No one knew how he arrived in the neighborhood four weeks after the May 31, 1970 earthquake. The fact is, he simply appeared on the dusty streets of San Isidro—streets still choked with rubble, and more than one dead dog lay decomposing in the open air. In those days, Chimbote still smelled of death, but the ominous stench of sorrow had already begun to yield to the light of hope.
He was a tall, handsome gringo, about twenty-five years old. He wore plaid shirts, blue jeans, and brown work shoes. He moved with long strides through the streets of San Isidro and 21 de Abril, followed by a cloud of children almost running to keep up. He had an easy smile, a noble heart, and a tireless nature. He was always helping with something, quickly winning the affection of young and old alike.
“My name is Clinton,” he’d say, offering no further details. So, we simply called him “Mister Clinton.” Despite the bond he forged with the neighborhood over the following weeks, we never truly knew anything about him beyond his name and his American nationality.
Just as he had appeared from thin air in June, he vanished in September. I was a nine-year-old boy then; to me, his presence—and later, his memory—was little more than a passing anecdote. As an adult, however, I felt the need to find him, to thank him for everything he did for my neighborhood during a time when tragedy marked us forever.
For decades, I asked anyone who might have known him during those weeks in 1970. When the internet arrived, I turned to it in my search. I scoured every available Peace Corps archive, as I had always assumed Mister Clinton was a volunteer with that organization in Peru. In recent years, as time slipped away, I grew troubled by the thought that life might have played a cruel trick on us, preventing my gratitude from ever reaching its destination.
I never knew that Mister Clinton had been a schoolteacher. I only learned this on the night of Saturday, December 14, last year. Curiously enough, for a few of the weeks he spent in Chimbote in 1970, the good gringo was actually my teacher. I was in the third year of primary school (fourth grade) then. Nineteen seventy was a strange year for me—not only because of the earthquake, but also because instead of having a single teacher, as was customary, I ended up having five.
Let me explain. When I began primary school in 1967, and for the next three years, I was taught by the venerable educator Doña Eva Carbajal de García. On the first day of classes in 1970, however, we were welcomed by a new teacher, Magda González Martell, the daughter of the school principal, Don Felipe González Olivera. She stayed only a few weeks before being replaced by Don Hidelbrando Gavidia Carbajal—Doña Eva’s son—whose tenure was also brief. Next came Don Macedonio Rodrigo Cordero Macedo, who was not yet a certified teacher but was studying education at the Indoamérica Normal School in Chimbote. Then the earthquake struck, bringing the school year to a halt.
When classes resumed on Monday, August 3, the principal announced that Mister Clinton would be teaching us for a few weeks, news that was met with great joy by the students. Finally, in September, we were assigned another student from the Indoamérica Normal School, Don Leonardo Severo Rashta Rojas, with whom we finished the year.
In late June, when Mister Clinton first appeared in the neighborhood, I had no idea he was there to fill the teaching vacancy for the third-year class at the Boys’ School No. 3151, located on the corner of Aviación Avenue and Huáscar Street, just a block from my house. Unfortunately, at that time, restarting classes was impossible; the school building had been leveled by the earthquake and still lay in ruins.
In mid-July, however, a large truck pulled up in front of my house. It carried the materials needed to rebuild the school. The principal had coordinated with my father to store the shipment in our corral until work could begin. It was a massive haul: woven reed and cattail mats, bundles of reed canes, eucalyptus poles, and wooden beams.
Over the following two weeks, parents rebuilt the school through voluntary workdays. The technical side was led by Felipe González Martell, the principal’s twenty-three-year-old son. Mister Clinton was an active participant as well. In those days, it was common to see neighbors nailing the lower sections of the walls, reserving the highest spots for the tall gringo. Someone would call out, “Mister Clinton, you don’t need a ladder—could you reach up and tap this nail in?” And the good gringo would reply, “No problem.”
We neighborhood kids were also there, likely hindering more than helping. I remember constantly looking for ways to strike up a conversation with him. I was an informed nine-year-old boy; through long talks about politics and history with my father, I had acquired a critical understanding of American foreign policy. I would relay this vision to Mister Clinton, who merely listened patiently, a smile never leaving his face.
On Unión Street, a block from my house, lived one of the neighborhood’s founding families. There, Don Marino Ramírez Pinedo ran a small private school with a couple of classrooms and a handful of students. One day in early July, he invited Mister Clinton to teach English on his premises. The good gringo accepted.
And so, for several days, a dozen neighbors of all ages sat in Don Marino’s wooden desks to listen to Mister Clinton. Most of us attended less to learn English than to enjoy his presence. We liked listening to him, and we were curious about that tall man who was so markedly different from us. We did learn a bit: good morning, good afternoon, a few other greetings, and perhaps a handful of words more.
As I mentioned, our school reopened on Monday, August 3. That day, Mister Clinton stood at the head of my class to restart the school year. He was a fun but disciplined teacher. He spoke good Spanish—his grammar uneven at times, but always understandable. Perhaps translating from the English "everybody," he often addressed us as “todo el mundo.” One day, he asked whether “todo el mundo” had finished copying his notes from the chalkboard. A student named César Segundo “Chino” Del Río Vásquez raised his hand and said, “Teacher, we don’t say ‘Has all the world finished?’ We say, ‘Have all the students finished?’” The good gringo blushed deeply and smiled.
Many years later, when I began the task of searching for him, the clues were scarce. I remembered him perfectly, but the neighbors from the time of the earthquake only recalled “a tall gringo” and nothing more. Toward the end of the nineties, while I was living in Europe, I asked a relative in Chimbote to visit Marino Ramírez and ask whether he knew the full name of the American who had taught English at his home.
Against all odds, I received an encouraging lead. The gringo was supposedly named Gregorio Labusa and was from Boston. But the information turned out to be a fiasco. I wasted twenty years searching for that name online. I tried every possible combination including “Clinton” to no avail. I searched for “Gregorio” in Spanish, English, and other languages. I explored “Greg,” the common American shorthand, and still found nothing. The truth was that the information was wrong: the gringo’s name was never Gregorio Labusa.
Something changed on the night of Saturday, December 14, of last year. I was sitting at my laptop, going through my usual routine. For the umpteenth time, I typed “Clinton Gregory Labusa Boston” into Google, but before the familiar results appeared, I deleted it. In five months, the earthquake would mark its fiftieth anniversary. In eleven months, I would turn sixty. Overwhelmed by frustration, I said to myself, “Eduardo, you’ve reconstructed many stories from the past thanks to your good memory. To hell with Gregorio Labusa. Trust your own recollections.” And so I did. At 9:15 p.m., I typed: “Clinton Chimbote 1970.”
Life is full of ironies, and it chose that exact moment to strike. The internet was slow. At a snail's pace, the first entries began to surface. Something I hadn’t seen before caught my eye, and I clicked. A black-and-white document began to load so slowly it felt as if it were emerging from an old typewriter. Suddenly, part of a face appeared, and something inside told me I knew him. First the hair, then the forehead, the mustache, the full face… “Shit, I found him!” I exclaimed. But instinctively, the other Eduardo—the cautious one, weathered by life’s hesitations—said: “No, it can’t be.”
I went upstairs to find my wife, clutching the laptop in my hands like someone carrying a cake with the candles lit. “I think I found him,” I said. “What are you talking about?” she asked. I replied with just two words: “Mister Clinton.” She had known the story of the gringo who came to my neighborhood after the quake since the days we met in Europe and fell in love. She knew me well enough to see that I was overwhelmed, so she took the laptop and took charge. She cross-referenced the information I had found with other websites and social networks. “It’s him,” she finally said. “He’s a teacher, a great educator, a successful man.”
What I found online that night was a newsletter from a school in New Jersey, published in the fall of 1970. Under the heading “After a Disaster,” it reproduced excerpts from the diary of a faculty member. In June of that year, he had traveled to Peru and stayed in Chimbote to help rebuild a school, later teaching the third-grade class for a few weeks. The teacher’s name was Clinton Wilkins.
That very night, I contacted Mister Wilkins. Over the next forty-eight hours, we communicated with the magical sensation of being young again through our shared memories. I learned that, unfortunately, he no longer had the diary he had written during his days in Chimbote, nor did he have any photos from that experience. I also learned that he had traveled to Peru without any particular city in mind as his final destination. He ended up in our port because his flight had a layover in Caracas, where he met Venezuelan doctors heading to Chimbote to provide aid. They put him in touch with a group of priests from the Boston Missionary Society of Saint James the Apostle, who were already working in our city.
In my conversations with Mister Wilkins, I also learned something deeply important to me. In the spring of 1972, the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, D.C., awarded him the Order of Daniel A. Carrión—a high distinction conferred by the Peruvian state in recognition of his service after the earthquake. Knowing this filled me with joy; after all, finding him to offer my thanks had been my mission for so long.
And one more thing. On that same night—Saturday, December 14, last year—while reading the newsletter I’d found online, I learned that before the earthquake, the seventh graders in Mister Wilkins’ class had been raising funds to send their teacher to a South American country to help a school in need. In other words, Mister Wilkins ended up in my neighborhood thanks to a coincidental chain of events whose first link was the noble act of that group of students. To them, and to their teacher, I offer my deepest gratitude… fifty years later!
Postscript.
A global pandemic strikes humanity as I write these lines. The world has become a new and unexpected place. For fifty years, I had no doubt that the 1970 earthquake was the most terrible collective experience I would ever endure. Today, I wonder if I can still be so sure. These are times of uncertainty for us all. May God bless us.
New Hampshire, USA
May, 2020
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