This story is highly politically incorrect, and it does not reflect my views of indigenous people. It is a work of fiction - I hope you will enjoy it as such.
*****
When I saw the job announced, I knew it was a chance I should try to take. There are not many postdoctoral research positions in the field of systematic botany, but lots of applicants at least at the attractive universities. This position was in the little-know South-American country of Palombia. The University of Palombia was even more obscure than the country itself, so perhaps there would be few applicants. And not many had heard of Professor Ruiz. But I had. In the last couple of years her articles had begun appearing in top-notch international journals, and were always of an outstanding quality. Her name was beginning to be mentioned at conferences. In a few years, having been working in her group would open doors to academia. Or at least I hoped it would, it was the best chance I had.
I googled her before writing the application. She was three years my senior, and had received a tenured position as associate professor only last year. Her group was still pretty small with only two graduate students, and an open position that I hoped to fill. I wrote the application and sent it. With two years since my PhD and only a single year as research assistant since then, I was perhaps not the strongest applicant. But my specialization matched the position well, and perhaps few would apply.
The job interview was with Skype. The network connection was awful, we could hardly understand each other and video was out of the question. But we managed to communicate, and at the end she offered me the job.
I was received in Palombia City airport by Prof. Ruiz herself. She looked like her profile picture on the university web-page, except for a minor detail. She was beautiful! Somehow, that had not come across at all in her profile picture.
"Nice to meet you, professor Ruiz."
"Nice to meet you too, Michael. And please call me María."
She drove me to the small apartment where I would be staying, and explained how to get to the university next morning.
The first two months were enjoyable. The research project was fascinating (at least for a botany nerd like me), and I quickly became friends with the two students. María was an inspiring boss, and I began thinking of her as a friend, too. I also developed a crush on her, but of course did not in any way act on it. Why would she be interested in a guy like me? I am not ugly or anything, just pretty ordinary. And anyway, regardless of genders, sleeping with your professor is an awful career move - for both.
An important part of my work was planning the expedition into the Palombian rainforest. We would be sailing up a tributary of the Orinocco, and hoped to collect invaluable samples of some of the lesser-known groups of plants. Analyzing our finds would then be my main task for the next couple of years. When María was not there, the two students teased me about going into the jungle with a gorgeous woman, although clearly they knew María well and did not really expect anything to happen; in reality they were quite envious about the scientific opportunities and about the pure adventure of going into essentially uninhabited and almost uncharted land.
Eventually, the big day came. We were flown by a small airplane to an airstrip deep inside the jungle. A small motorboat was waiting for us, we would be sailing it ourselves. We planned to sail upstream for a week, and then walk into the jungle, and that was essentially what happened, although technical problems delayed us by two days. Then we walked, carrying everything we would need with us. At night we slept in a tiny tent, close together in our sleeping bags. Although the tent was small, there were never any physical intimacy between us, we both knew that would be a bad idea.
But we did get to know each other quite well, lying in the tent talking in the evenings. I told her of my childhood, growing up as a bright kid in a poor family without any tradition of getting an education, and how my parents struggled to give me the opportunities they never had - I guess I never fully appreciated what they did until I had to explain it to María. And she told me about growing up as the only child to a most unlikely couple. Her father was a moderately successful businessman, her mother had literally come right out of the jungle, growing up in a tribe deep in the rainforest, until some missionary convinced her to run away, then she had been trying to adapt to an alien world while preserving something of her old culture. She had insisted that María learned her mothers language, too.
"So if we meet any natives, you can speak their language?"
"Probably not," she answered. "My mother grew up more than five hundred kilometers from here. If we meet anybody, they probably speak a completely different language, or at least a dialect that is so different that we cannot communicate."
She actually looked a bit worried as she continued, "But we will not meet anybody. I am quite sure!"
I looked at her. By then she knew me well enough to realize that I knew she was slightly worried.
"The natives don't like 'white' people," she explained. "They never got anything good from us, only diseases, missionaries, and companies wanting their land."
