We were scheduled to have our final language tests at 11am. Those that could not pass the language tests could not be sworn in as volunteers and would spend an extra 2 weeks studying Spanish intensively. I have no idea what happens if they still don't pass after 2 weeks. But anyway, this test was to be given by a few select instructors that were to arrive by car at 11am. Micah and I were thrilled to have the day's obligations done at such an early hour and each had our respective free times packed with plans. However, early that morning, Milton, the guy that drives around shelling out money to each family as their compensation for keeping us, had some kind of major accident with a bus and was knocked out with a pile of cash in his car. Everything turned out more or less OK with that, but it caused our language testers to arrive 3 hours late. They pulled up in front of my house tentatively and yelled out the window that they wanted to drive up the street to Talwaza to do their tests first and said they would return in another 40 minutes. Micah, who like myself had been stewing in impatience for the past 3 hours, went to the car and told them no, we were scheduled first and we were going first

      The tests took place in various rooms of my house. All of us passed. My test ran the longest. When I came out of the house, the 7 or 8 other people were all hanging out on the porch. I told them I has heading to Santo Domingo. A few minutes later, I was smiling contentedly and listening to the animated discussion on my porch when the bus to Santo Domingo flew past. A few seconds later, Jason and I looked at each other and said, “Wasn't that the bus?”

     The people sitting on the outer edge of the porch leaned back in their chairs and peered up the street. They reported that someone had flagged down the bus 100 meters up the road. The whole porch exploded in screaming “Run! Catch it! Gooooo!” I took off running automatically. 30 meters up the road I realized I had just changed pants and may not have transferred my money. I ground to a halt and thrust my hand in my pocket. The whole porch, now draped over the porch railings, began yelling again “Go! Runnnnn!” Automatically I took off running again. Half way to the bus, it began to pull away. I pushed my speed higher. I was gaining on the bus, but it would soon outrun me when the driver moved up the gears. I finally flanked the bus moving my legs at top speed, thinking about how great it was going to be to grab the bar next to the open door and swing myself triumphantly onto the bus stairs. 10 feet from the door, the driver caught sight of me in his side view mirror and jacked the brakes. I threw an arm out and grabbed the bar and nearly flung myself horizontal when I suddenly found myself moving 15 miles an hour faster than the bus.

      In Santo Domingo, I stopped back at the internet place that could not figure out its own CD burner to see if my pictures were still on the computer and thus ready to be lifted to this web page. They had been erased. I checked my email; no one had written. I then returned to a place I had seen other Peace Corps gringos hanging out at earlier; they were gone. I was burnt up. A day that had begun with so much promise of being a productive one had become a total loss. I decided I would just bus home, borrow Jason's laptop and spend the rest of the evening assembling text for the website. Guess who wasn't in San Miguel when I got there. Yep. And all the busses were done for the evening. I had absolutely nothing to do, so I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling drifting in and out of sleep.

      The phone rang; it was Micah. He was down the street from a party the Peace Corps gringos were whoopin up at a semi-outdoor restaurant called the French Burger. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing at home and was I just going to let this party suck by not attending it? I thought I had made it clear earlier that I was not planning on going to that party and thus my absence should have been well anticipated. Micah was having none of that. I told him I would have EcuaMom's son, who was visiting the house at that moment, take me with him when he left. He could at least get me off via Puerto Limon and I could take a city bus from there. Instead, EcuaMom's son dropped me off directly at French Burger. Showing up late to a party at a semi-outdoor restaurant in Ecuador by stepping out of an actual car that is dropping you off where you tell it to while you are wearing flip-flops, it should be noted, is pimp.

      Animal Production, plus 2 chickens, a guinea pig and a rabbit drove to a place called Luz de America. After Roberto wasted a few hours of our lives, we killed our animals. The rabbit was smashed over the head with a tire iron and was then decapitated. Then after a big explosion of its pee flew into the air, we opened it up and made a big mess out of its guts. The guinea pig was merely stretched imperceptibly and then set down again motionless. This wasn't sufficient for Animal Production so we cut its throat, bled it and then opened it up and made a big mess of its guts. Lonnie quickly and quietly killed his chicken.

     Something about the horrific acts of violence Animal Production was committing on this day were somehow traveling through my brain using the wrong neural networks and were producing uncontrollable laughter. I laughed when the rabbit's head was cut off. I laughed when its head was momentarily produced from a bag of its own blood, thoroughly sullied. I laughed when the partially skinned rabbit resembled a poodle. I laughed at my chicken who was filthy from the coop I never cleaned and the faulty watering trough I never fixed that the chickens routinely flipped over on themselves. I laughed when the gash I put in the chickens throat merely wounded it and caused it to bleed into unconsciousness. I laughed when Roberto ordered me to come back and kill my chicken for real. I laughed at nothing at all as the successful slash into its neck left the chicken writhing to death in my hands. Afterwards, we went to Calazacon to present the statistics of our animal raising projects, such as the total cost of feed and the weights of animals etc. Like everyone else, I had not kept track of anything and so falsified all the information for my presentation.

      I handed Roberto my competencies. Roberto is such a pathetic piece of human excrement that it is beneath the human race to waste their time dealing him insults. Unlike Roberto's handling of everyone else's competencies, he scrutinized mine to the extreme and called my attention to every flaw in my work- and there were many because my work was completely falsified. To this day I stand behind my total falsification of required Peace Corps competencies. Were y'all aware that there are people in Washington D.C. at the Peace Corps headquarters whose sole job is to conduct internet searches for web pages its volunteers are putting out to “verify that it is in agreement” with everything that is being said? That's right, censorship. Well, the United States Government and the Peace Corps may not believe in freedom of speech, but I can tell you who does. That's right, baby, yours truly. And it is for the D.C. web weasels that I say the following: I falsified the information on my competencies for the same reason I throw junk mail into the garbage unopened- because it is less than worthless; it is a nuisance. You cherish the thought that you are considered an independent organization of the U.S. government. I don't know to what extent you possess true independence, but I'll tell you this much: If you're independent, you've been lying down with dogs. Someone brought fleas into this house. You're a wooden hippy that's been eaten away by termites for 40 years. And your competencies? The snatches of pseudo merit you use to judge volunteers, while at the same time, out of the other side of your mouth you are preaching that people see past the surface? Yeah THOSE competencies- they are a joke and not a single person on this side of the fence believes otherwise. I am happy to say that the skills you thought your competencies were teaching were totally lost on me. As my successes continue to mount in El Tambo, I want you to know that you had nothing to do with any of them. Your “training” has served to annoy and harass your volunteers only. You gave them nothing. And my name is Trent Binkley. Put it in your file.

      Roberto decided that he was going to deal with my competencies using different standards than he used with everyone else's. Roberto went in search of flaws. He could not seem to criticize me enough. Finally he said that one of the competencies could not pass. Technically, this meant that I could not become a volunteer. I was livid. Everyone who witnessed the spectacle was disgusted. They all knew that the particularity of Roberto's standards applied only to me. They knew this because 75% of them had had their final competencies checked off without Roberto so much as glancing at them. I decided that if they refused to “swear me in” as a volunteer, they were going to have to physically capture me in order to deport me. I know scads of gringos scattered across this country who would be glad to house me when I wasn't traveling. Happy hunting.

      The EcuaFamilies left at 2 pm. The gringos hung around longer to swim. At around 4 pm I left for San Miguel to pack. This was the last night I would spend in San Miguel. In the morning, the scattered gringos of the Santo Domingo area were scheduled to leave for Quito and from Quito to their permanent sites.

      I was coming up via Puerto Limon in the bed of a pickup truck full of campo workers with San Miguel in site when we encountered San Miguel Jason, a few of his EcuaFamily members, the dog “Lupe” that always followed Jason around and about 40 cows which were strolling all over the road. The cows more or less parted to let us through, but when we picked up speed again, Lupe decided to play a game his degenerate EcuaDog friends had taught him and tried to attack the pickup truck. I was yelling something in English at Jason about what a poor cowhand he made when I saw Lupe make his fatal error. I stopped mid-sentence to listen for the thud. It sounded bad. The pickup truck stopped. Jason went beneath the truck to free the dog. It stumbled into the roadside ditch and fell on its side projective- vomiting. Then it let rip with the most bone chilling wail as the pickup truck again resumed driving.

      When the driver dropped me off in front of my house, he apologized about the fate of the “perrito”. I told him it was the dog's fault and was the 2nd or 3rd dog I had seen killed in San Miguel trying to chase cars. I went inside and got 90% packed and then stopped to eat. EcuaMom was being very sentimental. She spoke to me in wistful tones and actually ate her dinner with me at the table, which I don't believe had ever happened before. She asked if I could leave her something small to remember me by. The gravity of what was happening began affecting me greatly. I did my best to block it all out, but so much had happened here it was impossible. Our roots had grown deeper into San Miguel than any of us had realized. Wouldn't Micah always be my around-the-corner-neighbor? Wasn't the sound of the steel tienda window guard always going to open and close the day? Unconsciously, we loose sight of these things. Our lives in San Miguel had never felt like a temporary thing and its end had snuck up on all of us.

      I walked over to Grace's house. She was packing up her room. She asked me if this leaving San Miguel business wasn't surprisingly difficult. I looked away and nodded. I sat in her room and kept us both distracted with conversation. It had been a long time since Grace and I had really talked. We had been busy with different things in different places lately. The last night was ending the way the first day had begun, with Grace and I talking at length.

      We moved the conversation outside so Grace could wash some clothes. I ran across the street to my house to grab something from my room. I arrived at my house just behind Micah, whom I saw jogging through the front door. He had come to say goodbye to EcuaMom because he was leaving with his things on the last bus leaving San Miguel that night. He asked if I wanted to wait with him at the bus stop. I looked over at the bus stop and saw Micah's forlorn EcuaParents sitting in the dark with Micah's things. “Vamos”, I told him.

      Micah's EcuaDad sat mostly in silence, but his EcuaMom was saying- almost singing- all manner of dirgeful things about her little bird forever flying away. When the bus arrived, I snapped picture after picture. When it left I went back to Grace's house. Along the way, I passed a parked truck whose bed was loaded with all the San Miguel neighbor kids. They stopped me and asked me if we were all leaving tomorrow. I said yes. The kids shifted. I asked if they were going to be around tomorrow. All the kids shook their heads. We all looked at each other for a moment and then 13 year old Ramiro and I fired handshakes at each other. I went around the truck shaking each kid's hand. 5 year old Karin stepped out of the darkness behind the truck and shot her hand up at me. I shook it and said goodbye doing an impression of her. I don't think she recognized herself because I omitted the falsetto voice, but she still laughed. Then I disappeared into the darkness in the direction of Grace's house.

      Grace and I packed for a while and then made a few phone calls to the Peace Corps about the wallet she had lost on the bus toady. Then we sat at the kitchen table while Grace ate. Micah's EcuaMom stopped by and moped into the kitchen with her unaddressed feelings of loss in tow. Again she made a speech in a mournful tone about life and loss and human bonding. She had heard Grace lost he wallet and a bunch of picture I.D.s on the bus. After waxing poetic about life's lemons and watching your stuff on busses, she presented Grace with 5 dollars- about a days wage. We were shocked. Grace extended the 5 dollars back to her saying “No, no, no, no, no, noooooooo. No. No.” but Micah's EcuaMom would not budge.

      Grace and I walked over to Jason's house to say goodbye to his family. Then we stopped briefly at Micah's. The males of Micah's EcuaFamily swung by our houses in a pickup truck about a ½ hour later to pick us and our things up. Jason, Grace and I extended our handshakes through the iron fence of the tienda at EcuaDad. I told EcuaDad to tell EcuaMom that I would return and bring my real family with me as promised.

      On the ride to the bus terminal, I showed Micah's EcuaDad the pictures of Micah leaving from the night before. With each picture, he made a sound of triumphant surprise and either clapped his hands together once or shrugged histrionically to express his astonishment that I had caught the whole event on camera. Then we all nearly passed out from the trucks exhaust leak that was pumping directly into the pickup's covered bed where we were all sitting.

      At the bus terminal, the PCTs were slowly trickling in and assembling. We had rented out an entire bus but were as yet unaware that said bus was waiting 200 yards across the street and outside the terminal grounds. A messenger soon brought this news and all migrated to the correct location. While the tons of suitcases were being loaded into the bus' undercarriage, Grace, the group's designated money collector, collected each persons share of the rental fee. I spotted a bad counterfeit Sackagewea coin among her handful of Sackageweas and traded it immediately for a real one. I had reversed the anti-counterfeit stance I had been sold upon arrival in Ecuador because I figured that small counterfeit currencies snagged from circulation would make nifty gifts for a few people in the States.

      The undercarriage filled up easily with our mountains of gringo possessions so the rest of the bags had to be piled into the aisle inside the bus. We left for Quito. About an hour into the mountains, the bus driver said the bus was overheating and he could take us back to Santo Domingo and give us a partial refund or he could give us enough money to offload most of the gringos and reload them on passing busses also headed to Quito, while the original bus continued onward with all the baggage and only a handful of people. It was unclear how the driver knew he was overheating as there was no temperature gauge and no overt signs of overheating, but we opted to lighten the people load and continue onward scattered across 3 busses.

In Quito, a load of people and I climbed into a pickup truck with a bed cap and caught an overpriced ride to the “Arupo” hostel near a touristy district called Marispol. Then another group and I set out in search of food in Marispol- a district full of internet places and trendy restaurants technically off limits to Peace Corps personnel. We pretty much killed the whole afternoon there.