I walked through the front door of Julio’s house and took a deep, theatric bow. Ivan, the sole witness, laughed and then reported my return to the rest of the house. Everyone came running. Susanna had earlier mistakenly heard me say that I would be back ‘after noon’ (medio dia), when I had actually said ‘after dinner’ (merienda [and no I don’t mean cena]). The difference, of course, is being either on time or 8 hrs late. I was right on time, but the family had already spent the evening worrying about my whereabouts due to the error. Julio placed a callback to Debi telling her I had turned up and to desist all fretting and/or peering expectantly from windows.

     A little later, Julio told me Francisco had called to tell me about a surprise party planned for Debi later this week and that I was to call him to learn the details. Instead, I received a call from the States and gabbed until it was too late to go bothering Francisco.

     The local anti malarial crew came to El Tambo midmorning to spray insecticide on houses. Julio told the crew not to spray his house (just the area at the very back of his land) due to his wariness of toxic chemicals. He ran this decision past me and I concurred. Just the same, overspray from the neighbor’s house drifted into my room and forced me out.

     As luck would have it, when I did return to my room, I immediately stumbled across an article about the death rates from agricultural insecticide use in the highlands of Ecuador being 20 times higher than previously estimated.

     After lunch, as our phone service is cut off from having gone delinquent on the bill, I bussed into Santa Elena to use the phones at Bell South. Then internet. At 4:30pm, I left internet for Debi’s surprise party. Whatever was supposed to have been occupying Debi away from her house failed to happen, so she was present when the first person arrived and thus it was no longer a surprise party. The rest of the guests showed up at 5:30pm. We all left around 8:30pm.

     Later, as I was on the phone (we can still receive incoming calls, though technically without service), a strange ailment in the phone ended in my call being cut off. I investigated and found that mud wasps were building a home inside the phone jack. I shook out the wasp and taped over the hole.

     I worked on my pig lecture until lunch. After lunch, Ivan got me ensnarled in video games, which I played by myself until dinner a mere 6 hours later. After dinner, I went outside to throw my frisbee with a weird neighbor kid. When Julio came out to watch, several wayward tosses that landed near him sucked him into the game. Soon, the weird neighbor kid dropped out and Julio and I began the most out of control frisbee contest this country may ever have seen. I kept flying out of my flip flops, but when I changed into regular shoes, the game really heated up. We were totally in the zone. It was like Matrix frisbee.

     I knew that frisbee was going straight for Julio’s rooftop when I saw him hesitate an instant before throwing it. Thought about it, he did. That’s not how frisbees work. Susanna came out to see what that noise on the roof had been and stood there laughing at what may or may not have really been us looking forlorn at having lost our toy.

     An idle student standing nearby then spoke up and told me he’s having trouble raising his bananas. I hit him up with a few questions and then just went with him and Julio to have a look at the plants in question. Diagnosis: your soil sucks. You can’t raise bananas in ground that is so compacted that water cant penetrate it. I told him to mix some of El Tambo’s daily tonnages of sawdust into the soil to fluff it up and aerate it. He could mix in some of his pig’s older and drier dookie, as long as it was a good bit down from the surface of the soil (future dookie should be well composted to avoid breeding parasites fresh from the pig’s intestines).

     “Can chicken dookie be used on plants”, he asked

     “Why yes, but not fresh chicken dookie because the nitrogen content is too extreme. What have you been doing with the tons of crap your animals have been producing?”

     “We throw it out.”

     “You’re joking, right? Hey, wanna learn how to compost and make worm beds?”

     “Absolutely”

     “Really? Uh… So, when you kill your pigs, do they have parasites inside them?”

     “Yep”

     “That’s because you’re breeding parasites in the muck of their pen. A $5 bag of cement and a bottle of Clorox will end your parasite problem forever.”

     His jaw fell open and I had to shield my eyes from the light bulb above his head. This was too easy. These people aren’t stupid, just ignorant as all get out. I told the student we could talk more later, but that we should get back to the school.

     When we returned to the school, there was a general meeting in progress that didn’t have anything to do with me, but I was whisked to the center of it by Guido anyway. It was long and boring. When it finally ended, the students and I began leaving, but I was stopped by another teacher and told the teachers were now going to have another meeting. I was irate. I teach English for free. The rest is not my concern. The second meeting dragged on forever and said almost nothing of substance. The meeting had absolutely nothing to do with me. Why turn me around when I’m leaving to attend someone else’s meeting? Now I was extremely irate. Tambo folk love meetings. They wallow in the stuff. There is no concept of “wasting time” in Tambo. In a town where sitting on your porch staring straight ahead at nothing for hours is a valid activity, a meeting about anything at all is considered high entertainment. If your largely pointless meeting gets down to business and terminates prudently, what are you supposed to do with the rest of your day?

     Back at Julio’s, the dining room/bedroom/living room was full of people watching a brainless Chuck Norris movie on my VCR. The lunch I was eating was cold, no doubt because it had been ready for hours while I was stuck in meetings. The people crowded around the television kept turning around and staring at me. I think they wanted me to say “Oh wow! You guys found a Chuck Norris movie! High rollin’! Chuck Norris is the bomb!” I had had enough of El Tambo. After 3 bites of my lunch I left for Libertad.

     I pulled money out of the ATM at the mall and went to email people. After emailing, I went back to the mall to eat, and more importantly, stay away from Tambo. When I returned to Tambo around 8:30pm, I made the mistake of paying a social visit to Susanna’s sister’s tienda with the rest of the clan, where I found the good mood that typing emails and eating mall food had put me in was not transferable.

     Back at home, the wild ass party going on next door did not prevent even one second of my nights sleep, where I conducted my 3rd consecutive night of extraordinary dreaming. I’d like to discover the source of all this enhanced mental activity. Wouldn’t it be cool to isolate a single external stimulus and then experiment with varying doses of it to see what kinds of controlled manipulation of dreaming are possible? Shut up, you think about this same stuff, too.

     I worked on my pig lecture from morning till after lunch. You would think with all the work I'm putting into this pig lecture it's fixin to be a masterpiece. No. The problem is that these people know so little about hogs that I have to tell them everything. That means that not only does every lecture have to be able to stand on its own, but also has to fit into a comprehensive system of pig lectures. I have to know where I'm going with all this lecturing from the start and have to keep that in perspective every step of the way. Why? Because I'm teaching people who are hung up on my foreignness and in a language I am at best shaky in on a subject I have only just learned. If I confuse them on the implications of what I am saying, I will probably never know. I didn't come all the way down here to shoot from the hip and make easily preventable mistakes. So, in spite of all my efforts, I am still at square one with the pig lectures.

     After lunch, there came a knock at my wooden shutters. Apparently the shutters weren't latched tightly enough because they slowly swung open from the impact. Lorena's head floated in my window with her hand covering her mouth. I greeted her through an ironic grin and then got up and did a mock karate chop through the open window, causing her to proliferate apologies. I interrupted her and told her it was OK; no harm, no foul. After a few minutes, her disembodied head asked me if I wanted to leave the house. I said I could, figuring we would go pasiando on the main drag again. Instead we went straight to her house. With very little in the way of talking, Lorena put a giant plate of food on the table and directed me to have at it. I told her I had just eaten. She pleaded with me to eat anyway. I sat down and began shoveling food into my mouth. She and her 13-year-old sister joined me, sitting at the far ends of the rectangular table with much smaller plates of the same meal. No one talked. The 13 year old and I began exchanging commentary on the awkwardness of the situation through comical glances and were soon both on the edge of laughing. I was the first to falter. Lorena, who had been engrossed in her meal, raised her head like a quizzical deer. “Mande? (come again?)”, she queried.

     My mouth was stuffed full of rice, but it was obvious I was fighting back a smile. I shook my head and tried to bunch up my eyebrows in an earnest expression of 'Oh nothing', but was still practically laughing. Lorena glanced at her sister and then lowered a frown to her food and continued eating.

     Amazingly, I managed to eat about 85% of my food. Lorena's plate had a deliberately untouched triangle of banana on it and a deliberately untouched portion of rice that she had scraped into comely pile. I had no idea what social perfunctory this was supposed to address, but assumed she was trying to mirror my inability to consume my entire meal. This, too, kept me suspended on the edge of laughter. Lorena is always in the throes of some meticulous social choreography. She really is a consummate artist with respect to all of that, but to a total philistine, like myself, banana triangles are hilarious.

     A TV was then carried out from a back room and the channel ended up on cartoons. My EcuaHosts were rapt and laughed out loud at the schtick. A chicken strolled into Lorena's house and began slamming its head repeatedly on a hard green banana lying on the dirt floor. Lorena pretended to care and flailed her arms in its direction until the instant the chicken half-heartedly responded to her movements with a fluttery recoil, at which point Lorena returned her full attention to the cartoons.

     I told Lorena I had to get back to the pig lecture I was writing and made my exit. At home, I tried to write but got sucked into my TV and videotapes. Julio and the family went up to sit in front of the tienda, but I stayed home and basked in the house's all to uncommon emptiness.