THE UNEMPLOYED DOCTOR

It was 2017 when NN, a 61-year-old doctor who had only contributed to social security for 15 years, became unemployed. He worked for the Social Security of Esmeraldas in the Galera San Francisco Reserve, the first marine reserve in South America. His routes ran from the Galera parish in the north to the San Francisco parish in the south, both belonging to the Muisne canton in southern Esmeraldas. He had worked in the area in 1982 when he did his rural medical training as a newly graduated doctor from the Central University of Ecuador. He was accompanied by his wife, a young woman like himself, just 26 years old. They lived their first year of marriage in Cabo San Francisco, when the town had no road during the almost 10 months of the rainy season. This was from December to September, when the El Niño warm current arrived; it only stopped raining in October and November. During those 300 days of torrential rains and thunderstorms, the road connecting this old town, founded by the Spanish in the 17th century and still home to South America's first lighthouse, disappeared. Returning to work in the town 33 years later was a significant event for both the town and the doctor. The town was experiencing a revolution brought about by Rafael Correa's government, which built the paved road in 2016. This included paved streets, a sewage system, a potable water network to homes, 24-hour electricity, telephone service, internet, and satellite television. Everything arrived so abruptly that the town and the inhabitants of southern Esmeraldas Province were in shock. But on April 16, 2016, the worst earthquake in the history of the Ecuadorian coast struck. The earthquake struck at sea, near Pedernales, a canton experiencing a boom in shrimp exports and production, but which was also a hub for drug money laundering. Then, for a year, aftershocks continued along the entire coast of Esmeraldas, even affecting the apartment NN owned in the Vargas Torres Building in downtown Esmeraldas, across from the governor's office. NN lived in constant fear for a year, often having to jump out of bed in his rented apartment in Same or rush out of the clinics in Quingue and El Cabo San Francisco, where he worked from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. His wife came to be with him several times; she, too, experienced these fears. The protests continued until March 2017, when the government changed. Rafael Correa did not seek reelection and nominated Lenin Moreno as his candidate, who betrayed him a week after assuming the presidency and began a persecution of Correa supporters, including NN, who was fired. That dismissal was illegal because the doctors and teachers who had worked in the earthquake zone had the right to have their contracts automatically renewed. For this reason, when he returned to his hometown of Quito, he went to Social Security to complain about his abrupt dismissal and discovered that his sister, who was a leader in Correa's party, and the new director of Social Security, a traitor who joined Lenin Moreno after having been one of Correa's favorite ministers, were behind his dismissal. For almost two years, he went every week to the Ministry of Labor and the Council of the Judiciary to complain about his dismissal, but in 2019 the Covid-19 pandemic arrived. Then he understood that it was a blessing that he no longer worked in the Social Security for Rural Workers or in the fields, because that pandemic killed 120 doctors and a similar number of dentists. NN was a doctor exposed to the virus in those areas, so he suffered from chikungunya, respiratory infections, malaria, and dengue fever from 2011 until 2017, when he left the hospital. All of these illnesses were caused by his own patients and mosquitoes. Thanks to his dismissal, he was able to return to live with his family, whom he had only seen one week a month or on weekends since 2010, and before that from 2008 to 2010, when he had to travel from Esmeraldas to Quito on Friday nights and Sundays. That 1,000 km journey every weekend and the nearly 90 km daily commute from Same to Cabo San Francisco or Quigue took a toll on his health, compounded by the poor diet in the villages where he worked, where eating was a problem that even landed him in the hospital after he choked on a piece of meat that nearly killed him. He had risked his life trying to save lives and cure patients in southern Esmeraldas. He thought those years of sacrifice were useless; it was thanks to ceasing to be a doctor that he saved his life and was able to return to live in Quito, living off his investments in a comfortable apartment with his family, and even obtained Spanish nationality for himself and his daughters because he was the grandson of a Spanish woman. He even experienced racial discrimination from some black colleagues in Esmeraldas for being from the mountains, white, and with green eyes.