Afterwards, on the way to catch the bus back to Tambo, 1 of the elated Visa hopefuls suggested we go get a beer. It was 11am. Had these guys not been from Tambo and thus the impression I left them with not so politically important, I would have declined. However, a single 11am beer is a small price to pay for networking potential, especially since I had just met one of the guy’s grandpas yesterday who told me he farms 3 hectares locally.

        We walked several blocks out of our way and entered an establishment that was basically just a single room with plastic tables and chairs everywhere. There were large speakers on the wall blasting music and 7 girls sitting in a row in the corner. The girls take turns bringing a single beer to each table, which the people there divide among however many glasses they have. The girls will keep trading out one’s empty bottle for a full one until you tell them not to. The girls are “for dancing only”, the 2 guys told me. They are paid 25 dollars a week to bring beers and dance with the patrons, but the brothel, if I was wondering, is around the corner. Then, while the music was blasted far too loud for us to be able to communicate well, which is how all music is played in this country, the guys harassed me to call a girl over to dance. This irritated me immensely. Can hanging out in Ecuador ever just once not suck? Does every male have to be a depraved juvenile with a one-track mind. Can music ever be used for purposes other than to shake the damned earth? What would people do here without alcohol? When I refused to be interested in the extraordinarily stupid idea of EcuaDancing with some quasi-hooker to bad music cranked to epic volume, the guys asked me if I didn’t like to dance. I didn’t even try to soften the blow; I flatly told them “No”. I was hoping they would ask me if I played soccer or was catholic so I could tell them no to this as well. I give up on this place.

        When I got home, I found the males of Julio’s family bricking up the large space between my wall and the ceiling to “prevent me from getting colds in the future”. I kinda liked my skylight. I could look at stars from bed. I asked them if it wouldn’t just be easier to give me a second blanket instead of bricking up my giant skylight if they wanted me to be warmer at night. No one answered this question.

        Afterwards, I bussed to the mall with the intention of using internet, but the only thing open at that time- 9:30 am- was Hipermarket. Since the family had gone crazy for the packets of instant soup powder the nurse had left me when she visited, I went into Hipermarket to seek out more. I ended up spending all of my money on various purchases. I attempted to withdraw more money from the nearby mall ATM but it was out of order. I bussed to central Libertad, withdrew money at the bank, and finally used internet there. Then I returned home for lunch and spent the rest of the day writing. Julio’s sons began construction of a stick fence on the front side of the property, which they hope will keep their vicious dogs in, and street pigs and chickens out. Julio, the man himself, cemented his leftover cement blocks onto the top edge of one of his outer walls in the area of his house still lacking a roof.

        Back in Tambo, Julio and I had a very discouraging discussion about the peninsula’s total lack of available protein. The peninsula folk already eat far too little protein and the animals, which the humans eat, cannot be grown efficiently because feeding them a protein deficient diet, which is far less expensive, makes for scrawny– even severely dwarfed- pigs. “Fish flour”, a protein rich powder made from leftover fish parts which are dried and ground, that one can use to efficiently mix up batches of nutritionally balanced pig feed (which one would expect to find in abundance so close to where so many fish are coming out of the ocean) is all being sold directly to pig feed mixing factories. You can’t find it in the market.

        If one is interested in growing healthy, if not superior pigs here in the peninsula, it appears they will have to buy the commercially mixed pig feed. A pig raised on expensive, commercially mixed pig feed does not return high enough profits to allow a pig farm to really get off the ground. This is because too substantial an investment is required and will be tied up for too long before the farmer’s profits begin rolling in. When I did the math, I found that if one tries to raise and mate a sow and then raise her modest litter to market weight while mating the sow again in the interim, at one point, one will have close to 1000 dollars invested before the first dollar is returned. No one can come by that kind of money.

        Armchair economists at home may be thinking I should start a pig farm using a largely nutritionally deficient diet until I am in the position to start getting returns, at which time I could slowly turn up the nutrition levels as money allows. Ha! I’ll do you one better: Start a chicken farm simultaneously, which has high profits coming in every 2 months, and shovel all profits not being reinvested in chickens directly over to the pigs.

        From about 10am to 1pm I sat at Lorena’s house in Libertad and from about 2pm to 2:30pm I combed the market for ideas on how to mix up a nutritionally balanced alternative to commercial pig feed. No luck. I found Soybeans, a very high source of protein, for 50 cents a pound, but at that price you still cant beat a commercial pig feed.

        After a late lunch in Tambo, I wrote until nearly 5pm, when Julio came into my room to remind me of the Frente de Apoyo Feminino (Women’s Support Front) meeting presently going on across town I had wanted to attend. Feeling that he was obligated to accompany me, Julio asked what I was going to the meeting to do. I told him I had no major objectives, I just wanted to tell the women that my job is to improve the quality of life in Tambo, which I know well how to do, but that what I don’t know how to do is how to get people’s asses in gear in this town. I told Julio it was more of a social visit (because almost all of the women in the group live in my neighborhood and it’s becoming a little awkward that we never exchange more than a “buenos dias” in passing, and because I feel like the novelty of my presence in town could use a new push) but also because I think women the world over have a less rigid outlook on life and are thus more receptive to new ideas. Plus, I knew that even if the women themselves wouldn’t take up an animal project, if they could be convinced it was a valid enterprise, they would take home the idea to their husbands and work an angle with them that I could never access by discussing the matter with the husbands directly.

        I did not want Julio to go with me to the meeting because the social norms of Tambo do not apply to me the way they apply to Julio. The women will take Liberties with me they would be reluctant to take if Julio and I showed up together giving them the impression of “solidarity”. On the street, the women are shy and scurry past me at a heightened pace, sending their salutations through embarrassed ear to ear smiles, but they are exponentially emboldened when they outnumber me 10 to one and will openly conduct themselves as if I am their little pet gringo. My shaky grasp of the language gives me (as it would give anyone) the appearance of vulnerability, which I was hoping to exploit by showing up to the meeting alone, ostensibly in search of advice.

        Now before you think me the devil, realize that this the way you humans must be dealt with. You will not, for the love of god, just make a logical decision when bluntly confronted with plain facts. I wish it were that simple to deal with you people. I wish you humans would wake the hell up and put all these salesmen and marketers straight out of business. I wish that you would tell Nike to kiss your ass when it tells you to spend 3 times as much for their shoes because a celebrity is on their commercial. I wish that when the president of the United States goes on TV and says he wants to invade an oil rich nation for reasons that keep changing and for which he provides nothing resembling evidence, that you would assemble in droves and rip the front door off the white house and pound the little Mafia don into hamburger. I wish you people wouldn’t have your “imagination” and “common sense” ever confused. I wish that all I had to do in Tambo is say, “Alright, everyone listen up. The reason you people are so poor is because all you do is sit on your asses. Those of you that can find work in this country, good on ya. The rest of you, if you don’t like being dirt poor, have no alternative than to save money everywhere you can. This means growing as many of your own vegetables and animals as possible, not sitting around on your asses all day and then using what little money you have to buy food. If you only have one square inch of yard, you need to have a single radish planted in that square inch. Only rich people have the option to say ‘It’s not worth the bother.’” Yes, if only you humans were that simple to deal with. Instead, I have to do things like sneak around like a fox, studying people’s strengths and weaknesses in order to manipulate the calibration of their brains to the point where they can open their eyes to the wasted opportunities they have been sitting on their whole lives. Without resorting to the games you humans play, I could easily waste 2 years getting nowhere in Tambo.

        But Julio thought I should have an overt objective in mind if I was to go the Frente de Apoyo meeting, like asking them to help me find people who would like to form a group and go in together on a pig or chicken raising enterprise. Overt objectives, as suggested in the above rant, go nowhere with hardheaded people. If I barge into their meeting and “ask for a favor”, it will not get me as far as it would if I make them think helping me was their idea.

        In order to derail Julio’s directive in this matter, I introduced a little relevant bombshell I had been working on. On my upcoming trip to the States for Christmas, I could easily pick up an old, way outdated computer that you almost couldn’t give away in the States and bring it back to Ecuador, where almost no one owns their own computer and raffle that sucker in a big high profile extravaganza that we would advertise in all parts of the peninsula. The money we make from this raffle would go towards some kind of local animal project(s), the exact nature of which we have yet to work out. Julio was electrified. That idea had major potential. However, we could not successfully orchestrate the nuts and bolts of the idea. Every plan we conceived was full of holes.

        One plan was to go around town asking people we thought would be reliable workers if they wanted to go in on a little group animal project, without making any mention of the free money. When the group of people had been assembled, we would announce the raffle plan and fund the group project with the proceeds. However, once the rest of the town hears about the free money the group got, they will be angry that there was never an open invitation for everyone. But if there had been an open invitation, there is no telling what kind of group would be assembled. It is absolutely vital that the group work well together and carry no deadweight, lest the whole project be thrown into bickering due to petty grievances and charges of laziness and thus fail, as has happened here before. This is a major danger in spite of the fact that there really isn’t enough work in any given project to go around. A single person really could do everything.

        Another plan was to announce a contest wherein various groups, who would assemble themselves of their own accord (thus almost eliminating the potential for a project to fail on the basis of people not working well together), compete for a share of the raffle money by submitting written plans to me, anonymously. The written plans would have to be very specific and tell me every step involved in their proposed projects, including all predicted expenditures and profits. This would get the whole town thinking in extreme detail about the economy of how animals are actually raised. The few best plans would receive a portion of the raffle money. Then, even the losers of the contest might go ahead and raise animals because they’ve done the math and really thought it all through in an attempt to persuade me to give them money, but in so doing, have turned the raising of animals into a definite reality in their own minds. This idea appeals to me because it could potentially generate a lot of energy in town and put the subject of animal raising at the forefront of every mind. It would also allow that people of any affiliation anywhere in town could land cash, not just some elite crowd. The problem with this plan is that A.) we would have to know in advance how much money to anticipate the raffle will bring in so we can advertise beforehand about how much money they are competing for, B.) different projects would need different amounts of money to really be of assistance, C.) this assumes we will get ANY good project proposals, and D.) we have no way of making sure people will really spend the money on their projects or that the projects will be continued beyond a single harvest.

        Julio and I came up with a dozen of these plans. We talked and plotted and proposed and predicted and got so immersed in our scheme that we threw out the idea of going to the Frente de Apoyo meeting. We continued brainstorming until I was so worn down I could no longer understand Julio’s Spanish. I told him I was done thinking about it for the night and might make better headway on another day with a different perspective.

        I spent the day finishing and proofreading a huge update to this website, which I then sent off by internet.

        When I got to he school, a number of Julio’s nephews ventured out to greet me. This caused a large number of random kids to drift out immediately after them and form a crowd surrounding me. They began asking questions. Someone got the bright idea to ask me to translate a given word with which he could insult his schoolmate. That started a trend. Soon I was translating non-stop insults. A fair percentage of the kids formerly surrounding me were now chasing each other around trying to avenge their having been insulted. I asked the kids what they were doing in school on a Saturday. Their short response again contained a word I didn’t recognize. I much preferred entertaining the crowd of children in front of the school to teaching English to the Don Bosco students inside of the school, but I finally pulled myself away and went inside.

        My first class was the 5th year students. The last time I had seen them, many weeks prior, I had distributed 3 photocopies to each student and said they were to memorize the modest assortment of greetings and interactions scattered across the pages so we could practice them when I got back. I told them I was going to be gone a few weeks, so there was no reason why anyone shouldn’t know the words when I got back.

        The first thing I said to the students in the first 5 seconds of today’s class was “None of you studied anything, am I right?” They admitted without hesitation that they hadn’t. Not only had they not studied, they had not even bothered to bring the folders of copies I had made them nor their notes from the last class. I was not happy. I am tired of having my time wasted by lazy people. I sat down and refused to teach class. I don’t think anyone even noticed. The school was once again a 3 ring circus. When Oscar arrived, the kid whose pigs I had shot up with iron, I attached myself to him and talked about pig raising and nutrition, which he was extremely interested in. Soon Oscar was pulled away because part of the student’s grade for something involves painting the school and almost everyone else had gravitated outside to participate. When they noticed Oscar missing, they sent for him. I didn’t know if school was over or not, but I didn’t care. I left and walked home.

        The family was surprised when I walked in at 10:30 am, but they were not surprised at my explanation. Shiftless people had been a major target of my very vocal criticism of late. Julio was playing with cement again. Alex was preparing a 3rd pigpen in order to separate Julio’s pigs, who have been fighting over food recently. I was sort of in the mood to do something other than sit at my computer, but for lack of anything else to do, ended up sitting there anyway typing notes all day from a book about chickens. At night Julio and I discussed the potential profits of buying egg-laying chickens.

        I was again sitting at my computer with plans to spend yet another day compiling notes from my chicken book, when there came a startling knock on the doorframe of my open door. I turned and found Ela standing there propped up in my doorway. An electric shock involuntarily fired off within my head and torso and a burst of alarm disordered my thoughts. I asked her what the hell she was doing there, though on some level I already knew that she was surprising me with a visit. She had hinted at her wish to surprise me with a visit earlier in the week, but I had somehow fully dismissed the possibility of it happening anytime before next Wednesday. I was wrong. I tried to get up and play along with my end of having been surprised, but was having some kind of weird residual “fight or flight instinct” interfering with my ability to think and act normally.

        We drifted outside to look my pigs while I filled her in on all my present dilemmas concerning lacks of protein and raffle money for animal projects. Then I explained why Julio’s outhouse was destroyed and why the nearby puddle of soapy water was billowing smoke. Then we loafed in my room. I read her what I fancied were highlights from things I had recently written, but she began falling asleep. When I invited Julio in to talk for moment because he had been passing by my doorway for the last 10 minutes trying to get invited in, Ela fell fast asleep.

        When I walked into the kitchen around 5:30 pm, I was about 2 minutes too late to tell Susanna that Ela and I were not sticking around for dinner. She had already plunked rice enough for the 6 of us into her pot of boiling water and appeared despondent at the prospect of having wasted it. I told her we would stay.