Around 11pm, while I was ascending the full flight of stairs that one must ascend to enter Ela’s abode, returning from having shut off the water to Ela’s house (which one must do because Ela’s broken faucet will continue to pour water if you don’t), I noticed Ela’s cat at the bottom of Ela’s stairs having something of a problem with one eye. As it crept up the stairs, I could plainly see that its eye was grotesquely dislodged from its socket. I opened the front door and told Ela, who was raiding her fridge at that very moment, that we had a problem. Indeed, we had. The cat climbed up on the vaguely couch-like structure serving as a couch in Ela’s front room. Its good eye was squinting or closed, but its injured eye gazed starkly ahead, neither movable, nor able to be blinked. I flashed my hand in front of the eye to see if kitty would flinch, meaning the eye was still seeing. Kitty didn’t flinch. We scratched its head lightly. It purred without hesitation. We continued inspecting the injury. Although there were some apparently blood filled tissues bulging out from behind the eye, there was no open bleeding. Neither were there any cuts or lacerations. I told Ela that it looks like the kinds of injury I’ve heard of people bonked really hard in the head getting. The more I looked at the injury, the more certain I became of this, although the cat didn’t seem to have a problem with people touching its head, which is inconsistent with a head that has received a right proper bonk. In spite of whatever had happened to it, kitty was behaving fairly normally and purred and purred with its big ol’ freaky eyeball popped out of its head like a Muppet until we turned off the lights to encourage it to sleep.

        In Quito, the vet needed exactly 1˝ seconds to conclude the injury was a blow to the head. He said he didn’t know if it were a car, a fall or what, but the shock wave of a blow to the head had resulted in enough internal pressure to dislodge the eyeball. However, as the unblinkable eye had been drying out for less than 24 hrs (12 hrs, in fact), there was still a chance to save it. While we waited in the waiting room, the vet anesthetized the cat, shaved the eye and sewed the eyelid shut. We would not know for 5 days if the eye had been saved or if it would have to be removed altogether. The charge per day for the cat to be housed at the vet clinic was $25. We paid for kitty to stay only 2 days, so they could make sure he recovered from the anesthesia alright, but after that, Ela would pick him up and stay in a nearby hotel, which is cheaper, and then return on day 5.

        After kitty was properly reassembled, Ela and I went to a globalized fast food chain, which I must do every time I am in Quito. As it was Halloween, people in Quito were running around everywhere in costumes and the traffic in the streets was heavy. I called Ivan in Tambo and asked if he thought we were going to have school tomorrow, Saturday, because it was the Day of the Dead holiday weekend, when everyone hangs out in graveyards and remembers their dead relatives. Ivan told me there would absolutely be no school. As school was the only thing I really had to do in Tambo, I decided I could again postpone my trip home

        At around 8pm, we swung by the Arupo to pick up 2 other volunteers, Joelle and Laura and the 4 of us went to the bus station to catch a bus to Baeza. The bus to Baeza, as part of the holiday weekend chaos, was completely sold out. When we asked if the next (and final) bus to Baeza was sold out, the guy in the ticket window told us they were only selling tickets to Tena. This is a sort of scam they can pull when demand for busses is high. Tena is the final stop of this particular bus line and is 3 hours beyond Baeza. From Quito, it will cost you 3 dollars to Baeza and 6 dollars to Tena. Everyone knows the bus will sell out. You can board the bus without a ticket and pay the 3 dollar fare to Baeza directly to the ayudante, but if the ticket window sells an actual ticket to every seat, all non-ticket holders will have to ride to their destination, whatever it may be, sitting on the floor or standing. The idea behind the ticket window only selling tickets to Tena is that they hope the threat of sitting on the floor will encourage Baeza people to buy Tena tickets for 3 extra dollars to secure a place in an actual seat. We refused to go for this ploy and we also refused to stand around for another hour just to see if the next bus would sell completely out. The four of us paid 3 bucks directly to the ayudante and sat together on the floor of the bus.

        Around 11 pm, we stepped off the bus in Baeza in thick fog, where a Halloween dance was going on in the Casa Comunal. After Ela fed us, we divvied up all the soft horizontal surfaces in the house, pushed the very bad flea problem Ela’s house was having out of our minds, and allowed our respective screen savers to drown out the numerous interpersonal Word documents opened on our desktops.

         In Chaco, we found the 1st Annual rafting competition had been a surprising success. So many people had come to sign up to compete that about 30% had been turned away. Melissa Heitman from Chaco was with 6 other Peace Corps volunteers at the event already when we arrived. We did absolutely nothing all day but mill around in the total lack of shade, getting sunburned and waiting for our turn to compete. That moment never came. Sometime in the afternoon, a storm passed through the valley and forced everyone to huddle beneath a handful of event tents, which in turn had to be held down by the people inside so the wind would not lift the tents off the ground and fling them down the river banks. By that time, though the competition was still continuing, none of us gringos had any interest in rafting. We packed the 11 of us plus 3 dogs into a camionetta, along with a muddy table and chairs set and went to Chaco.

        In Chaco, 10 of the 11 of us were gearing up for what was promising to be quite a little social gathering. The 11th person was myself, who would have to be shot with a horse tranquilizer to voluntarily opt to hang out with 10 Peace Corps volunteers. To be fair, the majority of the volunteers present are cool to hang out with in small numbers, but when you get a group of people big enough, the unique faculties of each person is diminished by the exceedingly shallow depth inherent in any “group dynamic”. I do not enjoy the chaos, the constant interruptions, nor the “greatest common denominator” mindset. I’m missing the chromosome that’s supposed to make me want to plug into the collective to “feel alive”. Solitude is more volatile.

        My sunburn and I caught a camionetta to Baeza, where we pulled off a 3-hour nap that ended when Ela and Joelle arrived and needed let into the house. By that time it was 8:30pm. After an hour or 2 of amusement, the nature of which I do not recall, we retired.

        At about 8 pm, 2 Melissas, and a Bibi came over from Chaco. Ela had become sick and puked sometime prior to their arrival, so she, after a tour of the house, flopped herself onto a bed while the rest watched a movie. Then it was Melissa Fleishman’s turn to get sick, followed quickly by Bibi and Joelle. As the Chaco folk had been 40 minutes away in Chaco for the past 30 hours, there didn’t seem to be a common cause of the illness that the Baeza folk also appeared to have. Everyone but me, that is. I was right as the rain. The various pukings and fountains of diarrhea continued through the night and were it not for the flea circus taking place in my blankets, I might have missed out on all sleeplessness and misery altogether.