When I got home from the internet place, I talked on the phone to the States for 3 hours, and then watched Ecuador lose to Brazil in soccer on TV. I was secretly pulling for Brazil for 1/3 of the game because I hadn’t realized Ecuador wasn’t wearing their trademark bright yellow jerseys because the game took place in Brazil and they also wear bright yellow jerseys. Like I know anything more about the Ecuador national soccer team than that their jerseys are yellow.

      10am: The house was entirely empty, save for my happy ass, when a military guy in fatigues with a bevy of conscripts in the bed of his camouflage pick up truck came to the door asking for the man of the house and was I he. I told him I was not. Incidentally, the answer you should probably always give to Latin American military guys on your front porch, asking if you are the man of the house, is that you are not. Just a little tip from me to you. Then the military guy asked where the man of the house was. I assumed this had something to do with Ivan having turned 19, the age in Ecuador at which males put in a mandatory year of military service. Ivan had been refusing to go down and register with the military, as he is required to do, knowing fully that there was a strong possibility they would come looking for him. The truthful answer to this question was harmless, so I gave it: Julio was working in Ancon. The man told me his work detail was looking to buy bread and they had somehow been aware that Julio makes it. I told him we normally make bread, but had none at the moment. The man gave my hand a single, domineering shake and left.

     When I heard the return of Susanna’s hallmark flip-flops shuffling leisurely across the gritty cement floors, I finished a paragraph I was typing and went out to use the military guy story to reopen the topic of her getting Julio to let her make bread. But Susanna got to me first. She was scrambling in from the front porch to tell me to come out and see what she referred to as “the pig party”.

     I had never seen so many people in the street in Tambo. Not only that, but from what I could discern at such a distance, there appeared to be quite a tumult amongst them. Susanna gave a perfectly unintelligible narrative, which I spent the next 5 minutes chipping away at through a succession of largely identical but variously worded questions. “Los militars” she said, were coursing through the streets picking up any pigs they encountered to take back to the barracks to fatten and eat. The pretense they use for this exercise is that animals are not legally permitted to be outside of their pens.

     “So they’re stealing pigs?”, I asked.

     During the day, I posed this question three times to three different people and each time the response was that ‘no, they weren’t stealing the pigs, they were taking them away because this was the how they get people to pen up their pigs in order to maintain a little order in the streets of Tambo’. I asked them if they think the military really gives a damn about order in the streets of Tambo or if they just want free pigs (recall that the military has to raise all their own food, as do many of the world’s militaries). A few people smirked at this, but no one acknowledged that I had a point. A very good point, I would say.

     As with every tragedy hued happening in El Tambo, the “Pig Party” quickly became a lively social event with flying wisecracks and guffaw aplenty. I brought out my borrowed digital camera. Susanna watched the mini screen over my shoulder and squealed with delight as I zoomed in a lot closer to the action than we could see with our eyes. Susanna’s grinning sisters strolled up from a side street with amusing anecdotes from Pig Party action in their neighborhood and Susanna immediately directed them to the zooming camera. Little by little, an assortment of women from various directions that had meandered into the vicinity joined in the revelry and boomeranged hilarious observations amid the messy cluster we were forming in the street.

     Every few seconds someone in the distance would spring out from between houses hoisting pigs or dogs and race them to the safety of their tumbledown enclosures. Military conscripts zig zagged in the street with giant butterfly nets trying to collar delinquent swine. The pig sweep moved slowly in our direction, but upon reaching a certain proximity, the camouflage pick up truck drove directly over to where we were standing. The driver asked, sternly but not condescendingly, why I was taking pictures (of the military stealing poor people’s pigs).

     I walked up to his window and told him I didn’t know; there wasn’t any reason. And I didn’t feel pressed to think of a reason either. I was taking pictures of a slow speed “legal” pig round up taking place in full view of everyone in town. So the hell what, G.I. José? Susanna then thrust forward and launched into a vehement justification for the picture taking, joined at once by most of the women gathered there. An unknown woman behind me began steadily pulling me backwards away from the window and the clamoring women filled in the gap. After a moment, the truck began pulling away. I raised my camera above the crowd and took a picture of the 2 pigs they were hauling away in the back of the truck. With such instinctive unity, it’s surprising women haven’t historically gone further- oh, wait, that’s right, the external threat of distant men pushed their own men to unearned prominence (SEE ALSO: Bush, George W.). When I was scrolling through my pictures immediately afterward, I accidentally deleted the 2 best ones, including the one I shot of the truck and pigs up close. Oops. Sorry, ladies. But good looking out for a brotha!

     Soon after arriving home, my rooting around beneath my bed turned up something completely unrelated to what I was looking for. In my crates of things Debi Kerner had bestowed upon me before leaving the area for good, were little plastic folders with clips to restrain holed sheets of paper. Not only that, but the hole punching mechanism that puts 2 crisp holes in one’s papers at the precise spacing of the clips, was also among my things. And thus, my English Folders of Superb Knowledge Benefaction were born, and for another moment, the ghost of Debi again soared high amid the peninsula breeze.

     That night, at 10:30pm, the phone in my room knocked me rearwards from the initial stages of sleep being probed beneath my mosquito net and sent me scrambling through the darkness to gag the plastic antagonist. The small voice pealing sweetly on the other end was Grace in Patate. She was hosting 2 other volunteers who were tentatively planning to visit Ela in Baeza but had been unsuccessful that day at contacting her by telephone. Did I have a different phone number for her, they wondered. I did not. But then, to my amazement, like a crudely projected hologram from the silvery cap of R2D2, a scratchy message emerged from where Ela had planted it in my brain. Ela was attending a volunteer’s party near Santo Domingo, I told them, and she had left word with me to implore Grace’s guests, should I somehow manage to make contact with Grace, to join her in Santo Domingo, if at all possible. I scratched at my underwear in the darkness and blinked in bewilderment at my brain acting of its own accord. The small voice on the other end then reported that her guests probably could not attend the party, but thanks for clearing up the mystery and it was good, as always, to talk with me. And have a good night.

     I went around the room and had each student read a “secret for speaking like an American” out loud and after each, launched into a personal story pertaining to each tip. When the class ended, the other students from various levels invaded our corner of the 2 room school house and envied the colorful Folders of Superb Knowledge Benefaction, asking why they had not also received such. After everyone was herded out of the school, 4 students invited me to the park with them to eat 5-cent homemade popsicles and generic brand EcuaCheetos.

     After lunch, I put Alex to work proof reading my final charla on the laptop so I could begin writing it all out on giant sheets of paper. Then I worked from 2 to 9pm doing just that and playing through every last bit of music I had brought to Ecuador. At 7pm, I was interrupted by the family bursting into my room and imploring me to come quickly with my camera because Ivan had come home drunk for the first time. Julio put him in bed and stayed behind with him when the rest of the family went up to sit at Merci’s tienda. Ivan’s work began calling around 9:30 to say an unexpected job had come up and that he was to report that night to work. Ivan tried to dodge the obligation but ended up leaving for work around 10pm still drunk.

     At 10 am, I walked with Julio up to the school grounds to see the cement being poured into the small courtyard between buildings at the school. At 11am, raging with a system on coffee overload, I gave my final pig charla to an audience of 6 people who sat way, way too close to my sheets of paper and made me have to speak almost at my knees. The excessive coffee did not prove to be much of an asset under the circumstances. No sir.

     After lunch, I shoved a few last minute things in my backpack and walked outside to the bathroom. Seeing me walking across the hardpacked dirt yard with a loaded backpack, Julio stuck his head out the window with a wry smile and asked where I was off to.

     “Santo Domingo”, I answered. A look of unpleasant surprised shattered across his face.

     “Where?!”

     “Santo Domingo. You guys didn’t know?”

     “No!”

     Susanna leaned in behind him and clarified that they had known something, but had obviously confused the specifics. I went to my room to grab my calendar with the family in hot pursuit. I showed them that I had written where I would be and on what days and when we were all clear on what was happening, I left for Libertad to catch a bus to Guayaquil and then Santo Domingo.

     When the women the bus periodically picked up began sporting buckwheats-in-a-headlock and the air filled with the smell of burning garbage, I knew we were close to Santo Domingo. From the bus station of Santo Domingo, I cabbed to the Sol del Plata hotel, where I found a note saying that Ela and 5 other volunteers had left for a nearby restaurant about 3 hours earlier and that I should meet them there. After a long deliberation on whether or not I should bother going to the restaurant when I would likely arrive just in time to find the 6 of them paying their bill to leave, I decided to chance it. Waiting for them in the hotel was not an option as I was going to fall asleep from having gotten up so early. I got in a cab and headed to the restaurant, where, as predicted, I arrived just in time to find the 6 of them paying their bill to leave. The 7 of us then walked back to the hotel, got 3 rooms, hung out on the roof for a while watching the usual assortment of stammering idiot drunks in the street below and then retired to our rooms.