At the factory, we sat in Raul’s office until a plant manager came who could explain all the machines to me and took both Raul and I for the tour. The plant was a fairly sophisticated operation, but with production shut down to clean and prepare for the inspection, it didn’t make for very involved tour. They make ketchup, mustard, jellies, hot sauce, mayonnaise and canned sardines there. Then we returned to Raul’s office so they could have me translate a sheet of technical procedures and operations aloud. You may not realize, but things such as instructions and technical procedures, in English, Spanish or any other language are a thing far removed from the way normal people speak to each other. My Spanish comprehension is pretty much conversation only. I cannot translate technical lingo and awkwardly written technical instruction with anything resembling fluidity. Surprisingly, the 2 men seemed to understand that technical writing is different and they were convinced that they were going into their plant tour with a decent translator. I, however, am less sure.

         On the way out, Raul handed me a brown paper bag with 4 cans of sardines and a jar of mustard. The way Raul drove me home seemed to be a very misdirected and inefficient way to get from the Factory to Tambo, but I later looked on the map and found it to be a very clever shortcut that I would probably never have thought of myself without my own car and plenty of time experimenting with roads in the campo. Raul’s shortcut included a mini tour of 3 small pueblos I had never seen nor had any reason to: the port of Chanduy (where the factory is), El Real (a fishing village), and Atahualpa (a furniture building town like Tambo). We glanced off the outskirts of Ancon, and as we were approaching Prosperidad, had a surprise visit from Oswaldo Leon, the veterinarian, who then pulled up alongside us and motioned us to pull over.

         Oswaldo got out of his car and came over to us, telling Raul he was now free on Wednesday and could accompany the Factory tour. Then in English he told me that I did not look good and have lost a lot of weight. He asked me if I have been taking any de-wormers and told me I should be eating more protein. Then he caught himself and joked that he does not think himself my dad, but worries about me just the same. After a bit more jabbering, I was driven the final half-kilometer home. I got the feeling that Oswaldo wanted to talk to Raul about something and had not realized I was in the car when he flagged us down.

         I walked into the house and handed Susanna the sardines and mustard telling her I do not eat any of that and I don’t want to see it turning up on my dinner plate. She says she doesn’t eat them either. I ate lunch and then returned to my proof reading. Around 1 pm, the neighbor kids Ines and Antonio came into my room and began playing and asking lots of questions. I kept them occupied with my camera while I finished up what I was typing and then led an exposition into the campo to acquire various dried animal turds to grind up, mix with sawdust and plant my palm seeds from Florida in. The turd collection turned into a grand event for a number of extraneous neighbor kids who joined the expedition and burned up extravagant amounts of energy in their excitement over the novelty of the activity (now look back at this sentence and count the number of words beginning with “ex”). I found that grinding dry turds is not as easy as one might think and I fast became sweaty and got blisters on my hands from cranking wood planks in a pot of said dumps.

         After accumulating a good collection of powdered turd, I put turd grinding on hold and left for Santa Elena to do internet. I caught the bus with Lorena’s 13-year-old sister who goes to “nursing school” in Santa Elena. I asked her what they study there and do they draw blood and give shots. She said ‘yes, the students practice such on each other’. I raised my eyebrows and asked her what happens if she screws up while sticking a needle in a fellow 13-year-old student. She shrugged. I made a mental note never to get sick in Ecuador and then got off the bus and did a few hours worth of backed up emails at an internet place.

         I returned home about 6:30 pm to eat. Only Susanna was home. After eating, I turned my brand new clippers loose on my head and intermittently talked on the phone with Jeanne (known as Miss Brownfield in the mean streets of south Toledo) in Ohio. I went to bed looking like Lyle Lovett and would not be sure if the haircut had been a success until I wetted it down and smacked a glob of gel on it in the morning.

         I arrived home in high spirits and stood on my porch greeting passerbys. I even returned a few wayward soccer balls with a swift punt from my flip-flop. Then I went inside and tried to write but was intercepted by a phone call and dinner. Around 9pm, Raul from the sardine factory called to say their long anticipated American visitors had a slight change of plans and would be arriving late tomorrow. Now he would no longer be picking me up at 8am, but rather at 2pm.

         To pass the time, I was handed an industrial magazine about the latest advances in labeling machines, conveyor belts and plastics technologies. Oddly enough, it was some of the most fascinating reading I have ever encountered. I’m not kidding. It was absolutely fascinating. It’s just something universally taken for granted that everything we buy comes in shrink-wrap or plastic display cases with colorful labels and stamped expiration dates. You never wonder what it takes to mass-produce something like that and to do so economically. There were articles about tiny changes in a plastic wrapper’s formula that added months to a cookie’s shelf life and cut tens of thousands of dollars off a factory’s annual production costs. There were articles about machines created just to remove the shrink-wrap from incoming pallets at double the speed of 2 human workers. Ever wonder how they stamp milk jugs with expiration dates? Of course not! Who thinks about that stuff? But for every product on a shelf, there is a dizzying amount of super high tech automation, cost analysis, patent wars, mechanical engineers, teams of technicians, robotics, and graphic designers. They even sell mechanized labor in these magazines. You can buy machines that stick labels on stuff and then hook them up to interchangeable conveyor belts, which one could connect to a filler nozzle and lid screwer and then sit in your house all day making stuff automatically, which cracks you up because you typed the words “turd sauce” into the label maker. Its like a giant erector set. They even give awards, like something resembling the Pulitzer, for commercial packaging displaying outstanding originality and effective use of advanced technologies to create an attractive, consumer friendly product. Who knew? I was completely blown away.

         When the 2 gringos showed up, I found out they were here from the FDA (Food and Drug) to make sure that all products being shipped to the States meet their standards. The Ecuadorians instantly became nervous upon their arrival. It was really tense and awkward. What’s worse is that no one was giving me a chance to translate anything, which was the whole reason I was there. A gringo would tell me a question to ask but the Ecuadorian would think he understood what had just been said to me in English and would automatically launch into a Spanish answer. The answer would miss the mark terribly and while I would be trying to explain the real question, the gringo would begin asking what the Ecuadorian had just said. Sometimes I would manage to shut the gringo up long enough to clarify the confusion to the point where I could extract a real answer from the Ecuadorian, but then the Ecuadorian, assuming he knew where the line of questioning was going, would interrupt my English translation of his answer to make a speech about something totally off the subject. Constant interruptions and false assumptions made my translating a complete fiasco all day.

         But then came the tour of the factory. It was beautiful. With production back in session, I again found myself adrift in a world of conveyor belts and chutes and stampers. Empty gold cans entered the room via a stainless steel slide near a conveyor belt which feeds sardines into a contraption that buzzsawed off their heads and tails and sucked their guts out and transported them across the room to a guts container. Things entered ovens, were flipped and drained and tomato sauced and canned and sealed and washed and conveyor belted and steamed and labeled and stacked and boxed. A technician sensed my awe and attached himself to me to explain each moment of production. He was as smitten with everything as I was. The factory was like a giant bong and we clam baked in the mechanized world of impersonal acts of divine precision. Giant steel hearts thumped amorously and schools of metallic gold fish swarmed throughout the networks of chrome arteries. Occasionally, devils crept out from the murky peripheries to ask in Spanish how well I thought the tour was going and were the gringos overheard discussing any problems. Sometimes pale devils appeared behind me and delighted themselves with sinister explanations for the questions they were floating about the room. All parties were trying to use me to gain insights on each other. The FDA was looking to find flaws with a plant, the Ecuadorians were trying to maintain their livelihood, and caught in the middle: me. Pressure flippin cooker. But did I break a sweat? Nay. I was untouchable, transcendentally drawing power from my kindred brethern in mechanized automation.

         The tour ended pretty conveniently at about 5pm. The 2 gringos plus 3 women from Ecuador’s Ministry of Health shoved off to Guayaquil for the night (which they tell me the blind bureaucracy of the US government forces them to do instead of shaving 3½ hours off their round trip from the hotel to the factory by just staying in nearby Salinas). The veteran member of the FDA once more offered to bring me back something from “the big city”, convinced that I was probably missing all kinds of stuff out there in the campo. This was his 4th mention of such. I really didn’t need anything, but I told him to pick me up peanut M+M’s, since it would have been impolite to adamantly refuse his repeated gesture of goodwill.

         Raul and I got in his truck. The inevitable “how’d we do” questions came up 5 seconds after he turned the ignition key. I told him I thought everything was going well with the inspection. The FDA guys were making endless jokes amongst themselves and even when the Ecuas messed up, like when the plant supervisor strode into the packaging area without his hairnet, I overheard the older gringo telling the intern gringo that ‘it’s the same the world over, supervisors are always too busy to remember the safety rules themselves’. Raul was overjoyed with my take on the state of things and asked if I had eaten my sardines yet. I told him I had not- adding “yet” at the end to imply that I had some intention of doing so, which I hadn’t. He announced, with a sizeable degree of pageantry, that tomorrow he would give me a “more complete bag” of sardine products. If we had not been seated in a moving vehicle, I am certain Raul would have danced a circle at this revelation. I almost cautioned him to remember that today was only the plant tour and tomorrow is when they will conduct interviews and demand paperwork that proves they either dismantled or destroyed their biological weapons program (incidentally, Raul looks like a bald, miniature Sadaam Hussein) but then I thought better of it and let Raul have his moment.

         I had hundreds of funny anecdotes cocked and loaded when I burst through the doorless doorframe on the front of Julio’s house, but everyone inside was engrossed in low energy activities and weren’t exactly bursting at the seams to find out how my day at the factory had gone. They tried to bring it up later, but I was no longer interested in being amusing. I got 2 phone calls, typed a bit and tucked my butt into bed.

         When the gringos arrived at 9:30am, they busted out four 3-packs of M+M’s for me plus a bag of lollipops the older gringo said I could use to bargain with kids. Then the group of us headed into the laboratory to loot the file cabinet (the laboratory is used to check for “histamine” levels, which sardines produce a degree of naturally, but which bacteria can turn into “histamites” post mordem if not kept sufficiently cool, which can cause severe reactions in humans). After we donned boots, hairnets and lab coats for another brief inspection of the factory, we lugged all the lab records across the compound to the lunchroom, where the FDA guys inspected them until about 5pm. At 5pm, the FDA gringos went back to Guayaquil and Raul drove me to Tambo.

         On the ride home, Raul hit a giant speed bump at a high rate of speed because it wasn’t painted and sent our heads crashing into the roof. When I arrived home, Julio asked me what I was doing later and if I could go to speak to a man who lives in Santa Elena. The specifics of the arrangement eluded me, but apparently this man had just learned of my existence and was trying to get in touch with me about scoring some cash for animal projects. The man had apparently approached the worthless, drunk-ass president of El Tambo to announce his intention to fund an animal project in the pueblo, but the president had told him HE WAS NOT INTERESTED. This infuriated me. I had originally been against giving handouts like this to locals because they totally wont respect any projects they don’t have to invest their own money in. But I have since had to shelve this little nugget of idealism because the small-minded, self-defeating people of Tambo aren’t capable of overcoming even the minor obstacle of saving up the small bit of money necessary to invest in their own well-being. “Saving money” just is not a concept here.

         Irritated with the fool in office supposedly leading Tambo, I asked Julio when the next town presidential elections are. He said ‘December’, but not to hold my breath because this worthless cockroach of a so-called-president had been elected 8 times in the last 10 years. Julio did not know why the guy wants to be president since it doesn’t pay anything and the guy doesn’t want to do anything and Julio was as baffled as I as to why the town keeps electing him. Stone cold ignorance. The blind and genetically redundant leading the blind and genetically redundant.

         Julio and I bussed to Santa Elena, tracked down the mystery man by asking different people loafing near the highway of his whereabouts and entered the man’s house. The man said he was heading to a meeting tomorrow with the cousin of Lucio Gutierrez (President of Ecuador) and was going to give him his proposal for state funded animal projects, which he says is something Gutierrez recently professed an interest in funding. This was great news, but the man (I cant remember his name- hey, lets call him Gus) was apparently in the mood to give speeches. Gus exercised his truly frightening Ecuadorian talent for making longwinded, impassioned speeches almost entirely lacking in substance. He repeated the same concepts over and over and over for about 45 minutes until I was no longer capable of feigning politeness and Julio, sensing this, got us out of there. I was even angrier upon leaving Gus’ house then I had been upon entering. Gus had harped and harped on how the poor people never lift a finger to help themselves build a better life. While I was daydreaming through Gus repeating this concept 500 times, it really started dawning on me how futile giving free charlas had been. Not even members of the ‘pig growing club’ had showed up to my pig lectures. No one wants to work with anyone else (which would greatly reduce the workload and initial investment involved in having animal projects) because they are too self-centered to cooperate with each other. And a president who actually turns down help is worse than a town completely without “leadership”. I did not come down here to exhaust myself throwing bones to a basket case.

         However, there are still things I could be doing. My comprehension of Tambo’s garbled Spanish has been (and arguably still is) insufficient for communication here. For this reason, I have failed to adequately make acquaintances and put the people at ease with me. As long as these very small-minded people lack familiarity with me, I will be something of a strange creature from another dimension. Put simply, the populace has self-destructive habits and the person with the supposed solutions is an alien from another planet that speaks in a bizarre replica of the local language. I have to go one step further, be smarter and find a way to bridge the gap that keeps every thing I do and say so foreign that it is like a 2-dimentional photograph to their minds. And I have a few ideas.

         Everyone says the people here just need to be pushed a little. This is true to an extent, but it brings up an interesting dilemma about preserving autonomy. If you are American, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Respecting other people’s sovereignty is not a concept America subscribes to- but it IS the basic right of humans to govern their own lives, even if that means they decide to rot away in a dusty pueblo. True, a little push can help mobilize things that have been sedentary too long, but too much of too imprudent a push is coercion. You may agree with me that my proposed way of life is better than the way the Tambo folk presently conduct their lives, but you must ALSO concede that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (SEE ALSO: The conquest of the new world by the roman catholic church [and everywhere else]; the Cold War [including all the actual “shooting wars” that “preserving democracy” has spawned, such as Viet Nam and the secret bombing to hell of Cambodia]; the “civilizing” of the American Indians; The U.S. “humanitarian” intervention in Iraq [actually, like pretty much every “humanitarian intervention” the recent Iraq fiasco didn’t have anything to do with saving people- thus no true “good intentions” to speak of- NOR weapons of mass destruction for that matter, but that’s a topic for another time] and most every other short-sighted, non-circumspect, man-made catastrophe in history). I can make Tambo a very compelling case that they are living foul, but I can’t convert them “by force” to my way of thinking because that doesn’t make them happier, which is the whole idea behind the little “road to prosperity” I’m trying to sell them.

         I was the translator for the big final meeting involving all the factory bosses and FDA guys. A woman walked in late to the meeting who had been around the last 2 days and can speak English about as well or better than I can speak Spanish. Or at least that’s how it appeared because our English guys spoke to her slowly, but her Spanish guys spoke to me really quickly. Plus she was already familiar with the array of technical terms that are the same in any language. One of the problems with translation is that unless you are allowed to translate word for word every 5 – 10 syllables, you will have to paraphrase the giant chunk of information you bore witness to. In order to paraphrase anything, you must understand it first. Thus, it is impossible to translate lengthy descriptions of problems the FDA has with the functions of machines that you are completely unfamiliar with. Throw into that lengthy description a bunch of trade jargon that means nothing to you, and your translating gets nearly impossible to carry out. When I attempted to have the English speaking Ecuadorian factory boss translate the more ridiculous paragraphs that I myself couldn’t understand even in English (and she had nodded all the way through because she is well acquainted with the factory’s processes from her 15 years of experience) she would freeze and stay that way until the room would begin vehemently encouraging ME to do the translating, which I could not. What subsequently came out of my mouth could not possibly have communicated the full significance of such sentences, but no one asked for clarification.

         After the meeting, the FDA gringos left amid a flurry of handshakes and salutations and I and 3 other Factory folk piled into Raul’s office for a conference call to Guayaquil, where the factory’s headquarters are. Then Raul gave me a box containing 6 cans of sardines, mustard, ketchup, mayo, hot sauce and 4 marmalades and drove us out of the factory compound. On the way home, Raul had me clarify once more that the factory had received a perfectly normal amount of minor “suggestions” from the FDA, plus a single mandate to file paperwork on a valid process they were using that had simply not yet been filed with the FDA and that in the final analysis, they were still going to be able to export to the States.

         We drove in silence until Raul announced out of the blue that he “puts glasses on” to drive at night. I looked over at Raul, a tiny, bald replica of Sadaam Hussein whose short arms gripped the steering wheel and whose stout torso was tilted so as to present the head atop it, now wearing a set of glasses and for some reason, a contented smile. I received his random statement as a kind of warning and took it upon myself to alert him from the very edge of my seat every time a speed bump came into view. I was making poor Raul, already unsure of his ability to drive at night, apprehensive to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but I think I single-handedly saved a heard of black goats walking in the street from massacre. I’m quite sure of it, actually.

         Around 9pm, the younger FDA guy called the house of Julio from his hotel in Guayaquil, just as we had planned earlier at the factory. I told him I would be done teaching English and thus available to cruise up to Montañita with him around noon tomorrow. He suggested we meet at 12:30. Then I gave him directions from Guayaquil to Santa Elena, detailed in the extreme, and told him I would meet him in the central park in Santa Elena.

         “Gone up to where?” I asked

         “To where the town is” she answered.

         “What is he doing there?” I asked.

         Silence.

         “Did he leave to go to school?” I prompted.

         She nodded. I knew I had fed her that answer and as such it was worthless. She had no idea what the hell her brother was up to and was exercising her Ecuadorian birthright, even at such a young age, of not only being completely incapable of quantifying or giving precise answers, but also of not knowing that her brain had no idea what her mouth was talking about. I walked back past the school and then kept on walking all the way home. From home I tried to call Guido, but a female voice at his number told me he had gone “on a trip” to Guayaquil and that there was no school today.

         With my new found extra time, I built a contraption out of scrap wood to keep a stupid mother hen out of my gringo garden, where she had been doing lots of damage lately. Then I wrote until Susanna called me for my very early lunch at 10:40am. Around 11:30am, it occurred to me that since the FDA guy said he grew up surfing and was hoping to rent a board in Montañita, I would probably be hanging out in the ocean by myself. So I invited Julio’s youngest son Alex, knowing he had probably never been up to that part of the coast- maybe even ANY part of the coast- in his entire life.

         Alex is a tad nerdy and reserved. I knew he wouldn’t come back with a direct answer right away. I proposed the idea and then walked off, leaving the matter unresolved for a while before coming back and asking what he had decided. It seemed that he was willing to go, but Susanna had reservations about letting “her baby” go so far away. She asked if I would be “carrying him” or paying his way. I said I was. Susanna gave Alex permission and he jumped to his feet and began packing immediately. When he finally emerged from a back room, dressed in campesino “traveling clothes” and wearing a backpack, he looked nerdier than ever and I wasn’t sure anymore if taking him to Montañita would be very good for him or very bad. We climbed aboard a bus to Santa Elena toting my 2 new boogie boards.

         In Santa Elena, I spotted the FDA guy already on location but walking away from the central park, where he was supposed to meet me. Alex and I climbed down from the bus and walked in the direction we had seen the FDA guy (Brent) heading. We saw him rounding a corner in the distance. We followed him around several more corners but could not catch up to him because he never paused in his walking. He wasn’t trying to get anywhere; he was just walking. Finally I handed the boogie boards to Alex and just ran after Brent. He was totally lost and confused and wasn’t even sure he was in Santa Elena and very glad to see me, as you can bet. We walked a few blocks to where we could catch a bus to Montañita. I had wanted to involve both Brent and Alex in conversation equally, but Brent monopolized the conversation in the extreme.

         In Montañita, we headed straight to the Casa Blanca hotel and got a room with 5 beds in it for 5 bucks a person ($15 for the 3 of us). The town was surprisingly dead, unlike the last time I had been there. Brent rented a 6 foot 0 short board for 7 bucks “for the entire day” and the 3 of us headed down to the beach, boards in hand. We selected a section of ocean too near to “the point” (a spit of land jutting out into the ocean) as Alex and I would soon learn. The “point” forces the incoming waves to wrap around it and causes strange clashes between incoming waves and cross-shore currents. The cross-shore current becomes stronger as you get nearer to the point, and the sea floor, probably due to the interplay of motion of the ocean there, suddenly drops away. This means that 2 boogie boarders, slowly drifting towards “the point” with every wave they catch and every occasion in which they lift their feet, at some point will be left defenseless against its undertow because the seafloor will drop away.

         “Are your feet touching ground?” I asked Alex, having suddenly felt my feet slip off some kind of edge of land, with several seconds of extending my legs finding nothing of the seafloor.

         “Nope” he laughed, clinging to his boogie board 10 feet away, evidently wondering the same of me.

         My own attempts to move inland a little to where I could touch bottom again became increasingly urgent, as I realized that all my paddling towards shore was producing a negative progress. I plunged an exploratory toe deep into the waters below me several times, sure that I was able to touch ground at this distance from the shore further up the beach. But there was no seafloor. I became very worried and fought hard against the currents, not sure if my floating boogie board were obstructing my swim to shore, but unwilling to jettison it to find out in such turbulent waters and thundering waves. After a long and vigorous struggle, the sea floor appeared suddenly beneath my feet and in 2 or 3 steps I was in merely thigh-high water. That’s when I noticed Alex. He had not made an inch of progress. He was still out battling in the waves. I could see him kicking desperately and his head frequently disappeared among the swells. He was moving away from the shore.

         I knew Alex was not a great swimmer and entertained going out after him, but remembered that I had barely gotten myself out and was hardly capable of getting myself plus one back to shore. Nevertheless, I vacillated back and forth on the water’s edge, almost going after him, then relenting several times. I was ready to puke watching his head getting smaller and smaller amid the surf. Not quite sure what else to do I motioned him in sweeping gestures from shore to ‘get his butt over here’. Soon he had drifted out right to where the large waves were crashing over. I saw him repeatedly disappearing in a thunder of white wash and knew that if he got knocked off his board he would drown. I went in search of someone with a surfboard, which could navigate such waters and make it out to Alex. But there was no one around, save for a few older men talking in the distance who were obviously much less capable of rescuing Alex than I. Still, I walked towards them to see if they had any ideas. Seeing this, I saw Alex motioning me not to leave. I thought it better not to panic Alex and so stayed put. A scene flashed in my mind of telling the family I had taken their “baby” to the beach in spite of their reservations and let him drown. I knew my stint in Tambo, as well as probably Ecuador, would be over.

         Then all at once, I asked myself if Alex was looking closer than earlier. A few minutes later, I was sure of it. He had gotten closer. In fact he was still getting closer. A minute later he was close enough that I instinctually moved in to the water to make sure he finalized his exit, but the old men in the distance, who had not appeared to be watching any of this happening, motioned me not to do it. I motioned back to them that I had received and accepted their message. Then they began a complex series of hand signals that were as curious as they were elaborate and probably had something to do with the danger of the currents.

         Alex came trudging out of the water. He did not look to be at all aware of what had happened. I asked him if everything was cool. He pondered this for a moment, as if he thought it odd that I should ask that out of the blue. He said everything was fine, and looked like he meant it. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to find Alex covering up his true reaction to something like this, but that he might do it so consummately or, in fact, be feeling nothing at all, was indeed baffling. I told him we needed to do our boarding down at the other end of the beach and we headed that way.

         When we had gone a distance down the beach, we saw Brent gliding out of the waves on his surfboard where we had just been drowning. He had seen us and thought we were leaving and was trying to catch up. The three of us got back in the water at the far end of the beach and Brent traded me his surfboard for my boogie board. I had never surfed, but with a few rudimentary instructions, and in spite of the choppy conditions and short length of his board, I got up once for a second. But then, whether the surf was coming in or going out, the cross-shore currents had become annoyingly strong to the point you could do nothing in the water but struggle to stay upright even in knee deep water. So we got out. We told a Canadian girl we had met in the water to join us for dinner and then returned to our respective hotels to shower off the salt water.

         Canadian chick met us at our hotel and the 4 of us went to the place I always eat at in Montañita. Canadian chick (yep, forgot her name. Lets call her Lucy) told me she’s working outside of Guayaquil pretty much doing Peace Corps type work with the Canadian Government in conjunction with some university Lucy had never attended nor had even hear of prior to applying for the job. Her stint in Ecuador was to be 5 months long. Lucy had only been in Ecuador 3 weeks, had only studied Spanish for a total of 6 weeks, and yet had already traveled to Baños and now Montañita by herself, which we found rather impressive. The 4 of us wandered around Montañita for a while after we finished eating and then looked into renting surfboards for the following day. We found a pretty cool place that let Brent take a surf board with him that night that he was technically renting for the next day and where Lucy signed up for a 2 hour surfing lesson for tomorrow morning. Then we scattered like cockroaches and called it a night.

         The 3 of us showered off the salt water and caught a bus back down the coast. In Santa Elena, Alex got off the bus with the 2 boogie boards and Brent and I continued on to Libertad, where we put Brent on a bus to Guayaquil at the C.L.P. bus station. Then I walked to the mall to buy coffee. By 3pm I was back in Tambo.

         I was exhausted from the 2 days of swimming and travel and was very much looking forward to firing up my coffee maker. As luck would have it, our section of Tambo was again having a power outage when I arrived. I tried heating water on the stove, but could not get the propane tank to act like it had any gas. No one was home and I was too tired to get into reading or straightening up my room. Nevertheless, that’s how I tried to pass the next few hours. Why didn’t I just nap if I was tired and no one was home? Because, for me, not being a hardcore nap enthusiast, it is worse to acquiesce to a nap, if that nap is to be disturbed by someone, than it is to just refuse the nap. I knew there was little chance of getting a decent stretch of nap in before some fish vendor would pass by in front of the house screaming that he had fish to sell or dogs would start fighting or something. In Tambo, there was just no way it could be pulled off successfully. Nevertheless, I eventually tried it and was rudely awakened by Ivan bursting into my room, exclaiming his surprise and telling me he didn’t know anyone was home and hey, where were they anyway?

         The very second the power came back on, I got up and hit the switch on my coffee maker and had it brewing away when the family returned to the house 10 seconds later. They had all gone to the graveyard to paint Julio’s brother’s tomb and had all somehow managed to paint themselves as well. After dinner, I tried to write, but was repeatedly interrupted by phone calls and people bursting into my room.