Ugly Tim

The rocks rattled and clanked as they rolled down the sloped zinc
panels, raising a hell-sent cacophony that made my nerves jangle. I ran
outside and chased the kids away, [but they returned, chanting]
“Timoteo, Timoteo, el hombre mas feo” (Tim, Tim, the ugliest man) over and
over again.
This unpleasant greeting set the tone for the first few months in my
site. I organized soil conservation meetings that no farmers attended. I
was heckled by wiry teenagers while giving presentations in my awful
Spanish. With the help of school children, I planted a thousand baby
trees around the Santa Rosa soccer field, only to find every single one of
them uprooted and overturned a few days later. I had constant diarrhea,
lost 20 pounds, and even the simplest tasks were a struggle to complete.
I knew my psyche had been scraped truly raw when one afternoon,
coming home from a failed attempt to organize a tree nursery in a
distant village, I was taunted by kids along the dusty hill path. It was
the ever popular Timoteo chant that had quickly become my anthem, as
far as the children of Santa Rosa were concerned. I saw red; the next
thing I knew, I was chasing the little bastards up a hill waving my
machete like a maniac, tears streaming down my cheeks and screaming
in English: “I am not ugly, you little ______s! I am not ugly!”
—PCV Guatemala