After living on the Navajo Reservation as a schoolteacher, I developed a thirst for learning about people and places that were different from what I was familiar with. At the same time, I wanted to be of service in a meaningful way to the local community. Without realizing it, I repeatedly chose paths that would prepare me and bring me ever closer to finding the purpose of my life.

Fortuitously, the Peace Corps had somewhat arbitrarily assigned me to teach topics related to health, first aid, nutrition, and home gardening in rural communities—even though I had never received formal training in any of those fields. On my application, when asked what my skills were, I wrote languages, and bilingual and bicultural education. When asked what my interests were, the list extended to the bottom of the page. Near the top I listed yoga, meditation, jogging, gardening, and nutrition.

The town of Guallyabamba, where the Peace Corps had assigned me to work, lay about 40 km north of Quito. Most weekends I walked into the center of the little town, bought some exotic fruit, like cherimoyas, and put them in my hand woven bag, hoisted my pack onto my back, and then hopped onto a rickety and overcrowded bus headed to Quito. In the city I met up with my mountaineering friends to climb yet another one of the countless massive volcanoes in the surrounding area.

The bus looked like it would tip over from the piles of goods and caged animals headed to market, strapped precariously onto the roof of the colorful bus. I almost never found a seat and had to stand with the others, pressed together.

Instead of keeping a diary during this period, I wrote long letters to my parents—partially so they wouldn’t worry about me being so far away from home, and also as a way to document my experiences.

In one of the letters, I wrote: “My own garden here in Guayllabamba is doing just fine, except that 50% of the seeds you sent me didn’t sprout. I think they must have been out of date. The pumpkin is growing like a house on fire. I have tons of vegetables from the seeds that did sprout, including Swiss chard, broccoli, garlic, onions, corn, peppers, cucumber, potatoes, mustard, radishes, beets, lettuce, cabbage, and tomatoes.

“The friendly townspeople come by to look at my garden and marvel at it, but they don’t express much interest in growing their own food. They ask me why should they grow food when they have the money to go to the store and buy canned food. And when I encourage them to eat quinoa due to its health-enhancing qualities, they answer that quinoa is for Indians and other poor people.

“The people in Guayllabamba all look like Indians or Mestizos to me, but I’m getting the impression that it’s not so much the color of the skin that determines whether you’re considered an Indian or not, but by the amount of land and money you have.

“Although my home and garden is in Guayllabamba, I was assigned two other little villages where my information is welcomed with enthusiasm—unlike in Guayllabamba. The villages are indigenous. I’ll tell you more about it later.

“In Guayllabamba I live rent-free in a tiny room in an adobe house with the landlady. She’s one of the many people who told me only Indios eat quinoa and that I was wasting my time teaching the people to grow their own food.

“I forgot to tell you something funny. Sometimes I have to pee in the middle of the night. I don’t want to walk in the dark all the way to the outhouse quite a few yards behind the house. Instead, I pee in a jar. In the early morning, I throw the urine off the front porch. The urine is very diluted and has no smell so you don’t have to worry about me being inconsiderate of others. After a few weeks some tiny looking weeds turned into enormous, colorful quinoa plants and little poinsettia trees surrounding the steps up to the porch. The landlady exclaims in amazement every morning at how healthy the plants look. I have to try hard not to laugh.

“I’ll write more soon. I am writing these letters to you by candlelight, which takes a long time. Please pass this one to the rest of the family. And please tell me how everything is going at home.”

In the next letter I wrote: “I am happy to work in the Indian communities because they really need help. I’m not only teaching nutrition to the mothers, but also to the primary school children. I’m teaching the boys and girls how to grow a school garden. The ultimate aim is two-fold: 1) The little children will be able to use what they harvest in their lunches. The rest they can distribute and bring to their homes. 2) These children will hopefully teach the rest of the children in the community how to grow a vegetable garden and what to plant, in order to supplement a diet heavy in grains and potatoes.

“It all seems terribly exciting to me and something that will bring tangible results to the community—because, really, how can I teach good nutrition when the people don’t have the ingredients, nor the money to buy the vegetables?

“Now, because of my work with food, I am officially connected to the Ministry of Agriculture and will get its support to implement two other projects I have in mind. In order to complete these projects, I need to get ahold of the right materials.

“All the people are more than willing to work communally. It is a very generous community in spite of the fact that they have only their hard labor to offer. The first project I have in mind is to build an outdoor, wood-burning oven made of adobe so that once a week the mothers can get together to make bread communally. The second project is to build a kitchen/dining room for the school. The kids live too far away to go home for lunch, so the little girls make lunch for all the students.

“The indigenous people receive Care products from the government and from churches overseas, such as soy flour, powdered milk, and corn flour. All the ingredients are mixed together so that the children can supplement the few scraps of food they bring from home. They cook over a fire outside in the dirt. They also eat in the dirt. When it rains, they either don’t eat at all, or eat and get wet. Seeing them eat in this condition touched me, and gave me incentive and drive to do something to alleviate these conditions.

“Pretty soon I must transplant the seedlings. The whole system of growing is quite a bit different here. Each row, for example, is surrounded by a little ditch, so I can irrigate from the canal that runs nearby. I look forward to showing you how they grow over here. It’s very interesting.

“All my work has been focusing on the two indigenous communities. When I explained to the Peace Corps officials in Quito that the people in Guayllabamba felt that planting home gardens and eating fresh foods like quinoa was moving them in the wrong direction socially, they understood my plight and approved of me letting go of any projects there.

“The Peace Corps invited me to go for a week to the south of Ecuador, to a city called Loja, to get to know the nutrition program down there. I think the Peace Corps is very happy with my work—at least I have been hearing rumors to that effect. They are paying for my trip. I invited Hugo Torres to go with me. We are taking the train, which I believe is the highest train in the world and supposed to be spectacular.”

Speaking of Hugo Torres, we began to see each other almost every weekend when I took the rickety bus into Quito where we met up to go climb giant volcanoes with the climbing club or we sometimes just wandered the city by ourselves. Hugo excelled in his studies and didn’t need to spend all of his time studying. I had the impression that all the students in the climbing club were highly intelligent and would be eventually moving on to outstanding careers.

One time while we were exploring Quito, Hugo said impulsively” “Vamos a algún sitio.” I knew he was saying, “let’s go someplace,” but he had a mischievous smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. I knew he considered me his girlfriend and had already taken me to a town called Quevedo to meet his parents and his many siblings, so I suspected what he meant was, “Let’s go to a hotel and make love.” And that’s exactly what we did. I was Hugo’s first girlfriend. I hoped I gave him a good introduction to this fine art. Before we left the hotel, we swore eternal love for each other with all our hearts.

Immediately after I made the oath, I wondered how I could possibly keep it, especially considering I’d only be in the Peace Corps for two years. I reassured myself that everything would work out the way it was supposed to and we’d find a way to stay together.

During that first year in Ecuador, Hugo and I and the other men in the climbing club summited at least a dozen of the most spectacular volcanoes I could ever have imagined, including Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador at 20,700 ft. It took me a couple of months before I was thoroughly acclimatized and could keep up with the men, even while carrying a heavy pack. The days of desperate panting were gone. But during the period of acclimation, I had a scary experience.

I went with a few of the men to Antisana, a nearly 19,000 ft. volcano located southeast of Quito, not far from Cotopaxi. Antisana is the fourth highest volcano in Ecuador and has three summits. It is one of the most technically challenging climbs in the country and requires lots of experience with glaciers and high altitude snow and ice climbing, along with the appropriate equipment for vertical ascents up sheer ice walls.

On the drive to the volcano, we saw lots of wild horses roaming the páramo, the large, seemingly empty stretches of land that could be compared to moors in England or the tundra in Alaska. I saw majestic condors circling overhead, waiting for a wayward rabbit to snag for lunch. A few feet from where our car parked, a giant condor stood with his enormous wings outspread imperiously. He stared at us with his beady eyes without moving, his claws dug into a rabbit he had ripped open on the ground. Blood stained his beak. As we all piled out of the car, the condor hopped a few times and then flew away, carrying the mutilated rabbit with him.

We set up camp high up on the glacier, much higher than we usually set up camp. I could smell the sulfur fumes wafting down the mountain from the snow-covered crater just below the summit. When we rose at midnight to begin our ascent, I began coughing. I assumed the sulfur was irritating my lungs. As we trudged along, the coughing worsened and was eventually accompanied by an altitude-related headache, a symptom very familiar to me.

Just before we reached the first of the three summits, I realized that something was very wrong. I could no longer think clearly, stumbled frequently, and had become dangerously short of breath with spasms of coughing.

I told the leader of our group that I thought I had pneumonia. Our leader was a Chilean professor at the Polytechnical Institute, of German heritage, who helped form the climbing club. In fact two of his students, Miguel Andrade and Hugo Torres, did a first ascent of the highest peak on a volcano called Sincholagua and gave that peak the name of their beloved professor, Dr. Bruce Hoeneisen.

The professor suggested I had “soroche,” or altitude sickness, sometimes referred to also as “puna.” He explained that I probably had pulmonary edema. In those days, I had no idea what edema meant. He explained that with low oxygen pressure, the blood vessels in the lungs leak fluid into the surrounding lung tissue and make it difficult to oxygenate the blood. He suggested that I also had cerebral edema in my head, for the same reasons, which explained why I couldn’t think clearly or walk without stumbling.

Hugo Torres was not on this climb, so his best friend, Miguel Andrade, came forward and gallantly offered to escort me off the mountains. The professor said that we needed to get off the mountain as soon as we could, but without endangering our lives.

Miguel had me on belay most of the descent, until we came to terrain that was less steep and less glaciated. I was sure I had pneumonia and told Miguel I would need to somehow get to a hospital right away. Then, something quite unusual happened.

When we descended to much lower elevation, I stopped falling down and began to think more clearly. And then, even further down the mountain, the cough disappeared. My symptoms were indeed from pulmonary and cerebral edema. I had just experienced my first episode of soroche. In the ensuing months I would be able to recognize altitude sickness in other non-acclimated climbers and help them get to safety.

Back on the flat land in Guayllabamba, I dreamed every night of the mountains and my mountain companions and our adventures together. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my work with nutrition and home gardens and my other projects in my two communities, I couldn’t wait for the weekends to come so I could get back into the mountains with my compañeros.

I saw that the mountains served as a metaphor for our lives. We climbed the mountains as a tightly bonded team with a common goal, like soldiers going to war who would give their lives for each other. We made our way up the treacherous mountains together, we protected each other, we encouraged each other, and we celebrated with each other. The friendships had roots beyond what words can describe. I will never forget these brave men I climbed with—even after all these years. And I will be forever grateful that they allowed me to enter their world, even though I was a woman—an inexperienced woman—whom they trusted and trained and took under their wings until I could do the same feats they did and be supportive of them as they were to me.

I thought about why I felt so at home with these men. I remembered that my father fostered in me a love of nature, hiking, and scrambling around on rocks. During times when he was home on the weekends, we hiked together in the wilderness when I was a young girl. He even took me rock climbing when I was fourteen. I knew he thought of me as his buddy. Sometimes he treated me like a son. He encouraged me to join the local gun club on the army base where we lived when I was ten years old. I had absolutely no interest in guns, but agreed to join just to please my father. After I won badges and a trophy for marksmanship, I felt I deserved to quit and pursue things I actually enjoyed.

Out of all his six children, I was the one who was most athletic. I loved sports and I loved being in nature. We had a cabin in the White Mountains in New England. Every winter that we were in the States, my father drove the whole family up to northern New Hampshire where we stayed in our rustic little cabin in the woods that he had built with his buddies when he got out of Harvard graduate school in the 1930s. The cabin had no electricity or running water. Being there was one step above camping. When the weather permitted, we took our telemark skis and backpacks and hiked up to Tuckerman’s Ridge on Mt. Washington and skied down. Those fondly-remembered times had a big influence on why I so ardently sought out the big mountains in Ecuador.

Hugo Torres and his best friend Miguel Andrade, along with several other climbers wanted to climb a peak on Sincholagua that had never been climbed before. It was one of the smaller peaks on the mountain, but it was treacherous. Sincholagua is an eroded, extinct volcano. Its name comes from an indigenous word meaning, “steep upward,” an appropriate name for this smaller but steep volcano. Sadly, in the last two decades it has lost all of its glaciers and snowfields.

When we reached the snow-covered, knife-edged ridge that would take us to the summit, Miguel and Hugo agreed that the last stretch was too dangerous to climb because of the heavily wind-blown snow that had formed a cornice hanging off to one side of the narrow ridge. If we took one misstep to the left onto the cornice, we would all fall over the edge to our death when the fragile overhanging ice and snow gave way. Since there was no way to protect us on belay for a distance much longer than the length of our rope, they suggested that we disconnect ourselves from the climbing rope and each climb unprotected. That way, if one of us fell, we would not pull the others with us to our certain death.

I knew I had to face this challenge, even if it meant risking death—not for the glory of being the first to climb this peak, but for other much more compelling reasons.

While I lived on the Navajo Reservation, I was sniffed by a mountain lion, a few inches from my face, while I lay in my sleeping bag on a slab of red rock in southern Utah. After this encounter, a Navajo grandmother explained that the mountain lion was my spirit guide and had come to me to give me his “courage, strength, and intense focus” because I would need all of these for what lay ahead. She said I would face “many obstacles, some big and life threatening”—and, if I lived through them, I would have “a strong heart and powerful medicine to give to the people.”

I wrote those words in my diary shortly after the grandmother spoke them, and then I forgot about them. But I didn’t forget what she said about the many obstacles that I would face, “some big and life threatening.” Those words helped give me the courage to keep going in the face of fear, and the strength to continue in the face of utter exhaustion when I didn’t think I could take one more step. I had to strengthen my mind and body for whatever lay ahead.

Seeking my purpose in life was like being on a mythological journey, full of demons and dragons and other terrifying monsters, but also full of wondrous sights and experiences, each teaching me something I would need to know in order to reach my destination.

Looking back, the knife-edged ridge could have symbolized one of the goblins I had to get past on my journey forward.

We were jubilant to have reached a summit that had never before been climbed because of the serious dangers posed by the overhanging snow and ice.

The climbing club subsequently christened the peak with my name, Pico Erica Elliott. I still have the clipping from the Quito newspaper about that climb. The article hangs in my clinic, now yellowed with age.

One weekend when Hugo and I hung out in Quito together, he broke some painful news to me. He began by saying that the Hungarian government wanted rights to some of the massive amounts of oil that had been discovered in the jungles of Ecuador. In exchange for those rights, the Hungarian government would offer full scholarships to high achieving students to study at the University in Budapest. A few days before getting together, Hugo had been offered one of those scholarships to study engineering.

We both cried at the idea of being apart from each other. Hugo asked me to go with him to Hungary. When I told him I couldn’t renege on my two-year commitment to the Peace Corps, I could see the hurt feelings in his face. He asked if I would wait for him and stay in touch while he was in Europe. I naively assured him I would, believing that I was capable of “waiting” for him—also known as being celibate—for three or four years.

Hugo’s family asked me for a loan to pay for Hugo’s airfare. I gave all the money I had brought with me from the States as a reserve fund in case of an emergency—a wad of dollar bills that amounted to $400. I gave the loan willingly as a demonstration of my commitment to Hugo.

Since those days, I’ve learned the harm caused by making commitments that I can’t keep.