At 4pm, we went to the mall movie theater to see Matrix 3, which, unlike Matrix 2, did not have any good action sequences to offset its laughably horrible dialogue. Matrix 3 sucks. Save your money. The movie was over at 6pm and since there were no other good movies playing, we just sat around killing time until Ela’s 8:30pm bus to Quito.

        The policeman or rent-a-cop or whatever, who was engaged in the completely ineffective task of pretending to search people and bags boarding the bus for weapons, made me have to get bravo with him. For starters, he, like every other guard in this and most other countries, does his job begrudgingly and is too distracted by feeling cool in his uniform to be thorough enough to find cleverly hidden weapons. I could get any small weapon past these guys I wanted to. If nothing else, I could go to opposite side of the bus and hand someone a small bag containing a dozen handguns through their window. And this assumes that the bus wouldn’t pick up my 3 armed friends waiting to flag down the bus on it’s way through town, where there is no guard, which it would. A security screening is worthless if it can only catch poorly hidden weapons passing through the front door while the guard is present.

        After Ela’s bag was lightly gone through (and mind you, Ecuadorian women are largely let to pass through undisturbed) and she was given the green light to board, she paused in the doorway to engage in a moment of comical banter with me. The policeman or guard, after a few seconds, interrupted us to demand identification from Ela. Why now, long after he had already cleared her without identification? Why at all? Its not like he’s memorized a list of international criminals and would recognize a name. He (actually they by this point- I’m thinking it was a rent-a-cop and the TransEsmereldas manager) wanted to see the visa to make sure it’s still valid. Why? Are they passionate about an imaginary immigration problem Ecuador is having wherein gringos are messing up the economy by spending too much money and disseminating a work ethic where none exists? Peruvians and Colombians, who are responsible for much of the crime in Ecuador, aren’t even required to have visas. They would have to be exceptionally passionate about an imaginary gringo immigration problem because it is not even their job to police that. It is their job to make sure no one carries a bag full of hand grenades through the front door of the night bus to Quito. And they cannot even do that correctly. So lets ask ourselves why a Nobody in a uniform cares anything about Ela’s visa (they didn’t ask for mine). Either he is too stupid to realize that his actions are pointless, if not counterproductive (a very real possibility), or he just doesn’t like foreigners (this option may contribute to other options, but is not likely to stand on its own as one), or he thinks he is going to receive a bribe if he can hit the jackpot and find an expired visa. Either way, it’s stupidity, intolerance or corruption and I have no patience for any of it. People who think I am making too big a deal of this are part of the problem. Anyone who would just sit there and accept foolishness just because it is coming from someone wearing a uniform only emboldens these cowards to do what they do.

        I asked the rent-a-cop if he thought Ela looked like a terrorist. I was not trying to be funny and this was not a rhetorical question.

        “Hm?” rent-a-cop asked. It was not the ‘hm?’ of someone who didn’t hear, but the ‘hm?’ of someone being given pause and not wanting to appear so. I repeated myself, stepping the interrogative tone of my question up a notch. Rent-a-cop squirmed, which I took for a signal that he deep down doesn’t feel authorized to be demanding identification, thus he knows he is taking liberties. Ela gave him a Peace Corps ID, which admittedly looks even more fake than a real Ecuadorian ID. The man with Rent-a-cop, probably a manager, said “No, a passport”.

        Both Ela and I exploded in belligerence simultaneously- Ela letting rip with a string of outraged oaths and I letting manager guy know he had originally only asked for “an identification”. When manager and Rent-a-cop misread the visa and were discussing amongst themselves how it was already expired, I let fly with a savage commentary in English about the stupidity of someone demanding to see a visa and having no idea how to read it. It wasn’t the message I wanted to convey, it was the rabid tone. Then as they figured out they were reading the date of issuance, I derided them further with what was obviously a venomous string of insults in English.

        Julio came into my room in the mid-morning to tell me he had just been talking with a woman in the center of town about raising chickens. She had just moved back to Tambo from Quito, where she had been buying and raising 21-day-old broiler chickens for a little added income. Here in the peninsula, they only sell 3-day-old broiler chickens. The woman wants to begin growing chickens again but needs to know what such young chickens need to survive. Julio told me she was planning on stopping by later to discuss the matter with me.

        Just as Julio and I were getting our shoes on to walk the half-mile or so over to his dad’s house, a small, old animated woman showed up at the house with chicken questions. First, she wanted me (and Julio by extension) to walk with her to check out where she intends to grow the chicks until she can get a proper coop built for them, to see if I thought it was an acceptable location. We walked about 7 houses down from Julio’s where the old woman indicated an actual people house that is currently unoccupied of said. She wants to grow chickens in a people house. I told her the baby chicks should enjoy the people house just fine. Then we returned to Julio’s to discuss what growing baby broiler chicks entails. She said she would let me know when the chicks arrived so I could come see that everything was in order. Then Julio and I walked her most of the way to her house before altering our trajectories in the direction of the homestead of the infamous Chino.

        El Chino, I think it’s important to note, lives in what can only be described as a mystery farm. He has almost certainly made a pact with the devil. El Chino grows mammoth bananas in sand and clay. El Chino has watermelon vines that refuse to die in spite of months without rain and El Chino walking across their stems like they were grass. El Chino, who mysteriously acquired what appears to be some kind of half-wild pig, has managed to grow said pig of alarming intelligence and self-control to impressive stature using only leaves and an occasional handful of commercial chicken feed. El Chino’s campo chickens (primitive chickens of haphazard pedigree that resemble ugly crows) lay fair-sized eggs at a rate that matches pure bred egg layers (about 240 eggs per chicken per year). El Chino staggers around his mystery farm bellowing warbled sentiments as if the throttle on his voice has a stripped nut and reports on the productivity of his farm in the manner of a bewildered bystander.

        Julio and I had come to the mystery farm to borrow 2 machetes. El Chino was more than happy to lend them. We followed him into his ramshackle bamboo hut and stood around covertly indicating things and shooting amused but uneasy looks at each other while El Chino rummaged through a pile of things looking for machetes. Noticing he still had his car battery electrical set up with his TV connected, I asked if he was still using the original charge or had he found some one with a car to charge it back up for him. He nodded enthusiastically (to which part of the question I have no idea) and made a gesture with his hands that could have meant anything. Then he jumped up and snatched a neatly folded hand towel off the top of the battery, as if revealing the explanation to something. After enduring our blank stares for a moment, as if to further elaborate, he flipped on the television (which worked fine, crappy reception not withstanding), indicated its screen and shrugged extravagantly (he sometimes forgets I can speak Spanish). I smiled and indicated that I was very impressed, then shot Julio another uneasy glance. If anyone out there knows that is physically impossible to run a television off Direct Current, it would be a very disturbing thing to let me know, but do it anyway.

        Then I went home and did a huge amount of writing and proof reading until 10pm.

        Julio, Alex, Julio’s 10 year old nephew Antonio (whose male psychological predisposition to join other males in manly expeditions has recently realized itself) and I entered the campo south of Tambo and headed in the direction of Prosperidad (southeast). I have never been able to assemble a comprehensive picture of what kind of campo ecology El Tambo is set in. How can there be green leafy plants in the campo if it has not rained (or rather misted) more than ¾ inch total since I arrived 6 months ago? According to local reports, which are not all that reliable, the rainy season, the only time it rains here, simply never happened last year. The answers one receives really become unclear when one asks a local what is the normal seasonal progressions of temperature and rainfall. Some people claim the rainy season involves only a fine drizzle for a few hours about 2 times a week. Some people claim that it actually never rains here and all the plants are living by tapping the water table that El Niño fills up with massive flooding every 11 or 12 years. Some people claim that El Niño has only really struck once in living memory. Meanwhile, the campo itself is a very uneven patchwork of plant types. Some areas have tall cactuses, some areas are completely brown and dead, some areas are impenetrable thickets of patchy, living-green and dead-brown and some areas, such as where Julio was leading our manly expedition, have tallish, leafy green trees. I don’t get it.

        Out in the campo, our expedition’s first stop was at a hole in the ground next to the trail with bubbling oil in it. True to form, when I asked if the oil was a natural pool in the ground or if we were looking at the uncapped end of a vertical pipe or something, the answer was both ‘yes it was natural’ and ‘no it was a pipe’. When I asked why the oil in the hole was bubbling energetically, I was told ‘because of the pressure’, which clarified nothing because it was an open hole. Because oil pipelines here are never buried unless they intersect with a road, I am assuming the hole was where the petroleum people drilled directly in the soil and hit oil close to the surface, but it wasn’t a big enough pool to bother setting up a pump.

        Alex climbed into the pit and little by little scooped out a gallon of muddy crude oil with a homemade ladle. It smelled exactly like motor oil but wasn’t quite as thick. After a gallon had been removed, the bubbling pit was not deep enough to submerge the ladle any longer. With an empty tuna can lying nearby, Alex scooped a big pile of mud out of the hole and tried again. Still it was too shallow to submerge the ladle. They decided a gallon ‘would have to do’. I asked what they were planning to do with the oil. Julio told me he wanted to dump the oil on the ground all around the perimeter of the pig pens to protect our pigs against the bugs and parasites that all the street pigs cutting across his yard are carrying. This logic was amazingly afield, as I had just told the entire family, including Julio, a few days earlier that Julio’s habit of letting the pigs run riot all over the property while he is cleaning their pens is directly exposing them to all the parasite and disease contaminated feces the street pigs are crapping everywhere in Julio’s sawdust precipice where street pigs like to sleep and root for edibles. There is no merit in penning a pig at all if once a day they are allowed to take a stab at a cesspool of all the infirmities the containment is established to protect them from. The pigs running loose in the morning hasn’t changed, but now he wants to dump crude oil on his soil? This is the equivalent of an overprotective parent, who only allows the child leave the house to visit the brothel or crack house, constructing a high voltage electric fence “for the child’s safety”. I did not take the opportunity to remind him that not letting the pigs out of their pens was much securer and less toxic, but I filed away plans to do so when it would not be received as snappish.

        Having capped our gallon of crude, we tossed it in the bramble for safe keeping and continued on down the path to where tallish frutilla trees were reported to be. When we found an area of frutilla trees worthy of chopping, we could see that someone else, probably many someone elses, had been there in the not too distant past whacking away at a number of trees. There were a few long dry logs that someone had chopped down and left to rot. Sizeable branches, which were not worthless, but had obviously not been what someone was there to get, were scattered everywhere. I can’t imagine that trees grow fast enough where there is so little rainfall to be able to accommodate this kind of rampant wasting. After the locals whack down the trees, goats can move in and keep all new seedlings nipped away as they sprout. The future of Tambo’s campo is a big question mark, I’d say.

        We dragged a few of the ready-made logs out to the path to await transport while Julio chopped down another frutilla. Then, after acquiring Ivan and making several trips, we relocated all the logs to Julio’s back yard where they will soon be used to make our chicken house.

        Quite a bit more physically wiped out than I had been in a long time, I plopped myself down at the computer and pulled up some stuff I was working on. Julio came into my room and resurrected an idea we had discussed a few days earlier about going over to Prosperidad and talking to their president to see if possibly anyone over there was interested in animal projects. Wearily, I consented. When we showed up in Prosperidad the president was not home, but as he was expected back in the next few hours, we went to a friend of Julio’s for a few hours and also walked around town. When the president returned, we filled him in on who I was and why I live in El Tambo. He seemed very interested in my helping get projects off the ground in his jurisdiction, took down all my information and said he would bring it up at the next community meeting. Julio and I returned to Tambo in the dark.

        I took a seat at the table of teachers and regaled them with week’s worth of pent up misadventures and whimsical observations. Guido, who had been behaving strangely around me for weeks, was delighted to the verge delirium and confessed that he has been a total slack ass and will metamorphosize into some kind of actual “counterpart” at some ill-defined point in the future when he is less busy. Then we ripped on the current president of El Tambo and vowed to delay all projects and overt productivity until after elections are held in mid December. Then we exchanged arms for hostages and funded the Contras until the class at the other end of the room disbanded.

        I had reversed course on my previous perspective concerning my student’s shiftlessness in the week having elapsed since our last class. I decided not to take such a hard line with them because I was probably being inconsistent in telling them we were staging a rebellion against the pedantic approach to learning a language and then telling them in the following class to memorize a sheet of greetings. I was planning to pretend they secretly have a work ethic and recapture their interests with my enthusiasm for what we are studying. I then proceeded to blast the 2 mixed level classes I taught clean out of the proverbial water with possibly the best day of school we have ever had.

        After school, I went with Oscar to see his mama pig, whom he had told me had fallen ill. He told me thought there was something stuck in her throat, but his reasons for believing so were a tad flimsy. The pig had not eaten in almost a week and could no longer stand. When I peeked into the pen, mama pig already looked dead. With a few slaps to the ass, she tried to stand but was so shaky she nearly collapsed and had to be helped up. I doubt that she was still able to produce milk, but the babies that I had shot up with iron weeks earlier were still healthy and active. Oscar’s family wanted me to diagnose the ailment and maybe give mama pig a shot, but I told them I am not a veterinarian and cannot divine what is ailing their pig. They decided they would just kill mama pig in the morning, as she would soon die anyway at the rate she was declining.

        I walked home. Lunch was placed in front of me, but I was not at all hungry. I went to my room and parked myself behind a pot of coffee but could not get interested in doing anything. It seemed like I had exhausted all the things I usually do. I went outside and peered at the gringo garden; it needed no work. I wandered around in the yard and stood with my hands on my hips staring out into the campo. Then I balanced myself on a log that was lying on the ground. I watched Julio give Ivan a haircut, then I went back to staring out into the campo with my hands on my hips. I was bored as hell. My attitude went straight south.

        At 8pm, I drifted over to Lorena’s house, even though I knew better than to expect that would turn out well. Lorena’s house was full of people watching a stupid Jean Claude Van Damme movie. I sat there facing the TV but paying no attention to the movie until I no longer cared that it would look strange that I left 15 minutes after arriving on a rare, unannounced visit. I waited until Lorena stepped out on to the porch to talk to someone passing by in the street, so she couldn’t precipitate an incident in the same room as everyone watching the movie, and got up and walked out behind her. Outside, Lorena, no doubt mortified at the possibility of having failed to be totally hospitable, begged me not to leave. I tried to convince her I was just tired and to go back to her movie and not worry about it. She was having none of that. I told her I would come back later, but I refused to say when. She was having none of that, either. I told her I would be back at 9pm. She demanded I promise her that. I refused. She insisted. I promised. She grabbed my wrist and looked at my watch, notifying me that 9pm was in 20 minutes. Then I walked home and sat in my room doing absolutely nothing.

        At 9:17 pm, I walked back over to Lorena’s house. This time, everyone was sitting around watching a dinosaur cartoon movie. I could not even pretend to be interested, although it was a little amusing that for some reason everyone was compelled to talk to the cartoon characters. Lorena tried to be interesting, but was unsuccessful. She tried to make me food, but I did not want to eat. Then she broke out 2 identical plastic games filled with water, wherein one squeezes buttons to make waterborne hoops flip up and get hooked on little posts. This, oddly enough, I found very entertaining. We competed game after game, with Lorena unable to beat my thumbs of lightning- except for one time, which was a total fluke- until I left at 1 am.

        The old woman’s house was full of girls ranging in age from 13 to about 30. I explained my position to them and told them if I gave them classes, I could not defend my decision not to give lessons to everyone else who had asked lessons. For this reason, there would be no classes. However, the girls would not be so easily dispatched. They worked every angle they could to get themselves English classes. I was impressed with their wits and temerity and so decided to test how much English they already knew. They knew a lot more than my stupid Don Bosco students. Moreover, they had proven their enthusiasm for learning, which is more important. Finally, we agreed that I would not give classes, but I would come over and hang out from time to time and we would just talk in as much English as we could. I told them I did not care how many people showed up, but no one had better use the word “classes”. We are NOT having classes, we are just socializing. Everyone nodded. Then a car on the “highway” in front of the house hit and killed a street pig- an omen if ever there were one.

        Then I was asked if I could stay to eat lunch. I did not want to stay and eat so I told them I couldn’t because I had not said anything to Julio’s family about eating elsewhere, so they had already prepared food for me there, which would be wasted if I didn’t go home to eat it. They picked up the phone and called Julio’s number on the spot. They asked whomever picked up the phone if I could be kept for lunch, said ‘thank you’ and hung up. They told me I had been given permission to stay and eat (which was hardly the point) and that my food was already waiting on the table. After eating, though they apparently expected that I would be staying longer, I announced that I needed to get some shopping done and made an abrupt exit.

        After a quick visit to the mall ATM, Hipermarket and internet (the usual suspects) I returned to Tambo and found, with no small degree of horror, my coffeemaker to be non operational. I took the coffeemaker apart and found no obvious problems. I made a few suppositions, rerouted a few wires and then went into the other room to tell Susanna and Alex not to be alarmed if they hear me screaming and see the lights flicker because I was about to plug in my overhauled coffeemaker. I showed Susanna the wires I had switched and explained the logic behind it. She pretended to know what the hell I was talking about and then followed me into my room to see if my coffeemaker and I would explode into flames. We did not. Neither was there any coffee made.

        Alex then joined the autopsy. I brought him up to speed by explaining how I had found the coffeemaker and how I had changed it and why. When he used the word “circuit” to finish a sentence I was stumbling through (I had not used the word circuit previously), I quit talking to him like a baby and we got down to business. Alex was very serious. The insides of the coffeemaker were not that complex and yet we could not see a reason why our multiple reconstructions were consistently unsuccessful at getting electricity to the part responsible for all the coffeemaker’s heating. Then Julio came home and the autopsy got even more serious. We narrowed the possibilities down to 2 things, which we could have clarified if Julio would have let me override the sole resister inside and plug in the coffeemaker. We had done so much playing, he was no longer sure the wires made a proper circuit. I was sure, but it was his house.

        When the family left to sit at Merci’s tienda, Ivan showed me the trick to working Susanna’s dilapidated stove, which Susanna would not let me play with if she had been home, and I heated water and made coffee that way.