I tried to go back to writing, but ended up watching kids in the street playing a wild game that all the Tambo kids are into all of a sudden. The game appears to be a cross between Cricket and gang warfare. I could not really discern the rules of the game by watching. The kids on one team are all carrying broken boards. One of their team members is pitched to, deliberately smacks a pop-fly, and if that pop-fly is a fair ball and is not caught directly from the air, which would be an “out”, the “fielding” team charges the “batting” team, who in turn bolts in the other direction down the street. The next few minutes are filled with “fielders” whipping the ball at “batters”, batters smacking the ball out of the air as it is passed fielder to fielder and everyone chasing and fighting over loose balls. It seems that it is a batters’ job to knock the ball as far out of bounds as possible and keep it there while his teammates converge upon a scattered multitude of bottle caps in the street in order to flip them over without the threat of being hit with the ball themselves. The batter that runs down the street, continuously smacking the ball further out of reach of the fielders in hot pursuit of him, is invariably sacrificed when the fielders catch up to him. Thus, the game is filled with suicidal charges, violence and hand to hand conflicts which spill all over a 2 block radius of the bottle caps. As it seems there is always a degree of confusion over the rules governing when people can invoke a certain protection over themselves by calling out a word that sounds like “escalera” (a staircase?), or indeed what it even means to the game to yell out “escalera”, as well as that I never hear anyone proclaiming to have won the game, I suspect it is all just a tenuous excuse to tear around in the streets causing mayhem. That’s awesome. If there are really rules to this game, I don’t want to know about them. Don’t burst my bubble. I have few left.

        Out of the blue (but not really), Julio asked me ‘if the U.S. government was in Panama’, which caused me to laugh bitterly and ask “In what sense?”, which led to a discussion of the U.S. government lying about its reasons for the Panama invasion as well as its relationship with Noriega, which got me looking for the videotape I have wherein a documentary juxtaposes footage shot by Panamanians of U.S. soldiers committing mass atrocities with the bloodless version of the story the media was filling the American mind with (including the way the handful of dead American soldiers were all but immortalized in the media while the thousands of civilian casualties that American soldiers were causing was covered up), which led me to ask Julio if people are incapable of doing the math behind 3000 innocent civilians killed in the WTC attacks vs. 5000 innocent Afghani civilians killed as a direct result of the U.S. military response to the WTC attacks, which led to lunch.

         After lunch, I went to internet in Santa Elena, but as all internet places were closed, probably due to phone line problems, I continued on to Libertad. I stayed at internet as long as I could, because I needed to escape the monotony of Tambo, whose downtime I have suddenly developed a difficulty abiding. Back in Tambo, I watched Julio and Susanna working on a fence they are building in an effort to enclose the part of the campo located directly behind their house. Julio, inspired by his neighbors’ fencing in their campo and my recent speeches about investing, has decided he will expand his animal projects out into the campo in the future, thus his need to keep other animals out. This is great news, but I hope we get some of that rolling while I am still around. I want to let a bunch of wild turkeys go in our fenced in campo.

        I watched the kids play their “escalera” game in the street for a while and then slipped inside to write and drink coffee in vast amounts. At night, the males of the family and I watched a really bad early Jet Li flick on the VCR until about 10pm.

         We drifted back into the house and dispersed. In the next room, I could hear Susanna harassing her sleeping son- a favorite morning ritual of hers. Julio joined in the harassment by breaking into a song from the genre he always says ‘old timers get drunk to’. The words to the song were either ridiculous or he was ad-libbing and Susanna, now upstaged, chimed in between lines with puns and one-liners, by which she cracked herself up. By the time I arrived to see what was going on, Alex was sitting up in bed and everyone was flailing around him in hysterics. “It’s Alex’s 16th birthday”, Julio exclaimed, pulling one of Alex’s arms in an effort to get him out of bed. The laughing and celebration of another year of Alex’s life was the strangest juxtaposition to the wailing and sobbing- and now audible puking -going on next door, which could be heard when the decibels of Julio’s family spiked downwards between acts of silliness.

         Later, as I was writing, 7 year old Ines came into my room and asked what the thing sitting on top of my TV was. It was the gift I had received being a Padrino, which I had set out on display because for some reason I feel terrible that I secretly think it the height of tacky. I pulled it down from the TV and showed it to her, explaining that we couldn’t light up the woman because the switch fell inside when I first tried to flip it. She told me I only needed to unscrew the base to get at the problem to fix it. Since I had to do this eventually anyway, I humored her and took the base apart. When I put batteries in and flipped the switch, much in contrast to the mellow glow I had expected the plastic woman to alight with, she flashed green and red and a startlingly loud and shrill Fur Elise blasted us. I almost dropped the stupid thing I was caught so off guard.

        I then carried everything to the bread-making table in the unroofed section of Julio’s house to be glued. Alex - obsessed with gizmos as you’ll recall- immediately flanked me and pointed out a detached wire in the base. He took over fixing that problem himself, using what I thought was a fairly brilliant procedure. He shaved off a little insulation and wrapped the bare wire around one leg of what appeared to be a capacitor or something soldered to the same point that the wire originally had been. I’m not sure I would have ever thought of that. Then, perhaps because he wanted to play some more, he undid his rigging and explored the very stupid idea of heating up a nail on the propane stove and actually trying to melt the original solder blob the wire had plucked free of. After failing at that, he reinstated his first repair.

        Julio and I then weighed our pigs. His 2 pigs tipped the scales at 36 and 38 lbs, respectively. As he had just finished the last of his first bag of balanciado, we were able to calculate the growth rate of his pigs. 88 lbs of balanciado had increased the pigs a total of 44 lbs. That’s a 2 to 1 ratio exactly. Not bad, considering we have no idea how old the less-than-ideally-nourished pigs had been before Julio bought them. The 12 dollars Julio had invested in balanciado had produced 22 dollars worth of meat (if we use the very conservative estimate of only half the pig being edible. It is likely to be significantly higher). My pig was 25 lbs. I don’t know what to tell you about that because my math is screwed up due to one of my pigs dying and Julio feeding his 2 pigs from my sack for a week. Oh, wait- that fact kinda screws his math too, as there is unaccounted for food that his pigs have eaten. Oh well.

        One of Julio’s pigs was rather opposed to the idea of being weighed and burst out through its closed but unlatched door while Julio was trying to scoop it up. Somehow we got distracted for a moment and when we went to look for the pig, we found it had given us the slip and was standing way out in the campo looking at us. This pig seems to me to have a similar outlook to mine. It neither squirmed nor made a single peep when we cut it open and ripped out its testicles, but let it dig its hooves into the free soil outside of its pen and watch out. That maniac does not want to be taken alive.

        Like humans have been doing since the dawn of man, the males of the family trickled out into the campo beyond the pig and secured the outer perimeter by forming a semi-circle, which we tightened progressively in such a fashion as to drive the pig back towards its corral. There came a point, as there may someday for me if I am not watchful, where the only remaining escape route was through the open door of his wooden corral. Like everyone, piggy spent a period of time thrilled that he had apparently eluded his pursuers, who seemed to be kept at bay by the door that had slammed shut between them. Ah, but piggy will realize his fatal error the next time he yearns to breath the free air and investigate the strange whiffs of distant adventures drifting into his pen. Welcome to the rest of your life, piggy.

        Before lunch I wandered around in the yard taking pictures of different things with my non-digital camera and after lunch I went to internet. Nothing else of note happened.

         At 11:30 am, I went to the bank to deposit money. There I ran into Lonne from Olon (and oddly enough, 2 people from the Fundacion FIAT place near Manglaralto). Lonne and I talked for a while and then walked up the street to a animal supply store to inquire about where one can buy baby turkeys- as it turns out we are both in the market- and also so Lonne could buy a 40 kilo sack of chicken feed. He then grabbed a cab to the mini-Terminal and I walked down to internet for 10 minutes before bussing home.

         Like yesterday, today was cloudless and blazing hot in the afternoon. I gave myself a haircut after lunch and realized that at the rate I am losing my hair, I will have none left by the time I leave the Peace Corps. At least that will greatly simplify the haircuts I have to give myself, no?

         In the evening, neighbor kids played games on my computer while I read. Then I wrote a little and put myself to bed at 9pm. Adding to, and possibly resulting from, the recent downward spiral of discontent with life in Tambo, I woke back up at 11:30 pm and did not drift back to sleep until at least 3:30 am, which was way out of character.

        After lunch until about 3pm I laid around reading a book. Then I got up and went to internet in Santa Elena. On the bus ride home, the man sitting next to me leaned over without a word and presented a picture of me he was carrying in a plastic slipcover. Naturally I was taken aback, no doubt the goal of his little prank, before I realized he must’ve been the photographer at the first communion. He had dozens of other photos of assorted Padrinos with kid escorts, which we filed through. My picture was one of 2 that were actually good shots- and not just because I was in it. About half were substantially out of focus and the rest, for one reason or another, were merely mediocre. You can’t even tell from the picture that I was on the verge of acting out on some very non-constructive impulses.

        When I got home, Julio and I sat on the porch and watched the best game of little kid soccer in the street that I have ever seen. Little kids are light on ego/testosterone, heavy on slapstick, not unlike Benny Hinn. Among many other highlights, a kid fell in horse poop, the goals were repeatedly destroyed when a dozen kids descended upon the ball at once and avalanched and just like the Ecuadorian national soccer team, no one managed to score in spite of 3,000 shots on goal.

        Immediately following dinner, I went over to Lorena’s house. They had borrowed the neighbor’s DVD player and were watching Stuart Little. The house was grand central as usual. When Lorena’s mom came home, in spite of the house’s dirt floor, roof rusted through, walls that are halfway to falling down and the random chickens and dogs passing through the house, she was furious about a bed that hadn’t been made. Sometime around midnight, a contest between Lorena, her 2 sisters and I to see who could swallow a gulp of Pepsi the loudest, broke down into uncontrollable laughing about absolutely nothing for about ½ hour, which grated sleeping mom’s nerves immeasurably. Around 12:30 am, I carted my butt home.

        After dinner (you’ll note that when one’s day is only sparsely engaged in activity and the only immutable entities in life are one’s meals, that one is often found referring to tracts of one’s day as “before lunch” or “after dinner”), Julio and I stood around in the near darkness watching a street soccer game that refused to end because the score was still 0 to 0. All the players were fired up and screamed at each other constantly about teamwork and getting each other’s asses in gear. Now, I don’t claim that my ducks are in anything resembling a row, but I still find the contrast between the determination and fortitude of Tambo’s soccer games and every other area of its existence to be in absurd disparity. If they could diverge even a tenth of what they put into soccer games into providing for their families, this place would look like Hong Kong in 20 years. Ok, 25 years.