46 years later has granted me a sense of catharsis. For the longest time I had actually hoped that I would never have to talk about it. But inevitably there would come a time when I would have to open up about this period in my life. And so I faced a great dilemma: should I share this with you all? Or do I keep it tucked away in that corner where we keep those things we want to forget? I confess I deliberated for some time. Finally, I decided that since I‘m telling the story of my life as it was, I had to be honest. I had to get over my fears and do it the right way.

When I sat down to talk about this with my wife Fanny and my daughter Angie recently, I told them that I felt it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. But on the other hand, I was glad that I had righted my wrong. It was only then that I was able to meet and marry my beautiful wife, with whom I’ve had and raised the three finest children on earth. I’d like to take this opportunity to remind them, along with my daughter Mariuxi and son Rafael, that I love them with all my heart and that if I had to do it again, I would do it exactly the same way I did it the first time, for life is not about regrets; it is about lessons learned and the way we choose to move forward with that newfound knowledge.

Back in May 1964, a couple of weeks after the entrance tests at the U were over, the Students Association of the School of Economics welcomed me and presented me with a diploma that read: “To the Student with the Best Entrance Test Score for the 1964-1965 Academic Year.” So far I had been making good on my promise to be second to none. My next task was to get a job, which would allow me to work during the day and study at night, something that was not new for me, as I had been doing it since I was 14.

In my next posting: THINGS START TO IMPROVE

A UNIVERSITY STUDENT

My daughter Mariuxi, who has given me my first two grandchildren, and I, while horse riding in Pallatanga

My last year of High School started in early May 1962, and as I’d promised my mom it was a great academic success,having finished that school year with an A+ average and then graduating with honors in March 1963. Immediately after, I started my preparation for the tough entrance test for the School of Architecture at the U of Guayaquil. In early May 1963, about 350 hopefuls took the test. Only 13 of them were admitted, and I was one of them. I felt proud of myself, as it was the beginning of the fulfillment of one of my most cherished dreams. I’d always wanted to be an architect and I was willing to do anything in my power to reach my goal.

Little did I know that to become an architect in those days you had to have enough financial support from yourself or your family (no government support available), as it was a full-time commitment, with classes and workshops throughout the day and evening, plus you needed to buy all kinds of books, tools and materials. Stubborn as I’ve always been, I decided to complete my first year of architecture school, which I did, and very successfully, but this effort almost exhausted the savings I had made in my book selling tours to Manabí.

In February 1964, I decided to visit my parents in Pallatanga for the carnival holidays. In those days, following a decades-old tradition, carnival was still an occasion many local families used to get together, to chat about everything, to eat traditional dishes— including those made with turkey, chicken and pork, most especially the delicious carnival tamales made with corn meal and pork meat— to sing and dance very old carnival folk songs while drinking canelazos, a cocktail made with the locally produced aguardiente (liquor made from sugar cane), cinnamon and lemon juice, and served hot, as to help warm the body up during the cool nights. Spraying one another with water and a lightly perfumed white powder called carnival talco was also part of the fun. These were strictly family parties and used to last for three to four days and in some instances, for a whole week. They were a once a year event most families anxiously waited for, and they did not end until the host family for the next year carnival party was decided upon and committed.

It was during one of these events that I met this very attractive, fair-skinned, blue-eyed girl with almost-blonde hair. She was about 5’6” and 19 years old. We danced, nonstop, for several hours, while my parents and her parents, who had been friends for years, engaged in their own partying, apparently oblivious to what we, the young ones, were doing, planning and talking about.

She and I had known from our very young years, but we had not seen each other for at least eight years. During this time, she had become a very beautiful woman, so this night it seemed to me that I had seen her for the first time. Since our ages, (21 and 19, respectively)we were somewhat allowed to drink while within the families, we began to get a bit inebriated and I started to talk about “escaping from the crowd.” I wasn’t entirely serious, but she certainly believed me and took it seriously. Before I knew it, I was asking her if she was interested in “being intimate.” Such is the intoxicating magic of lust (which, I later learned, is entirely different from love). As the liquor flowed, so did the conversation, and soon we were planning a grand escape together. The plan was simple (in theory): she’d run away from her home the following night and we would meet at a certain point, to get on a bus and get away to Riobamba. Reckless as we were proving to be, we didn’t even think about what we’d do once we got there. Clearly, I hadn’t thought this all the way through. And as it turned out, she was unable to leave home the following night because she could not find the right moment to do so, but she did run away the evening after, on February 20. We slept together at an old nearby mill, where a friend allowed us to use his bed for the night. But at this point, her parents had noticed she had escaped. They had in fact, notified the police and many of their relatives, who started to look for her (and for me) around the town, and it’s safe to say they weren’t looking to congratulate on us for our newfound “love.” We knew we were in big trouble, and at about three in the morning we managed to get out of the mill thanks to the very dark night, and headed to the only other place we could consider ourselves relatively safe at: a peasants’ house at Azazan, which was part of my father’s farm, and it was here that a peasant and his family provided us with shelter for the rest of the night.

I sent a message to my uncle Antonio, who lived relatively close, asking him to come and see me. At this point I felt the need to discuss the situation with someone adult and rational, and try to find some kind of way out, unscathed. The whole thrill of it had almost worn off by now, quite frankly. Three or four hours later, Antonio came to see me, with a message from her family: We’d have to get married and there would be no problem (he also said that my parents had considered the situation as well, and thought it best if we married and went to live with them). That same night, we got married. I suppose I did it more to protect our families than a genuine desire to wed this perfectly nice young woman, whose name was Nancy. Then again, it’s possible I wasn’t thinking at all or I was just using the wrong head to think. After all, I was only 21! After the marriage ceremony, peace of mind returned to the two families, but not to me…

It was only about a week later that reality hit me. I suddenly realized the kind of mistake I had made; my sudden infatuation with this girl had blinded me from reality. What I had just done was completely out of context from my long term plans: becoming a professional, overcoming the hardships of poverty and truly making something out of myself. Married, penniless and living in Pallatanga, I would have to become a farmer, working from sunrise to sunset just to survive, and that was simply not what I had in mind. Not wanting to give up on the relationship just yet (doing so would have made me feel like a failure and my mother raised me better than that), I talked to Nancy and explained to her that I would have no choice but to go back to Guayaquil to continue my studies until I could find a good job and bring her with me to the big city. She was shocked at first, but then she was very understanding and graciously accepted my decision, even if it meant she’d have to stay at my parents house for as long as necessary while I was away.


In March 1964, I was married, (almost) penniless, and without any possibility of continuing my architecture studies, so I had no choice but to look for a job and change my career plans entirely. I now had a wife to provide for, after all. So I accepted my big brother Pepe’s advice and decided to enroll in the School of Economics, where he was attending for the third year while working full-time. Pepe had a good job, was married, and was already the father of three children and provided me with shelter and even pocket money until I found a job. His assistance during these difficult times was extremely important to me; I appreciated it then and I still very much appreciate it today.

In the middle of this chaotic situation, I was able to set my priorities straight, and began to prepare myself for the entrance exam to the School of Economics (not an easy feat). I was convinced that I’d find the solution to the rest of my problems once I took care of this one. I’d have to solve my chain of problems one at a time.

At the end of April 1964, I was one of the 600 hopefuls who took the entrance exam for the School of Economics of the U of G. The test consisted of two written exams and three oral exams, which would be taken only by those who passed the written tests with (at least) a 70% score.


In my next posting: THINGS TAKE A DRASTIC TURN