After breakfast, I set to work unpacking and putting away all my new things. When I tired of unpacking, I scooted out into the campo to collect a rusted pot full of dried pig turds to mix with sawdust and plant a bunch of little succulent plants I had brought back with me from the US. Because the plants had been inside the house for the winter and were rightfully in winter dormancy mode, I had to temporarily plant the little plants in the shade behind the pigpens so they would not have their surfaces burnt by the abrupt increase in sunlight. I then built a fortress around the plantlets to protect them from scavenging street pigs. Because the weather here is now unbearably hot and dry, the street pigs are exceptionally hard up for cool things to wallow in as well as reasonably palatable things to eat. For this reason, I built 2 sets of fencing around my plantlets and surrounded the fences with sharpened outward-pointing sticks to stab anything that comes over to check out the moist earth smell emanating from my enclosed plantings.

         Julio had gone to Libertad to hunt down a supply of illegal Guayacan logs to build furniture, because the logs the shady, blue, illegal log truck recently brought to Tambo had been defective. The furniture wood is illegal because the tree it comes from is becoming endangered due to over-harvesting. This tree is being over-harvested because it has an attractive sort of marbled appearance and resists termites much better than other woods. Julio had gotten busted by the police in Libertad buying the wood and he and the vendor had to pay off the cops to look the other way.

         When Julio and his logs arrived in Tambo, we walked 4 houses up the street to a fenced in place where hundreds of goats are locked up each night when they are finished grazing in the campo. We did this to collect 2 giant sacks of goat poop to create a garden for the many packs of herb and vegetable seeds that had come back with me from the States. Goat turds are much more sanitary than pig turds as goats do not carry any illnesses that can be transmitted to humans.

         When we showed up to shovel mass amounts of goat turds, the man tending to the goat pens told us that his goats were all dying. He blamed the peninsula's continuing lack of rain, saying that the lack of grass was causing his herd mass starvation. Just among his legions of baby goats alone he had had 60 deaths. 2 mothers and 10 remaining babies stood over a pile of small tree branches someone had snipped from the campo trees and thrown to them for food. Knowing how tough goats are and how they can find enough to eat almost anywhere, I asked goat guy if he was sure they were dying of starvation and not a mystery illness. He was sure.

         I had to assume the man knew more about goats than I, as I have never studied goats in depth and he has been raising them his whole life, but it does not make sense that he and the others that take care of the goats would stand around and watch 60 babies and however many adults starve to death without climbing all the green trees in the scorched campo to cut down piles of leaves to feed them. There were plenty of green trees in the campo. You wouldn't even have to climb the trees, just reach up with your hand and grab the stuff inches out of the goat herd's reach. Why, at that very minute the goats were feasting on a pile of such. I had to assume the man was covering something up, because no one is stupid enough to let their starving goats search in vain for food beneath low, green, leafy canopies. Or are they stupid enough? If this man really believes his own starvation theory, his not clipping down branches to feed them is the biggest act of backwardness I have yet seen in Tambo. The man also told us that he had 4 big pigs which he used to feed twice daily. One day at breakfast they were fine, at dinner they were all dead. I don't think that this can all just be bad luck.

         Julio and I lugged 2 our giant sacks of goat turds home. In spite of the sunburn all my outdoor activities had won me, I was still in the mood to keep planting things. I asked Julio where he wanted me to plant my orange flower seeds. Along the front fence, of course. I began to dig a flowerbed. Julio highjacked the digging and dug a bed that was not only not parallel with the fence in was next to, but was haphazardly curved. I asked him if the curve did not bother him. It didn't. He filled the bed we excavated only about half full of the goat turds, leaving an unsightly crooked ditch right in front of the gringo garden. Then he said he wanted a giant sunflower planted right where it would block my previous landscape job from the sun and the view of passerbys and said he eventually would like to fill his whole yard in with plants.

         Ok. Ecuadorians- at least those here in the peninsula- do not really judge the world around them nor are they at all critical. Within reason, when you say something stupid or spiteful, naive or ineloquent, no one responds to it as such. It's as if they do not recognize human shortcomings unless they are particularly egregious. Insofar as social tolerance is concerned, this is an amazing accomplishment. However, this is due to a general lack of observation, rather than a countrywide application of Zen rectitude. Without possession of a discernment sufficient enough to say "this thing is better than that", it is impossible to develop a sense of aesthetics beyond that of apes. Thus Julio can try his very first cup of fresh brewed coffee and see no difference between it and the instant crap he has drunk all his life. Thus Lorena can bite into her very first Dunkin donut, brought to her from Salinas amid no small amount of fanfare and still say "Hm, this is pretty much just bread isn't it?" Oh yes, Lorena. How very astute of you. A Dunkin donut is pretty much indistinguishable from a five-cent lump of hard, tasteless bread. So I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised to hear Julio's proposal that we swamp the carefully planned gringo garden in a yard full of random plants protruding from holes chopped in the hard ground. I cant tell Julio what to do with his own yard nor can I really make the argument that my sense of aesthetics should supercede his just because it is more active, but I CAN cause Julio's vision of a future EcuaWeedpatch to grind to a halt by simply not acquiring more plants or seeds.

         I finally demanded that Julio fill the flowerbed up with goat turds to almost level with the ground because it is fantastically hideous to leave it as a twisted, asymmetrical ditch. Then, after we thoroughly watered the fertile ditch, I covered it with boards to prevent pigs from wallowing in it during the night.

         Having worn myself out by midday, I pulled a chair up to my computer and spent a few hours typing. As I was typing, a very small milestone in the supposed influence my stint in Tambo is having came to pass. Alex, obviously a very willing participant in someone else's directive, burst into my room and grabbed the bathroom scale from beneath my bed, announcing that it was time to weigh our pigs. This was the first time the weighing of our pigs had not been initiated by me. The weighing of pigs, if I neglected to mention before, is done so that one can record the typical growth rate for one's local stock of pigs. Then, in subsequent generations of pigs, one can detect if a pig's growth rate is unexceptional (thus it shouldn't be bred) or if the growth rate suddenly levels off (check for intestinal parasites) or if changes in diet, such as substituting less expensive bananas for a portion of one's balanciado ration, produces a better, worse or equal growth rate.

         My pig tipped the scales at a mediocre 38 lbs. Julio had informed me that my pig suffered a spell of not wanting to eat while I was in the States, which he had treated by shooting it up with an intramuscular deparasitizer that I had in my room. It didn't actually sound to me like a parasite problem, as the initial manifestation of such is a sudden increase in appetite- but since the pig was again eating well, I didn't care to unravel the mystery. Julio's pigs, estimated to be 1 month older than mine, weighed in at 63 and 54 lbs respectively. According to my projections, which I can make because I charted my pig's growth rate on a line graph, my pig should weigh what Julio's lighter pig weighs when it is the same age. As my pig was begun on a superior diet at least a month earlier in life than Julio's, our recording of weights shows that his pigs are either of a less inbred pedigree, or the loss of appetite my pig suffered took a heavier toll than Julio's account of the episode seems to intimate. I then sat back down at the computer and updated the records with all the new info.

         At night, I grudgingly dragged out one of the computers contending to be in the big raffle and tried to figure out a problem it has with its CD drawer. Ivan, probably wanting to pick up a few pointers or perhaps drop some (he went to school for computers), attached himself to the project and greatly complicated it by asking 'what conclusions I was drawing' every time I stared long and hard at the screen. There is nothing less conducive to figuring out mysterious problems a computer is having than someone continually distracting you with thoughtless interrogation. Add to this that I possess no Spanish vocabulary to describe the processes of a computer, which at the time of interrogation were continuing to confound me. Whereas it may be acceptable in the United States to say "Hey, rainman! I'll get you all the information I can if you just let me think", it is not acceptable here. To have rebuffed him in the gentlest of fashions would have offended him immensely, especially as he fancied himself there to help solve the problem. Ivan stayed until the bitter end bouncing senseless questions off the side of my head like so many tossed pebbles. In the end, the CD drive still malfunctioned when it tried to open certain types of files and the only thing I had to report to him about it is that reinstalling windows (Spanish language version) may replace some corrupted files and resolve the problem that way.

         I read a little from a Michael Moore book and then after thoroughly debugging myself (last night's rain caused an explosion of insects which were swarming all night around my light bulbs and computer screens and falling down the back of my shirt), I slipped deftly inside my mosquito net and went to sleep. Sometime in the night, I was awoken when I heard something I was yelling in a dream come out of my mouth in real life. It was very interesting as I clearly heard every bit of my real life broadcast in spite of simultaneously dreaming. There was a ˝ to full second delay between the imagined and actual broadcast, and the real life version sounded retarded, naturally, next to the articulate dream version. I was instantly awake enough ponder this, as well as to be amused when after a few moments of blinking evaluation, I heard someone in the next room rolling over and going back to sleep with no investigation of my retarded outburst.

         I wrote until 10 am, then left for Santa Elena to pick up the mail I had been failing to pick up or more than a month. At the post office, I ran into Lonne and Sally, who, not coincidentally, called me yesterday to say they wanted to go out to eat today. We talked a bit, but were all in town at that early hour because we had stuff to get done before our big lunch at the Amazon restaurant in Salinas. After the post office, I stopped by Lorena's work in Libertad to say hi. The house was being renovated by half dozen construction guys and Lorena was out back washing clothes, which is normally the job of the maid, who was elsewhere today. She continued washing clothes throughout the 1.5 hours I was there. Then I bussed to Salinas to meet Lonne and Sally.

         From about 1pm to 3pm, Lonne and Sally and I ate and hung out at the Amazon. Then we went to the bank in Salinas, after which, Sally became the first person to buy raffle tickets to the big computer raffle. Then our respective agendas once again took us to the same place- the mall in Libertad. I was looking (in vain) for an adapter for a computer's keyboard that I should have tried harder to buy in the US. I also placed a call to Julio's house, saying that since it was 3pm and I had only recently just stuffed myself with pizza in Salinas, not to include me in the amount of food they cook for dinner either. Then the adapter hunt moved to central Libertad, but got side tracked by what should have been a quick stop at internet, but wasn't.

         At 6:30pm, I pulled myself away from internet to go meet Lorena in Santa Elena. She had told me earlier about an "exposition" going on that night at her sister's school that her sister was participating in and I had said I would go too. The "exposition", from her description would be something like a craft show. Since I knew her sister to be going to school for something like nursing, my curiosity had been peaked. From 7:09pm until about 7:48pm, I stood in front of the giant catholic church in Santa Elena (so big that it's visible at night from Julio's backyard) getting dive bombed by 100's of freshly hatched insects circling the lights. The church was having a mass and its front doors stood wide open so that people passing by in the street could see the whole thing. Although I am hostile to any institution that heaps shame upon everyone it cannot force to accept its black and white view of the world (SEE ALSO: The Bush Administration), it is still sometimes fun to try to assume the point of view of an extraterrestrial and through that prism, watch people "crossing" themselves upon entering a giant, ornate building presumed to woo the Being responsible for having created an entire universe. It would have to be of great comedic value to aliens, who one would expect to be quite familiar with the freakishness of our vast universe, to see the things that humans presume omnipotent beings to be interested in, such as robes and church hymns, candles and , standing up, sitting down, standing up, sitting down. [Incredibly, as I was just typing this last sentence, Jehovah's witnesses came to Julio's house while I was its sole occupant. They launched into their spiel, in spite of my very politely informing them that I was not about to buy into a belief system peddled by door-to-door salesmen. I had to then interrupt them and sum up my viewpoint more succinctly- 'I am not looking for other people to tell me what god thinks'. And their friendly facades came a tumblin' down. I did not want to offend the good, if slightly obnoxious people. They are, in the final analysis, people no more and no less full of faulty ideas than the rest of us, and at least they are taking it upon themselves to straighten people out- which is, ironically, not unlike a peace corps volunteer]

         Lorena showed up at the church just as I was leaving. She was soaking wet from a hurried shower and apologizing profusely. Less than a minute later, her mom, sister and neighbors showed up from Tambo and we all drifted to the "exhibition".

         The exhibition was a collection of drawings of first aid procedures, cakes, clothes and accessories and various holiday decorations. Apparently the school teaches all of these things and nothing else. The medium sized room these creations were in was about 15 degrees hotter than the already too hot outdoors. This was made even more unpleasant in that one could hardly move around inside for lack of floor space not containing lollygaggers. After a quick sweep of the projects, I went and stood outside. Lorena, who initially followed me outside, soon went back inside to show her support, evidently, by standing around facing a wall of first aid drawings but not at all looking at any of them. After watching this from outside for several minutes, my tolerance-o-meter registered a flatline and I motioned Lorena over to tell her I was taking off. Lorena had no response to this news. I kinda expected she would have a response, so I stood there a moment to allow for one. When none came, I said "ok?" and took a few steps towards the gate. Still she said nothing. She was in damage control mode because she felt bad that she had talked me into going to her sister's exhibition and I was bored.

         "Lets go pasear in the park", she said, upon emerging from her coma.

         I told her to just stay at the exhibition and I would go home. She again insisted on the park. I figured she probably did not want the evening to end so unceremoniously, so I agreed to pasear in the park (actually it's a landscaped plaza in front of the church).

         On the way to the park, a festive contraption raced through a distant intersection on a perpendicular street. Lorena shrieked when she saw it and said "the train!" The train was a chain of fiberglass replicas of Fred Flinstone's car with a fiberglass Dino head poking through each roof, all being pulled by a jeep. The train was covered in colored lighting and looked like a carnival ride.

         I asked Lorena what a "train" was doing racing around Santa Elena on a random Wednesday. She said 'it belongs to the city of Santa Elena, and that they only pull it out occasionally'. This did not answer my question, of course, but questions posed to Ecuadorians are rarely answered satisfactorily. Lorena suggested we ride the train. It was so ludicrous an idea that I consented immediately. We waited in the park for the train to return to pick up more passengers. When it did, everyone on board the train hopped out, Lorena and I climbed in, and then the train proceeded to sit there for 15 minutes waiting for someone- anyone- to join us aboard to make going for a ride more economical. The idea of riding the train grew less amusing the longer we sat in the lighted and open interior of a Fred Flintstone car in a high profile area alongside the park, but a small girl and her parents climbed aboard before my tolerance-o-meter bottomed out and off we flew through Santa Elena screaming with mock excitement as the driver swerved back and forth in the street to give us our 50 cents worth. We laughed at the ridiculousness of riding in the train for the first quarter of the ride and then laughed through the second quarter of the ride at the throngs of people who would come out of their houses in advance of the train's arrival to wave at us. When this was no longer funny, the train ride became a tad awkward and we slid to opposite ends of our Flintstone car and smiled benignly into the night air as we blasted through Santa Elena. When the train happened to pass the exhibition, we motioned to the driver to pull over and let us out.

         The exhibition was still going on but had not become any more exciting since the last time we had been there. I made a concerted effort to not appear bored and soon enough, a group of 7 Tambo folk including myself were on our way back to Tambo, popsicles in hand. Back in Tambo, Julio told me that Ela had just called from Baeza "4 minutes ago" all freaked out because a nearby volcano was erupting and that I was supposed to call her. I had no idea what, if any, volcanoes were near Baeza but it was still a fairly alarming phone message to have just missed and then follow up with 15 minutes of busy signals.

         When I finally got through to Ela I found out that it had been an earthquake, not a volcano, and that the majority of things that had fallen over in her house had not broken nor had a giant hole opened up and swallowed the house- although, for the record, her house is 2 stories of un-reinforced mortar block. The fact that there was no such structural damage, but falling household objects, implies that the quake was probably not much greater than a 5 on the Richter Scale, where the typical threshold for damage to brick objects lies. She had counted 4 aftershocks thus far and was relieved to hear that contrary to what a local had told her, it was physically impossible for earthquakes in Baeza to come in pairs.

         After lunch, I worked on designing a garden for all the seeds I had brought from the States. At 4pm, Julio and I walked over to the house of the old woman I had been supposed to stay with for my first month in Tambo but had ditched, and shared some of my seeds with her. She was the only other person in Tambo that I knew grew stuff, but she gave me a tip as to who else grows pants in town. Julio and I then went to the ex-president's house (oh yeah, while I was in the States, Tambo elected a new president. However, every last person in town I have talked to outrightly disapproves of the new president, which is a sentiment that would usually be smothered in euphemisms here. So who elected this guy?) to tell his wife, the president of the Women's Frente de Apoyo, that we have a raffle planned and are looking for ticket sellers. I now believe that Julio's past cynical commentary about the Frente de Apoyo, whose sole existence is ostensibly to assist any project going on in town, is accurate. I could see that madaam president was blowing us off until Julio mentioned the 10% comission. That visibly got her attention. She immediately got herself off the hook by saying that she did not really need the money, but she would pass the word on to her colleagues. This will be a great indication of the state of El Tambo if the Women's "Support Front" is too indolent to "support" a project even for money.

         I was once again back in my room, continuing to draw up plans on my computer for the new vegetable/herb garden, when I heard the loudest, most cartoonic sound of something getting electrocuted in the street that I have ever heard, followed by our power going out. I instantly bolted for the front door because there was a pretty good chance that someone had been toying with the line and had just barbecued themselves. Apparently the whole neighborhood had been thinking the same thing. Within about 10 seconds, every last person was standing in the street looking in the direction of the noise. Oddly enough, there was nothing for the masses of lookyloos to see. There were no ladders tellingly leaned against poles, there was no one or nothing smoking or on fire- nothing. It turns out that 2 kids had been playing with a ball and while it had been in flight to one or the other, it had hit the line and caused…. uh…. something to happen. I don't know, that's the story they gave me.

         I read a Newsweek until the power returned and then continued working on the garden planning until 8pm, when I took a 1.5-hour phone call from the States.

         Sometime in the afternoon, sunburn or no sunburn, the garden project became too difficult to continue neglecting and I drifted out to a shady spot behind the pig pens to assemble a fence from the scrap wood piled up at the back of Julio's yard. Alex came out and began building a long piece of fence line directly in the ground adjacent the garden (as opposed to doing it in the shade atop a hill) but built it about 3 feet away from the actual garden. When I asked why he was putting the fence line so far from the garden, he answered with pride that he was saving wood by attaching his horizontal beams to the neighbor's vertical fence post, rather than having to bury his own vertical fence post closer to the garden. When I pointed out that building a fence 3 feet away from the garden does not save us wood because we have to build 3 extra feet of fence just to get the perpendicular sides to reach the distant portion he built, his face drooped uncomprehendingly. Knowing that it is very difficult for me as yet to make sense laying out an abstract technical argument in Spanish, I asked if he had understood what I said. He said he did, but I later found the fence had not been moved closer to the garden. So I will just dig the actual garden 3 feet further west in the direction of the fence.

         As my hands were fairly torn up from fence building and ditch digging and my neck had gotten even more sunburned from leaving the shade periodically to pick over the wood pile, I made myself go inside the house to read until dinner. At night, the insect plague-of-the-day was hordes of large beetles and giant flying crickets (which were probably just stout, black grasshoppers). Swarms of such amassed around artificially lighted areas everywhere outside. Those that ventured into my room were swiftly smashed with a flip flop, and their numerous carcasses were entirely dismantled and removed by ants during the night.

         When Julio, Alex and I went out back to marvel at the flying beetle swarms behind the house, we found the sky to be crystal clear and full of spirited stars. The constellation Orion, which I have always had difficulty locating in Ecuador due to excessive clouds, high trees and not knowing where to look, was floating very high in the night sky and was almost as crisply visable as it is during the winter in Ohio. I pointed out Orion to Julio and Alex and after explaining how one is supposed to image the figure (which was not at all easy due to that being a little like laying out an abstract technical argument), told them that in the US, Orion's feet appear about 35 degrees above the horizon, but here he is almost directly above us. This was the first demonstrative evidence of something I had been trying to communicate since having arrived 8 months earlier. I told them that in the States, I use Orion to find which direction is south because the snowboard Orion appears to be standing on slides each night atop a semicircle which is planted on the southern horizon. Or in other words, Orion's "spine" if you imagine it floating in his torso, always points pretty much due south.

         In government bailouts, industries such as the airline industry get to cook the books and then bellyache that they are not making enough money to survive, which is a total lie. Then the government steps in and gives them all kinds of free taxpayer money (which they didn't actually need), ostensibly to keep the doors open and prevent lay offs (but then no one makes a peep when they go ahead and lay off 5,000 people anyway) so the shareholders can open their morning newspapers and grunt with satisfaction at the market report. An even bigger scam would be nuclear power plants, which besides being outrageously dangerous, have never churned a profit in their existence. Nuclear plants subsist on a steady diet of bailout money (while welfare for regular folk is being slashed). So why keep building them? For clean air? Anyone at all familiar with nuclear energy knows that no sane person would proliferate it out of environmental and safety concerns. That's what wind and solar power is for (but has been ignored all through the 70's, 80's and 90's while nuke plants were proliferating*). Nuke plants are built because fat cats get richer building and controlling them. Never mind that nuke plant budgets do not support such things as their upper echelon's massive paychecks, because when the books come up all red, they will be balanced with free tax dollars. A perfect scam.

         Meanwhile, if a small business, such as a single restaurant run by an average citizen falls on hard times, they will get no such bailout and will have to close their doors. This is because they are not Super Rich with ties to the other Super Rich people who decide how tax money should be used. This is just another example of how the pockets of the average taxpayer are freely mined to keep the massive profits rolling in for the Super Rich.

         However, in the case of wars, such as the latest one in Iraq (and mark my words: this is the first of many that will take place in the coming decades in oil and gas rich nations or places like Afghanistan, which are strategically important for things such as pipelines) the difference is that it is so high profile a scam that the American citizens have to have their 'consent' for the atrocities to follow 'manufactured' (to borrow the term "manufacturing consent" from Noam Chomsky) through campaigns of deceit. The most efficient way this can be accomplished is by preying upon the public fear with sensational press releases. "Madman Sadaam has biological weapons", "Madman Sadaam has a secret nuclear program and links to Al Qaeda". All of this has not only been proven false since the war, but it has also been partially established that the US government KNEW it was false before it was told to the public. The Bush cartel's Iraq scam was so outrageous that insiders with consciences were blowing the whistle on lies right and left. However, the same American public that chastised all the dissenting voices before the war STILL are not catching on to what is happening even as all the lies are coming to light. There will STILL be no outcry against the massive loss of human life and dignity in Iraq nor the massive expenditure of taxpayer money- all for a Super Rich scam - and Bush will STILL be re-elected. And because we lost all of our rights to privacy and due process in Bush's USA PATRIOT act, there is probably an FBI guy downloading this page into my secret "Homeland Security" file even as you read.

         If this sounds like the far fetched rantings of a wild-eyed radical to you, I would suggest you examine the facts concerning this "war on terror" and the legislation it has effected as well as the history of the United States government for the past 50 years. Go find the facts that prove me wrong and stuff 'em up my nose. Then go check out the conditions in pre-Nazi Germany that allowed for the rise of Hitler. Aren't we are supposed to study history so we don't blindly walk into mistakes that have already been made? The facts are out there, but people are still selecting how they put these facts together based on the emotional pipedream of Al Qaeda blowing up New York city with Sadaam's nukes that the media and the Bushies sold them (meanwhile, hardly a peep about oil-poor, far more volatile, already nuclear capable North Korea). If "wipe all the foreigners out before they can get us" is your mindset, you may consider yourself successfully brainwashed. You are a reactionary with zero comprehension of the complexity of international affairs and you have handed a blank check to a man that world history will eventually come to revile (Bush, damnit!)

         Just before lunch, a student of mine appeared in my window with her brother and asked to talk to Julio. I retrieved Julio, but heard the conversation begin about things that should have been addressed to me directly. After the 3 of them discussed something fairly heatedly on the front porch for about 15 minutes, they all of them came into my room. The brother of my student wanted to propose an alternative to raffling off the computer and then having the locals compete for the money. When he began his fluffed up sales pitch, out of sheer disgust for the human propensity to blow smoke up other people's asses and be fake and manipulative, I let him continue uninterrupted until the part of the conversation where he wanted to hear my response to his proposal, at which time I told him not to try to use fancy words because I could understand nothing he had said thus far. "Just be direct and don't swamp what you want to say in fluff", I told him. Instead Julio took over and gave me the summarized version. The duo wanted me not to raffle off the computer, saying that it would be almost impossible for us to sell the raffle tickets in the peninsula. I interrupted at that point and said there was no way the raffle tickets wouldn't sell like hotcakes for the mere 50 cents they were going for. Julio agreed wholeheartedly. Continuing, Julio said the duo wanted that I simply give the computer to them, plus 3 other as yet unknown people, who would then form a 5 person group, take out a loan from one of Tambo's homespun lending institutions and raise something "with quick returns, like chickens".

         I couldn't believe that that was the proposal they had come with. I told them they could always have borrowed money from the community bank, even without my computer, if they had any real interest in raising animals. Unbelievably, they continued pushing for their way in spite of the now highlighted flaws with their plan. I told them that with the money from a computer raffle, I could get a lot more than a 5 person chicken project started. They wanted me to give them my final decision but I was too angry by this point to tell them what I really thought of their proposal. Besides, they might not actually realize their plan is stupid and horrendously self centered and I might come to regret sending them scurrying from my room with repeated kicks to their asses. I told them I would think about it. They were visibly unhappy that they would not have an immediate decision. The boy said I should let them know as soon as possible. The girl said she did not see what there even was to think about. The dark squiggle above my head grew bigger and darker, but I held my tongue. I still wanted to check with Julio in private to make sure there weren't any valid subtleties in their proposal that I was totally misunderstanding. But I wasn't misunderstanding anything. It should be noted that these two kids are the children of the president of the Women's Support Front, who I had personally solicited help from 2 days ago.

         At 3pm, I walked down to the school to teach English. The reason school is now at 3 pm is because the big public school teachers strike ended recently and to make up for days of school missed, everyone has to go to school on Saturday. This impacts Don Bosco (a school that only meets on Saturday) in that all the teachers are teaching classes elsewhere during Saturday in the daytime, plus the school we use is full of children making up for lost time. We didn't do anything this week but review for the exam we are having next week. It was fun, as usual, but worthless, as usual.

         When I got home, Julio drifted into my room and plopped down in a chair. When I first came to Tambo back in May 2003, Julio was always plopped down in a chair in my room. The practice slowly died out over the months, but has now returned in full force since my having arrived back from the United States. In this most recent chair plopping, Julio told me that he heard that the women of the Frente de Apoyo had been consulted about the raffle and the result is that some want to help sell tickets while some do not. Of those that do want to help sell tickets, some said they will decline if they are not also "included in the animal project", whatever the hell that means. I asked Julio if they are confused about what my plan entails or are they trying to rewrite the nature of the plan because a 10% commission, for a job their creed says they do for free, is not good enough for them. He said he didn't know, but wherever there's money in Tambo, there is always a fiasco. I renamed the Frente de Apoyo the "Frente de Aprovechar (to gain or benefit oneself)" much to Julio's amusement and then told him that we have an expression in the US that fits Tambo that goes "Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash" (but no one understood the word "whitewash" so I tried to restate it as "too proud to eat rice, too poor to eat pizza". But they like rice here just fine, so that didn't make any sense either.)

         Around 7pm, the whole family disappeared without so much as a word to perform an activity I am still unclear about. Every time I have inquired into the matter, an argument breaks out among everyone present. From what I gathered, a road crew had freshly paved the road leading to Prosperidad. The type of pavement employed was that of covering the old road in hot tar and smashing mounds of gravel into it. At this point, everyone's story differs. Either there was a good bit of excess gravel that was pushed off the road by the act of smashing down the mounds, which may or may not have been something the government typically comes back to retrieve, or there were untouched mounds of gravel the government had either abandoned or had not finished using. Julio claims the government was wasting the stone plain and simple, yet he admits he waited till dark to retrieve his multiple wheelbarrow loads and I heard him tell someone that all the Tambo people that were down there gathering gravel hid every time a car passed. Susanna accuses Julio of stealing outright, which Julio laughs off.

         Anyway, while everyone was out playing with gravel, I set out for Lorena's house to see if anything was going on. On the way, I was intercepted by the man who was telling us the other day about the goats starving to death, a 63 year old named Rodolfo. I am Rodolfo's new favorite human being. Rodolfo appears in his doorway or exclaims my name from a window every time I am within view of his house. Sometimes I have no idea where my name is being exclaimed from because Rodolfo is sitting somewhere inside someone else's darkened shack that I happen to be passing in a random part of town. Rodolfo has so much fun exclaiming my name, that if he can't work my exclaimed name into the beginning or end of a sentence, he exclaims my name in what would have been a pause in the conversation when he (very) temporarily runs out of things to say. Rodolfo has probably long ago grated the very last nerve of everyone he knows and thus is pleased as punch to make a brand new friend who has not heard all his stories and who's lack of detailed knowledge about the area gives him the perfect excuse to talk about everything. At any mention of Rodolfo in conversation, locals snicker. I don't get the impression that people are especially thrilled to learn of Rodolfo and I kicking about.

         Rodolfo was sitting in the street in a wooden chair he had dragged outside from the house staring towards the center of town- a fairly common practice in Tambo. When I slapped his shoulder in passing and said buenas noches, he whipped out a small bench and wanted me to stay awhile and talk. I complied. Rodolfo broke out some classic old-timer dialogue about how the seafood market in Libertad isn't what it used to be and 'did I know where the all the good watermelons grow? Then we'll have to take a bike ride there on Tuesday and see them in person.' He told me that Libertad has Chinese people living in it that "own homes". And Rodolfo's second biggest fixation after exclaiming my name- the weather. The way he talks about "winter" (which is the hot season here and is a word commonly used interchangeably with "rain", as winter is the peninsula's so-called rainy season), you would think "winter" was known to take psychedelics and run naked through the streets.

         Passers-by in the street craned their necks at Rodolfo and I conversing enthusiastically in the night like it was the biggest freak show they had ever seen. This is probably due to the fact that the average Tambonian (I just coined that term this very second) has never actually seen me loaf publicly nor probably knew I even spoke Spanish. Sitting there with Rodolfo on the corner is where Lorena found me when she set out from her house (2 doors down) to return a video tape to me she had borrowed. Since I was becoming all conversed out with Rodolfo, Lorena was actually rescuing me when she insisted we go to Julio's house. Rodolfo gracefully relinquished his monopoly on me, probably muttering something inside his head about having been a young man once.

         After a while at Julio's, Lorena's sisters also came over to join the social event they were being left out of that usually takes place at their house. When the family finished stealing gravel and returned home to find a full blown social event taking place in their house, they dragged a bunch of wooden furniture out into the street and hung out there, as Tambonians are highly susceptible to festive atmospheres. Assorted neighbors then gravitated over and Julio's house became the event taking place on his street. At around midnight, the family dragged their wooden furniture back inside the house and Lorena's clan moseyed up the sand street to the salutes of a dozen ill tempered dogs sounding off from the doorways of their darkened mortar block shacks.

*wind, solar and hydrogen fuel cell power is no longer being ignored

         After a shower and dinner, the family left to sit at Merci's tienda and I proceeded to read for 2 or 3 hours until about 9pm. I was just about to go to bed when Lorena called from a cell phone at her house to see if I wanted to come over. Going to Lorena's house just barely beat out sleeping as my activity of choice and I set out to her house in the darkness. I was not at all surprised to see a party going down on Lorena's front porch, but I was surprised when her sister had to retrieve her from a bedroom, where she emerged in a nightgown looking as if she had already been asleep. As it turns out, she had not really wanted to sleep, but had had a fight with her cousin earlier, who was out on the front porch, and was either being ostracized or was ostracizing herself from the gathering thereupon.

         Not much of interest happened, unless you count Lorena, her cross-eyed mom and I watching the movie "Bumfights", which I had brought back from the States with me (only because I had found an extra copy I must've accidentally burned on CD). Even though it was I that had originally downloaded "Bumfights" from the internet, it is now I alone that am fairly revolted by its content. The Ecuadorians- from Julio to Lorena's mom to 100% of the people that have viewed it so far- love it. They refer to it generically, and without any sense of irony, as the "action movie". I doubt this is the kind of "cultural exchange" the Peace Corps had in mind when it was trying to reprogram us in training by harping on it as one of its supposed reasons for existing. Then we put in Steven King's "It", which I will go on record as the first human being ever to assert is a stupid movie. Not scary; stupid. And no I won't read the book, either. At 12:30 am I walked home.