We first hit Lorena’s house and Lorena’s neighbor’s. Then we proceeded across the highway to wake up a man sleeping in a hammock because Julio remembered that he had had pigs at one time. It was unclear whether the man was just ancient and foggy from having been woken up, or whether he, like half of El Tambo, was drunk this morning. He steered us to the neighbor’s house a few doors down. We poked our heads in the front window and spoke to the people inside. It was 11am, and the 2 or 3 men of the house were disheveled and drunk almost to the point of being incapable of walking. The women of the house looked like something from the Stone Age. The Spanish they spoke in no way resembled Spanish. I understood not a single word.

         We went into their backyard to see the piglets they were willing to sell us. The backyard was where a number of neighbor’s plots of land adjoined together and served as a sort of common area for neighborly activity, as well as pig raising, clothes washing and evidently garbage throwing. The mother of the piglets was riddled with intestinal parasites and was the skinniest living animal I have ever seen. It looked like an animal that had been dead for a week, but it was walking around in the yard without any apparent difficulty. Her piglets looked like 1 month olds and as such they weren’t doing too terribly, considering the mother from which they get their milk. However, it turned out they were really 3 month old piglets and grossly undersized from malnutrition. I pointed out that the mother is dying from parasites, but everyone dismissed my assertion, saying, with no sense of alarm whatsoever, that she was “merely malnourished”. They didn’t seem to notice that even street pigs look healthy next to their “merely malnourished” walking skeleton.

         Then it occurred to me just how “well-to-do” and “enlightened” my neighborhood in Tambo is compared with many of its other parts. It probably shouldn’t have been, but was still shocking to see how people on this side of town were living. While we stood there, we were endlessly bothered by the bleary eyed and incoherent drunks of nearby houses, who are always as friendly as they are senseless. The drunks in Tambo seem to get no bigger pleasure than shaking your hand and patting your back while drooling down the front of their shirts and mumbling. Julio and I excused ourselves and exited the common area via the opposite side through which we had arrived.

         Next we traversed a large soccer field on the far outskirts of Tambo and continued past the scattering of houses beyond, where to my great surprise, we found a green oasis of various crops growing on a large fenced in plot. I never knew this mini farm was back here and I was more than a little curious as to who its owners were and how they were growing all this stuff in a barren wasteland. We approached the fence and called out to 2 guys working amid a low crop of plants. Julio was in the middle of an overdressed question about the possibility of there being pigs for sale there when 5 tiny piglets burst from a big tuft of green grass nearby and hauled ass across the yard. Our delight was capital.

         The men, probably in their late 50’s/early 60’s came in out of the field to discuss the matter in more detail. They stood in stark contrast to all the blithering drunks and cavemen presently loitering everywhere in the rest of Tambo. They practically sparkled. When it became clear what exactly we were after, the 2 men deferred to a woman they said was presently up at the elementary school. And that’s where Julio and I found her. After a brief discussion, we agreed on the price of 6 bucks per piglet and Julio and I set out to retrieve the money from my room.

         We returned to the school to pay the woman and then continued on to her farm. We took a male and a female (the plan is that the male will be raised to ‘market weight’ and then turned into food and the female will be bred). I could tell by the way Julio was holding (and also bogarting) the pigs, that it was love at first sight. Julio was enamored. He made no startled movements when the piglets squirmed and stuffed their noses into his neck and only smiled and softly said “lots of noise” when the piglets screamed bloody murder directly into his face.

         The walk to Julio’s house was so long that the piglets began falling asleep in Julio’s arms. Susanna nearly gave herself a hernia doting from zero to 60 when we surprised her in the kitchen holding 2 tiny piglets, but a moment later began demanding we return the piglets at once to their mother because they were too small to be on their own. We told her it was ok, the piglets had already begun eating dry food and thus would have little trouble being fully weaned. They were exactly 4 weeks old, which Julio and I tried to tell her is the right age to wean a piglet, assuming you begin it immediately eating highly nutritious feed. Still, Susanna insisted it would die.

         We carried the piglets out to an old chicken coop Julio has and plunked them inside. Then we swept out the inside, made a “bed” from coarse saw dust and placed water and a beat up frying pan of kitchen scraps (incidentally, NOT a highly nutritious feed) inside to see if they would eat. They did. News of the piglets eating “dry food” (non-milk food) caused a small stampede inside the house as, for whatever reason, everyone ran outside to verify these very important facts with their own eyes. This was the scene that surrounded the pigpen for the remainder of the day: varied assortments of family members and neighbors with their eyes pressed between the bamboo slats, exchanging animated, pig-related commentaries.

         Julio and I were now fully in the midst of an escalating pig bender. We hiked up to his dad’s house, a small bamboo shack with a dirt floor far outside of town, to check the progress his little piglet was making. Along the way, Julio told me that he himself had grown up in such a shack with his plethora of siblings and had moved, at age 17, up the road to Tambo, where there the furniture building revolution was taking place because there was now electricity. He claims that he was the last person to leave his section of the campo for Tambo. Now almost no one lives there.

         Julio’s dad, a mestizo version of an Appalachian moonshine-swillin’, barefoot-havin’ hillbilly emerged from his shack pleased as punch to find us making an unannounced visit. Julio’s brother was also on hand because he was bringing his dad a light bulb. Julio’s dad was about to have electricity for the first time in his life. The new light bulb was screwed into its socket and the electrical clip replaced on the positive terminal of a car battery sitting on the floor. A bamboo mounted wall switch was flipped and the new light bulb glowed dimly. Julio’s dad, known by locals for whatever reason as “El Chino”, was quite satisfied with the success of his electrical rigging. El Chino’s wife was stoically cooking a meal of chicken and rice over the coals of a home made earthen grill. Incongruous with its surroundings, the meal was ample and looked delicious.

         El Chino took us to see his amazingly healthy pig. We grilled him on what he is feeding it, and then we moved on to his chicken coop where he was raising 85 chickens, which were almost ready to be sold as food. We grilled him on what he was feeding them too. The 85 of them (15 of the original 100 had died) had eaten 1600 lbs of chicken feed in their 8 weeks of life. Then Julio and I continued the day of bonding over pig farming by riding the bus to Libertad to buy 40 kilos of milk-flavored pig feed. I’m not kidding.

         Once home with the pig feed, we all but donned lab coats and launched into the first of a bunch of pig management activities like weighing the piglets and portions of feed on my bathroom scale and collecting a list of expenditures. The male pig weighed in at a whopping 2 pounds and the female tipped the scales at 2˝ pounds. When we had finally run out of legitimate things to do, we just stood at the pigpen and stared in at the piglets through the bamboo slats. When it finally got too dark to see, we moved inside. The neighbors, whom I would describe as “estranged” from Julio’s family actually came over to hang out, as they, too, had gotten caught up in all the generalized bonding taking place around the pigpen.

         In spite of the bus being spacious and quiet and having a whole row to myself, I did not sleep well. There was only 1 police checkpoint in the night at which time the whole bus had been emptied, males and females. During the search for weapons inside the bus, a policeman came down the bus steps obviously looking for someone. As I am always in dangerously irate spirits at police checkpoints because they are never thorough enough to be anything but worthless and are a major attraction for hordes of screaming vendors, which is the last thing someone wants to awaken to, I was standing away from where I was supposed to be, which is why the policeman could not find me. I knew he was looking for me because I had been watching him through the bus windows 5 seconds earlier rifling through my backpack, ostensibly in search of weapons. When he finally spotted me, he motioned me into the bus.

         At my seat, he picked up a can of sardines from my backpack and asked if they were sardines. With an air of total insolence, because I knew there was nothing in my bag that any legitimate law enforcement could mistake for anything even remotely suspicious, I told him that the unopened can of sardines, with the label that said “SARDINES”, were, in fact, sardines. He pondered this for a moment with me staring unflinchingly into his face from a distance of 18 inches.

         “Did you buy these today?” he asked.

         I laughed. “Nope, about 3 days ago”. I continued staring at him.

         “And these are clothes?” he asked, squeezing a transparent plastic grocery bag of what was obviously a stack of neatly folded clothes.

         “Yup”, I smirked.

         The policeman- oh what the hell, let’s just call him “the 2-bit puke”- pondered my answer for a moment and then he told me to go ahead and have a seat in my row. I sat down and went straight for where I hide my money because I knew that none of this made any sense. I immediately noticed that what had been crisply folded bills, well-hidden in an obscure pocket deep inside my bag, were now quite wrinkled and protruding a bit from their hiding place. I quickly counted the money. I couldn’t remember at that very moment how much I should have, but knew it should be more than the 20 bucks that were presently in there. I told the 2-bit puke, in front of all his fellow maggots, that I was missing money.

         The 2-bit puke came forward and shrugged in a manner that suggested “I don’t know anything about your money. What the hell do you want me to do about it?” I forcefully reiterated that I was missing money, which, though I never said it in so many words, was a direct allegation against him. He shrugged and pretended to look for it on the ground.

         “No! Nothing fell on the ground!” I barked, in total certainty, coming very close to losing my cool. “It was right here, where’d it go?”

         The 2-bit puke motioned that I should look again in my bag. I dismissively told him it was not in there and didn’t even turn my head to look. He leaned over me and had a look himself while I scoffed and harassed him with more intimated accusations. Then I watched him reach over my bag with a balled up fist in which I could see money protruding. He blatantly plunked the money inside my bag and then a moment later pretended to find it. I snatched it up and counted it. I still wasn’t sure how much I should have, so I accusatorily demanded to know where the rest of it was. He shook his head and shrugged vehemently. I pointed at his pockets and ordered him to give me the rest. He shrugged. In an unprecedented fit of disgust-inspired audacity, I moved forward and shoved my hand into one of his pockets. He didn’t pull away or utter so much as a word- so I invaded his other pocket as well. This was a bizarre turn of events indeed. People with alarmed expressions began boarding the bus. I found a dollar coin in the 2-bit puke’s pocket that wasn’t mine, but that I now curse myself for not having stolen. I sat back down in my seat. The 2-bit puke scooted past the people and descended the bus steps. I recounted my money, thought for a second, found more money in my own pant’s pocket, re-recounted, and concluded with certainty that I had reclaimed everything. Even so, as the bus pulled away, I could not calm down. I hated Ecuador. I wanted to go back to the checkpoint and let the 2-bit puke know how much of a pathetic waste of life he is and how his country will never ascend from the low-rent side of Mediocrity-ville because of lawless parasites like him. I tried to put it all out of my mind and go to sleep, but I wanted to slam a knife through his punk ass uniform- hell, EVERY uniform in this banana republic. The stupid bastard couldn’t even pull off the simplest of scams. Why didn’t he just put my backpack back together and not say anything? He would have gotten away with it scott-free. Instead, he tried to pretend he was aware of drugs or something suspicious in my bag so I wouldn’t say anything if I noticed my money was missing. In spite of my wanting to open and disembowel him and every other so-called cop in Ecuador like slaughtered hogs, I eventually managed to get a few fitful hours’ sleep.

         From breakfast we went to the Peace Corps office, where many more PCVs that I had been in training with (or, to use the vernacular, “in my Omnibus”) were on hand, many of whom I had not seen in the 5 months having elapsed since. I moseyed about shootin the dookie with said folk. Several of them did not look so well. It wasn’t so much a physical change I was noticing, though almost everyone has become either fatter or skinnier since training, it was more of an emotional change. Several people bore the air of someone who is slightly mentally ill, as if the isolation plus various stressing factors had proved very detrimental to their spirits. I do not mean to imply that they actually were mentally ill, and their commentary about their sites and their lives therein was more or less positive, but was there was still something vaguely troubling about their newfound blankness and lack of animation.

         From the conversations I held with various PCVs, it seems that one’s progress is largely based on their community’s motivation to work AND the natural resources at their disposal. Obviously, some people are much more inventive than others and more successful at winning people over, but the attitudes and untapped potential of a site seems to be the single biggest factor in how much “progress” a volunteer will “facilitate”. Some PCVs were dropped into thriving agricultural centers with well organized co-ops and motivated people and had thus hit the ground running, and others were placed in backwards or closed locations lacking organization or resources (ehem, Tambo) and have little more to show for their efforts than an assortment of stories featuring epic stupidity and a backwardness that would cause cavemen to tisk.

         I spent a long time in the Peace Corps computer lab deleting a massive accumulation of old emails. After that, Ela, 2 other volunteers and I went to eat at a globalized fast food chain located near the office. Then Ela and I walked a great distance to the Guayasamin museum. Guayasamin is an Ecuadorian artist whose work one can find all over the place here and whom I had not taken the time to understand prior to going to the Museum of his paintings. Perhaps “understand” is the wrong wording. Let’s say “dig on”. Guayasamin specialized in macabre portraits exhibiting various degrees of anguish. I cannot even begin to speculate as to what motivates someone to paint picture after picture like that. Not knowing, I would say, is part of the attraction.

         On hand in a different wing of the museum is Guayasamin’s collection of religious art. Let not it escape notice that religious art is often as morbid as it is bizarre- thus its attraction to someone like Guayasamin. Catholic religious art is especially gruesome. Let me ask you this: do Kennedy buffs often display paintings of JFK in the back of an automobile with his head blown apart? Do fans of Lady Di typically display statues of “Diana quiche” in a mangled Mercedes? And are Dale Earnhardt devotees known to wear necklaces dangling a broken hood latch? No. And why not? Well, because that would be twisted. Religion, however, expects us to put things such as crucifixes on a different level. They are not supposed to be viewed as grisly and macabre. Guayasamin must not have gotten the memo. Me neither.

         I could hardly keep from laughing every time the tour guide, who had attached herself to us without solicitation, made mention of “the collection of Christs” using the words “Los Cristos” and waving a sophisticated hand at a bunch of bleeding and grimacing Jesuses. The tour was given from the Art history perspective, and not really from the religious perspective, but it was still amusing to feign stupidity and ask naive questions about everything. In one painting, there were auras around the head of Jesus and José (his dad) while they were sawing wood in the workshop. This was as interesting as it was ridiculous, because it was the only piece in the museum that seemed to imply that Jesus did anything more with his life than get born and get crucified.

         Latin American Catholics seem extraordinarily preoccupied with “El Nińo”- the baby Jesus. The only logic I can put behind their adulation of the baby version of Jesus is that it naturally gives them an excuse to bring Mary into the picture, as all babies need mommies. However, this too ultimately lacks sense as Mary could more easily be characterized as an obstacle to Jesus’ career, rather than some kind of deity sharing equal billing with her bouncing baby prophet and often seen ascending to heaven and emitting auras herself. I don’t know where all the wires are getting crossed here. Does anyone give a rat’s ass about Gandhi’s mom? If at all possible, never let your religion marinate in about 500 years of Dark Ages. Never.

         Outside of the elegantly landscaped museum, on a patio, which overlooks a deep valley, Ela and I bought a 50 cent coke, leaving $1.50 between us to get a cab back to the Arupo hostel. That was a long shot. If we could not get a cab for $1.50, we would have to walk all the way down to the trolley, which would get us to the Arupo after everyone we had told to meet us there at 4:10pm had left, taking their knowledge of how to get to the convent of Conocoto with them. As we stepped outside of the museum gate, even though we were deep within something resembling a residential neighborhood, a cab rolled up the street as if on cue. We flagged him down. He quoted us $1.50 right off the bat, which in Quito, to be the initial price quote for the distance we were asking him to drive, was unheard of. Ela and I exchanged screwed up faces and climbed in. We arrived at the Arupo at exactly 4:10pm.

         Cab loads of PCVs ejected from the Arupo like alien pods from a dying planet. Across town, at an informal sort of mini bus terminal sprawling over an area of snarled streets, the cabs of PCVs were breaking open and scrambling gringos were boarding the Conocoto-bound busses which leave every 15 minutes. We arrived at the convent after dark (for pictures of convent, see week 1). Hanging out commenced immediately, but crapped out early, as everyone had had a long day of tumult and racket.

         Card playing went down at night.

         At Ela’s house, the cats were let in and out of the house 27 times while I condensed, ordered, resized and renamed 4 CD’s of digital pictures, plus a whole new batch of pictures from our 2 cameras. Then we attempted to watch the movie “Adaptation” on the laptop, but fell asleep.