Word
spread the way it always did.
Haphazardly. In fits and starts. A phone call here. Bump into
someone there. Have you heard? Anyone call you yet? The
news getting out the way it always had when they were all living
together in Zahm Hall. Smitty calling Cheez. Or Papa getting in
touch with Downsy. Someone tracking down Uno. An imperfect, inefficient
fanning of information until everyone who used to live in that
old hallway knew. Until they were all back in touch. Just like
before. The whole O-Row. You got the word, right?
Only this wasn't some late-night conspiracy hatched in a dorm
room. Not a call for volunteers to dye the fountain red or sneak
hay out of the Grotto Nativity scene for the Christmas hoedown.
This was no road trip rally cry or midnight Denny's run. This
was different. Serious. Something to make all of those late nights,
so achingly important and full of promise, tumble toward inconsequence.
I'm telling you, it's in the papers.
Others were receiving the news as well. Former professors and
old high school friends and Habitat for Humanity volunteers and
college crushes. All of them reading it or hearing it or passing
it along. I thought you should know. Their former rector,
Father Jim Lies, CSC, '87M.A., no longer living in Zahm Hall and
perhaps convinced he was done fielding these unexpected, unsettling
phone calls about young men in trouble, listening to one more
voice on the other end, full of concern and short on information.
Word spread, that awful spring, the way it always did.
Have you heard? Anyone call you yet?
It's about Wally, down in Bolivia.
No one can find him.
* * *
I have an amazing project just outside the capital
city, La Paz. I'll be living on the side of the high
plain. . . . It's called a cloud forest, as all the clouds
just crash into the side of the hill.
-- October 2000 letter from Walter
Poirier to college friends
Late one afternoon, in the gathering heat of the South Bend
summer, Walter "Wally" Poirier '00 received the letter that would
end his two-month holding pattern and send him to a thin-aired
place half a world away.
It had not been an easy wait. Accepted weeks earlier to the
Peace Corps, Wally was anxious for the packet informing him of
the country in which he would be spending the next two years of
his life. He passed the time working with Habitat for Humanity,
checking each day for the correspondence that would allow him
to shift gears and move on. Many of his college friends were already
gone. New jobs. New schools. New, unfolding lives. Most of the
"Zahmbies" from Zahm Hall scattered and dispersed, promising to
stay in touch. But not Wally. He was still in the 'Bend, waiting
for a letter.
A double-major in government and international studies, Wally
settled on the Peace Corps because it promised to expand not only
his burgeoning call to service but his understanding of a world
primarily encountered in college classrooms. Like many, he was
accepted to the program in the waning weeks of his senior year.
Since he had no training in specific fields like medicine, agriculture
or education, he was designated a program generalist and placed
on hold while the Peace Corps determined his placement.
Now, long-awaited letter in hand, he wasn't quite sure what
to make of it. The Peace Corps was inviting him to work in the
sprawling country of Bolivia, heading a tourism development project.
Not exactly what he imagined. When he shared the news with his
parents back home in Lowell, Massachusetts, they too wondered
if it was the right fit. Walter had always been successful in
service projects with tangible outcomes. Building houses. Working
with children. That sort of thing. This tourism project just seemed
so . . . vague. What did Walter know about tourism?
Friends still in town that summer couldn't resist throwing in
their two cents either. Wally? A tourism expert? C'mon.
The same guy who twice ran for Notre Dame student body president
on joke platforms? And convinced 10 other tickets from Zahm to
join him that second year? Please. The guy who submerged
a row of milk crates in the library reflecting pool and had one
of the frosh walk across dressed as Jesus? On a football weekend.
Sure. The Wally of toilet bowl apple-bobs and North Dining
Hall food fights and all-day tailgating? Him? An ambassador of
tourism?
Right.
In spite of the parental doubts and the good-natured ribbing
from friends, Wally was undeterred. When he happened to meet some
Bolivian students near campus one evening, it seemed like one
more indication that he should accept the assignment. After all,
he'd never met anyone from Bolivia. That had to be a sign, right?
And as for the intricacies of tourism development, he was sure
they taught you that once you got there. Besides, how hard could
it be? He had good people skills. Excelled at bringing folks together
for a common purpose. That had to count for something. There was
a lot more to Wally than the practical jokes and the rowdy hall
events.
He was also the Wally of after-school tutoring programs and
Habitat for Humanity work and thoughtful, late-night conversations.
The one who worked Zahm's Freshman Orientation because it was
important to him that the newest Zahmbies felt welcomed. The guy
who spent his senior year living at the Dismas House of Michiana,
a home where college students and former offenders from the criminal
justice system live together in community. All of that wasn't
some mysterious other side of Wally Poirier. It was one and the
same. Whether gathering friends to make a meal at a soup kitchen
or a trip to the bowling alley, the context didn't matter. The
important thing was the gathering, the motivating, the common
purpose. It was about pulling people together. And if nothing
else, Wally Poirier possessed a certain rakish genius for that.
* * *
"He climbs up on this table, right? I hardly even know this guy."
Paul Nebosky '01 turns back from the restaurant window and can't
help smiling.
"I'd just gotten there, it's Freshman Orientation, and he's
up on this table in the lounge. And he gets everyone to sing me
'Happy Birthday.' All these girls. And I'm just this shy freshman."
His eyes return to the window, to the unread menu, to that day
more than six years ago. He shakes his head, still not quite believing
it.
"Thing is, it wasn't even my birthday. He was just trying to
make me feel welcomed. But, you know, that was Wally."
That was Wally. There's Wally for you. That's just Wally.
How many men who lived in Zahm Hall between 1996 and 2000 are
walking around with stories that end with those words? Stories
that start off innocently enough, angle toward the absurd, cross
over to the mischievous, but all end the same way. Heads shaking.
Smiles impossible to suppress.
That's Wally for you.
How many people who love him carry those stories around?
Joe Priest '00 does.
"To be honest," he says, "that's the way people knew him at
first. Oh, this guy. What's he gonna do next?"
Priest, who lived with Poirier in Zahm Hall during their junior
year, recalls a particular Halloween when Wally dressed as their
hall rector. "It was Wally, so he went all out. He actually shaved
his head into male pattern baldness. Got the black suit, the whole
deal. The next day's a football game, and he's still dressed as
Father Jim. Collar and everything. I remember a fight broke out
in the stands, the student section, and Wally's down there in
the middle of it, acting like Father Jim. 'Gentlemen, gentlemen,
please stop.'"
He pauses, shakes his head. Cracks a smile.
"Funny thing is, the fight broke up. Because of Wally. That's
just who he was."
In March 2001, Joe Priest received the phone call so many former
hallmates were getting.
"This guy living in Zahm calls me up and says, 'Hey, have you
heard anything about Wally missing?' That's how I learned about
it . . . feels like yesterday."
Now, more than three years later, Priest wonders if he has truly
faced the implications of that phone call.
"If I found out he was dead I would start crying. For the most
part I haven't accepted it yet. That might be where I'm at --
that I'm not dealing with it properly. It's complicated."
It's complicated for Paul Nebosky too.
When he first found out that Wally was missing, he started seeing
his friend everywhere. In crowds milling around the campus. In
classrooms, sitting in the back row. In his dreams.
"I would dream about him once a week . . . I felt really bad.
Wally had sent me an e-mail in December, and I never responded
to it. I regret that to this day. Because we don't know what happened
to him . . . we don't have an answer."
Absent that answer, Nebosky clings to something else.
He holds on to the stories. The hilarious, heartbreaking stories
that all end the same way. Smiles and heads shaking. He holds
on to the stories because the stories have the power to gather
his friend back from the ether. Because in the stories, the winter
nights still thrum with promise and the hallways still echo with
their laughter, their plotting, their ridiculous potential. In
the stories, all the lingering regret is bearable, because in
the stories, Wally is still here.
And so, one more story.
The one about the football weekend when Purdue University came
to town with their vaunted marching band and their claim to possess
the World's Largest Drum. Wally, as Nebosky tells it, just wouldn't
have it. Couldn't see granting the Boilermakers the upper hand
on that one. Not when there was an entire Friday afternoon free.
Not when the only thing needed was the one thing he did best:
gathering a crowd for a common purpose. World's Largest Drum?
How hard could that be?
Three-hundred-dollars worth of building supplies later, the
Zahmbies set to work.
"The whole dorm was out there at some point hammering on this
thing," Nebosky recalls. "Just this monstrous, plywood thing.
That night, we convinced them to let us bring it into the pep
rally. I don't know if it sounded better, but I'm pretty sure
it was bigger."
He pauses to smile, and you already know what's coming next.
"He just couldn't let Purdue get away with it. That was Wally."
*
* *
I will assume that you have read my e-mails.
This letter will only delve into what lies ahead. . . .
My site consists of 21 communities with a grand
total of 1660 people. Called the Zongo River
Valley [it] is a two-hour drive on a shitty bus on
a shitty road from La Paz . . .
-- November 2000 letter from Walter
Poirier
to college friend Lou Amorosa
'00
How many times did Wally miss the bus?
How often did his fellow volunteers wake up in the communal
apartment where they all stayed when they were in La Paz and find
him still sprawled on the floor? Still curled up in his sleeping
bag and full of excuses. Overslept. Alarm didn't go off. Couldn't
get anyone to go with me. What kind of bus leaves at 5 in the
morning? How many times did that happen?
The apartment, known as the "crash pad" by its revolving cast
of occupants, was supposed to be a temporary hang-out, a home
base for Peace Corps volunteers while they were in the capital
city for business, relaxation or shopping. You weren't supposed
to actually live there. With three months of training
under their belts, the volunteers were supposed to be spending
the majority of their time at project sites. It was a time for
getting settled. Assessing needs. Making contacts. Moving on.
Wally wanted to be doing that too. It just wasn't happening.
"If you are taking note," he said in a frustrated November 2000
letter to his friend Lou Amorosa, "I wrote that [my site] is supposed
to be beautiful. That is, I did not get to visit. Public transportation
left at 5 a.m. every morning and my Bolivian associates would
not get up that early. I am the only one who has not visited."
All of the volunteers in Wally's training group, Bolivia #25,
were given an entire week during the third month of training to
make an initial visit to their project sites. Wally never got
to his. It was a disturbing trend that would continue through
January 2001. Although his Zongo Valley placement was closer to
La Paz than many of the other projects, it seemed at once less
accessible and more daunting. The astonishing thing, in light
of what happened, is that Wally selected the site himself.
According to Sarah Peterson '00, a fellow trainee in Bolivia
#25, there was a "site fair" in early October, at which the various
possibilities for placement were presented. Wally had known since
the summer that he would be involved with tourism development
somewhere in Bolivia. Here was the opportunity to find out where.
As the training group discussed the options, it was soon apparent
that a certain project in the Zongo Valley was not high on anyone's
list. Perhaps it was the location: a remote forest cut through
with precipitous dirt roads and scant infrastructure. Perhaps
it was the fact that the people of the Valley spoke almost exclusively
Aymara, an indigenous tongue, and the volunteers had spent three
months immersing themselves in Spanish. Perhaps it was the project
itself, ill-defined and under-funded. Whatever the source of unease,
most of Bolivia #25 tried to steer clear of the Zongo Valley project.
It eventually fell to the sanguine young man who could see the
bright side of just about anything.
"It was kind of the site nobody else picked," Peterson recalls,
"and Wally's attitude was, 'I can handle it if nobody else wants
it.'"
Once he started working on the project, "Wally had no real support,"
Peterson says. "He was frustrated. . . . When no one tells you
what to do and you're sort of dropped off in the middle of nowhere
-- not even dropped off, you have to find your own way -- it's
really hard."
Being Wally, he gave it his best shot.
He set up meetings with Teresa Chavez, his Bolivian counterpart
in La Paz, only to find her absent or looking to reschedule. He
sought funding from various sources and ran into bureaucratic
brick walls. He attended a workshop on tourism and got a certificate.
He traveled to the Zongo Valley and tried to make connections.
Unlike Peterson's assignment, however, which had "tons of work
for [her] to do," Wally's was being created as he went. Even the
proverbial Peace Corps village, where Wally had been expecting
to live, was not a village. It was a loose collection of communities
strung along the river, some no more than two or three houses.
As Wally began to visit the people who lived there, he had no
clear indication that a tourism project was even desired.
"Tourism," Peterson points out, "is such an American, capitalist
concept. It doesn't translate. It's hard to get people to come
to meetings."
The Peace Corps, so full of promise in the summer, became an
increasingly frustrating prospect for Wally. The comforts of cosmopolitan
La Paz and the sleeping-bag-strewn crash pad gradually became
more alluring. As the weeks crept on, that 5 a.m. bus, departing
in darkness from one of the most dangerous parts of Bolivia, the
one with the driver who blessed himself as the bus careened around
mountain passes, became easier and easier to miss.
* * *
People are trapped between tenses.
You have to realize that. You have to realize that even this
far along, more than three years out, those who know him still
struggle with how to place him in time, still hesitate around
the simplest of words. Every sentence spoken or discarded is still
suffused with meaning. Still considered for evidence of where
you stand. What you believe. The boundaries of your faith.
In the waning present tense there remains a sliver of possibility,
a door left open. Hope hinges on a hesitation, a pause, a subtle
stutter-step around avoided phrases.
Wally was -- I mean, Wally is . . . actually, we don't know.
That's the hardest part. We don't have any idea.
The alternative is pragmatism, the simple arithmetic of days
that have turned into months that have slid inexorably into years.
The passage of time makes the slow, reasonable exodus of words
into the past tense understandable. It is a benign sort of capitulation,
but surrendering your sentences to the past tense is admitting
that you do have some idea. Admitting that the sprawl
of the Bolivian jungle and the clutch of found belongings and
the silence of accumulated years do have something to say. Not
much, but something.
Sarah Peterson has had time to think about this. Time to watch
his grainy, Xeroxed photograph on the posters at Bolivian bus
stations yellow, tatter, and disappear altogether. She is familiar
with the unwieldiness of language.
"I still don't know whether to talk about him in the present
or the past. I guess I've started to be okay with speaking about
him in the past. But I don't want to -- I don't know. We just
circle around."
Father Lies, the former rector of Zahm Hall, is as trapped as
anyone by the limits of language. By all these answerless questions.
And so he continues to do the one thing he has done every day
since receiving that phone call. He prays.
"I pray for him all the time . . . and I continue to pray, seemingly
against all hope, for his safe return to us."
It has been his prayer for three-and-a-half years now.
*
* *
[T]he people of the Valley are extremely suspicious
of the work of the government. I feel that presenting
to these communities before having any hope of
receiving money would be ridiculous . . . nothing is
sure in Bolivia.
-- January 29, 2001, e-mail from
Walter Poirier to Ryan Taylor,
his associate Peace Corps
director in Bolivia
For two days, Sheila Poirier and her husband, Walter, waited.
While Peace Corps representatives in Bolivia scrambled and mobilized
and pointed fingers, Wally's parents held tight in Lowell, Massachusetts.
It had been a simple question, the one Sheila posed in a phone
call to the Peace Corps 24-hour hot line in Bolivia on March 4,
2001. The sort of question you would expect an organization claiming
volunteer safety as its number-one priority to be able to answer.
It might take an hour or so, stretch into the next day perhaps
(La Paz is 4000 miles from Lowell), but you figure they
would get back to you with something. The question, after all,
was not complicated. It was the kind of question a parent would
expect the Peace Corps to be able to answer in a reasonable amount
of time.
Where is our son?
The origin of that question, and its accompanying urgency, came
from the first phone call Sheila made on March 4. After not hearing
from Walter since the end of January, she thought she might reach
him at the crash pad apartment in La Paz. It was a logical assumption.
Walter had spent many of his nights there, unable to make the
expected inroads in the Zongo Valley. But the denizens of the
crash pad, who had awoken so many mornings to find Wally present,
didn't even need to check the sleeping bags.
"They said they hadn't seen Walter in two or three weeks," Sheila
says, "That's what set the alarm off for me. Not that we hadn't
heard from him but that nobody had heard from him."
Although alarming for parents thousands of miles away, a two-
or three-week stretch without volunteer contact was not exactly
panic-button material for the Peace Corps. One of the basic tenets
of the program is that volunteers be placed alone in communities
so they are forced to engage the local population immediately.
Groups of two or three living together, the Peace Corps asserts,
would increase suspicion and distrust on the part of neighbors
while encouraging dependency on the part of volunteers. The reality
of this approach is that many volunteers live by themselves in
isolated areas, without phone, radio or other immediate means
of contacting Peace Corps officials. They can go weeks without
being in touch.
For volunteers like Sarah Peterson, that sort of isolation,
and its attendant self-reliance, was both the challenge and the
reward of the Peace Corps.
"It gets really lonely out at your site. . . . I struggled.
And I cried. I cried alone in my little hole of a room. But that
challenge was also why it was such an amazing experience. It's
a decision you make when enter the Peace Corps."
Peterson acknowledges, however, that the tenuous balance between
volunteer independence and Peace Corps supervision may have broken
down in the region of Bolivia where she and Wally were serving.
Ryan Taylor, their associate Peace Corps director, was stretched
thin with too many volunteers and too large an area to cover.
"It is the job of associate directors to make sure [volunteers]
have site support," Peterson says, "and I think that was part
of the problem for Wally."
By the time Sheila Poirier called the Peace Corps hot line in
March, Ryan Taylor had not communicated with Wally for more than
72 days. On December 22, 2000, they traveled together to the Zongo
Valley seeking housing for Wally in the village of Camisique.
The room they selected was unavailable, so they returned to La
Paz the same day, with Taylor under the impression that Wally
would make the arrangements on his next visit.
But in a January 3 letter to college friend Lou Amorosa, Wally
noted, "I finally spent some time at my site . . . I have yet
to secure housing." Sometime between then and the end of January
he began renting a second-floor room in the Zongo village, upriver
from Camisique. Although required by Peace Corps protocol to submit
a volunteer locator form for this new residence, Wally did not.
Instead, on January 31, he signed in at the Peace Corps headquarters
in La Paz and turned in a locator form with the crash pad address,
perhaps convinced he would still be spending the majority of his
time there.
Two-and-a-half months after the December trip, when Sheila Poirier's
phone call notified the Peace Corps that one of their volunteers
might be missing, Taylor still assumed that his young volunteer
was living in Camisique. When the scrambling and the mobilizing
and the urgency lurched into high gear, with Sheila and Walter
Poirier awaiting a phone call, the Peace Corps began their search
for Wally by looking in the wrong village.
On March 6, a call to the Poiriers was finally made. It was
placed not from Bolivia but from the Peace Corps headquarters
in Washington, D.C. A voice on the other end held the sort of
news no parent should have to receive.
We're looking for Wally.
*
* *
"We call him Walter," his father clarifies, relaxing into the
couch for the first time. "The whole world calls him Wally. But
to us, it's always been Walter."
His entire childhood, at least to his parents, it was Walter.
It was Walter kicking the soccer ball around in middle school.
Walter crashing through the leaves that buried their yard every
autumn. Walter when he rose and fell with the Celtics, and Walter
pulling up for driveway jumpers, yelling Bird! like a
million other kids from Massachusetts. He was Walter at the age
of 12 when his father took him to the golf course for the first
time, and Walter that next summer when he started slinging bags
as a caddy to make some money. And it was Walter when he left
the crumbling textile mills and Merrimack River canals of Lowell
for the manicured quads of Notre Dame.
Always, to his parents, it was Walter.
Just like his father. Just like his grandfather.
"I guess being 'Wally' was his way to find individuality in
the family," his father says, before standing to adjust an oscillating
fan.
It is the day after Halloween 2003 in New England, and it is
unseasonably warm. A humid breeze drags store-bought cobwebs off
the bushes outside, while inside Walter fiddles again with the
angle of the fan. It is only the latest attempt to improve the
circulation in the living room. And as Wally's father returns
to the couch, it is apparent that the conversation, like the fan,
is about to shift directions.
"But here's another thing. Talk to anyone who deals with disappearances,
missing persons, they tell you that the first 48 hours are the
most critical. We had, what, four weeks go by? Three or four weeks?"
It is a rhetorical question. He knows the answer. He has had
three years to ponder these numbers.
"We lost all that time."
A stocky, fireplug of a man with a ruddy face and a short, trim
beard, he plows through the circumstances of his son's disappearance
in staccato bursts, sentences draped in a thick Boston accent.
His wife is more reticent, leaning back in her chair, but just
as firm.
"First of all," Sheila says, "they didn't even know he was missing
--"
"Yeah, that was a lot of fun," Walter interrupts, sarcastic.
"Pretty bad when an organization doesn't even know you're gone.
And the parents have to tell them? Real nice."
In fact, no one is exactly certain when Wally disappeared.
Evidence suggests that sometime after signing in at the La Paz
Peace Corps office on January 31, 2001, he traveled back to the
Zongo Valley and the upstairs room he was renting. Sarah Peterson
and several others who watched the Super Bowl with him on January
28 recall that he planned to stay longer at his project
site this time.
"He intended to really make a go of it," she says. "We figured
we wouldn't see him until February, at Carnival in Oruro. Then
. . . he didn't show up."
With no way to contact him, they figured he must have simply
changed plans.
When Peace Corps officials began looking for Wally in March,
they found most of his belongings in the second-floor room, including
his wallet and identification. There were no signs of struggle
or theft. If Wally left, investigators reason, he left from here.
If he was taken, he was taken from here. The small, spare room,
furnished with little more than a battered metal bedframe, yielded
few clues.
"So many things could've happened," Walter says. "He could've
been jailed. Or had an accident. He could've been killed for money,
or because someone got suspicious. I mean, here's a 22-year-old
American kid going village to village asking questions, and he
doesn't even speak the local dialect? There's all kinds of things
. . ."
He trails off on the possibilities as Sheila returns from a
room down the hall with two Ziploc freezer bags.
"These are a few of his things," she says, sitting back in her
chair, smoothing the plastic against her lap. "Some things we
know he'd still want . . ."
Inside the first bag is a fuzzy letter L, backed with
thick felt.
"It's his varsity golf letter," she says, "from Lowell High.
I removed it from his high school jacket. I didn't think -- well,
it just seemed unnecessary to keep the whole jacket."
Because after three years of waiting, how do you decide what
to keep? What to throw away? How do you select, among the blizzard
of belongings that accumulate in a 22-year-old's room, what he
might still want if . . . just if --
Sheila turns the letter over in her fingers and slides it back
into the bag. The second Ziploc holds a more recent acquisition.
"This is Walter's Peace Corps hat," she says.
Unlike the high school jacket, it wasn't found in Wally's closet.
Sheila retrieved the weathered ballcap from the basement of the
U.S. Embassy in Bolivia. Three months after Wally was officially
declared missing, Sheila traveled there herself.
"I went to see if somehow or other, just by my being there,
someone might come forward and -- you know, help us find our son."
Her husband's asthma prevented him from traveling into the thin,
Andean air, so Sheila journeyed to La Paz with her sister. There,
they met with FBI agents investigating the disappearance and spoke
with Bolivian security officers. They gathered in a hotel with
some of Wally's fellow volunteers. They braved the trip over the
steep dirt roads and winding switchbacks to the Zongo village.
And they visited the house where Wally had been staying.
In the abandoned second-floor room, Sheila looked out through
a broad window at the vista that only months earlier had been
her son's sole purview. It was all there, just like in his letters.
The sprawling jungle. The rising valley walls. The low clouds,
crashing endlessly into the hills.
The persistent silence.
"I realized," she says, "that nobody was coming forward."
Knowing that Walter's January 31, 2001, sign-in at the Peace
Corps office in La Paz was the last actual documentation of her
son's presence in Bolivia, Sheila requested to see the log before
they departed.
"I asked the Peace Corps if we could see the sign-in sheet.
At first they said yes, but when I went back they said, 'We can't
show you for privacy reasons.' I never got to see it."
And so Walter's mother, who had traveled 4,000 miles for some
hint of what had befallen her son, departed without viewing the
one document on which he may have signed his name for the final
time.
"Isn't that something?" her husband asks, in an unseasonably
warm November room, "Isn't it?"
*
* *
Mr. Poirier failed to follow certain Peace Corps location
and notification procedures. Although the Peace Corps
Associate Director responsible for Mr. Poirier while he was
in Bolivia knew that Mr. Poirier was not following these
procedures, he took no steps to correct the situation and,
as a result, lost track of Mr. Poirier.
-- official finding of the July
2001 U.S. General
Accounting Office investigation
into the
disappearance of Walter J.
Poirier
The Peace Corps, like so many other things, has been altered
by the disappearance of Walter Poirier. Stung by a blistering
July 2001 report on volunteer safety from the Congressional branch's
General Accounting Office, the program has enacted a number of
policy changes.
Associate Peace Corps Directors are now expected to speak with
each volunteer at least once a month and maintain a log of this
activity. They also are required to identify a host family for
each new volunteer at his or her project site and must ensure
that the volunteer lives there for the first eight weeks of the
project. The "crash pad" apartments, seen as an excuse for volunteers
to be absent from their projects, have been curtailed. And the
Peace Corps has initiated new, high-level positions in safety
and security around the world.
Many of these efforts, the Peace Corps suggests, were planned
before Wally's disappearance. Sheila and Walter Poirier are not
sure they believe that. After three years of frustrating interactions
with the Peace Corps, they have found it hard to let go of their
anger.
"My resentment," Walter says, "is that they put him in harm's
way. Contrary to what the officials say, they put him in harm's
way."
The harrowing travel, the language barrier, the ill-defined
project and the lack of funding all add up to a scenario the Poiriers
have a difficult time believing: that the Peace Corps would place
a 22 year-old with limited tourism training alone in a remote
setting without supervision for more than two months.
The Poiriers requested several times that the Peace Corps assign
a full-time Spanish-speaking investigator with Bolivian connections
to the case. For more than three years, the Peace Corps, while
continuing to offer assistance, rebuffed the Poiriers' request.
On June 18, 2004, after Wally's father testified before Congress
in March, that position changed as well.
Slightly more than 40 months after Walter Poirier was declared
missing, Peace Corps Director Gaddi H.Vasquez released a letter
agreeing to identify "an individual with the necessary skills
and experience to assume the responsibility of determining what
additional steps should be taken" in Walter's case. Perhaps now,
the Poiriers reason, the investigation will receive the coordination
it has deserved all along.
* * *
This much we know.
The people who love Wally are carrying his stories.
Stories to make you laugh and cry and break your heart. Stories
that are passed along like legends. All of them ending the exact
same way. Heads shaking, smiles impossible to contain.
You listen to these stories and you want every story about Wally
to have an ending because the endings are so damn good. They are
buoyant and irreverent and bursting with the kind of electricity
that gilds young lives on the cusp of something big.
"He would've done some amazing things," Lou Amorosa says. "I've
never met anyone else like him."
Which is what makes telling his story so maddening.
Wally's story, it turns out, is not about endings at all.
It is about memories pressed into Ziploc bags. Unreturned e-mails
you can't delete. It is about waiting for phone calls and letters
and things to get started. For signs and answers and closure that
never comes.
And it is about love.
It is about the fierce persistence of love in a place, half
a world away, where the unanswered questions and the lingering
regret and the defiant, ceaseless prayers still crash, like every
last cloud, into the echoing hills.
David Devine lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
(January 2005)
