NN was a young mathematics teacher in Denmark who went to Ecuador in 2008. What's unusual is that his parents were from Korea, having migrated to Europe during the war that divided the country into two: the communist north and the capitalist south.
At that time, the United States and Europe were beginning to experience the Real Estate Crisis, which wreaked havoc in developed countries because banks granted loans to people who lacked the ability to repay. The economy had recently transitioned from a period of great economic expansion, a result of the US and NATO's victory in the Cold War. This expansion opened the markets of Eastern European countries and the former USSR to transnational companies that arrived with technological innovations, especially personal computers, then the internet, cell phones, as well as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Italian shoes, French perfumes—in short, a revolution in supply and demand. This influx added millions of consumers and skilled labor, as the population of Eastern Europe was educated, healthy, and younger than that of Western Europe. However, this chaos in the former socialist countries created a large wave of migration. Millions of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, East Germans, Albanians, people from the Baltic republics, and especially from the republics of Yugoslavia, who had endured a brutal war, emigrated from their countries and created a huge demand for houses and apartments in the United States and Western Europe. Banks lent money to real estate companies and their clients to rent and build homes, creating a housing bubble. Ten years later, there were more houses and apartments for rent than tenants. Those who had taken out loans couldn't pay them, the banks were left with mortgaged properties, and couldn't sell them either. For the first time in capitalism, real estate lost its value, creating a wave of panic. Large banks began to fail, and countries had to bail them out with public funds, which created unemployment and led to the disappearance of backpackers who lost their jobs when they went on trips.
When NN arrived in Ecuador, the country was experiencing one of the best periods in its history. Rafael Correa was in power, and the price of oil had reached over one hundred dollars a barrel. This president renegotiated with the oil companies. Before his administration, oil companies paid for every five barrels of oil extracted from the Ecuadorian Amazon with one barrel of oil. Correa changed this, paying for every five barrels extracted with one barrel, which allowed him to have money available for significant investment in infrastructure, education, and health.
The 2008 real estate crisis and Ecuador's dollarization since 2000 reduced the number of volunteers and Spanish students at the foundation, which relied on Spanish classes that included accommodation for students, as the volunteers paid for their food and lodging in the communities.
A crisis at the foundation forced its administrator, a doctor, to seek employment at the Ministry of Health. He went to work on the northern border, in the Carchi Province, where Plan Colombia had been in effect since 2002. Under this plan, the Ecuadorian and U.S. armies operated like the anvil, while the Colombian army and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group, operated like the hammer, aiming to eliminate the FARC, who controlled the border between Ecuador and Colombia. This was compounded by the fumigation with glyphosate to destroy coca plantations, which led to a large migration of Colombians to Ecuador, precisely to the area where NN went to work as a volunteer.
NN arrived to work at the school in La Loma, a community in the La Concepción canton, where the Afro-Andean culture of Black people brought since the 17th century—mostly Africans from the Congo River region—was preserved intact, their surnames reflecting their origins. The doctor who directed the foundation also worked there. His Spanish teacher, the doctor's daughter, came to visit him in that remote place, nestled in a hot, dry valley, where sugarcane, bean, and tomato plantations grew alongside the mansions of the grand colonial estates.
His job was to teach those cheerful, ever-smiling children English and math, but what attracted the students most were his Taekwondo classes, since back in Denmark, he was a teacher at the sports club in his hometown. To the inhabitants of that small Andean village, this teacher, who resembled Bruce Lee, was from a country called Chinamarca.
