Rodolfo swept the dried droppings out from the edge of the fence with a broom ahead of Julio and I shoveling it into a big sack. When we had filled 2 of such sacks, Julio would cart them in a wheelbarrow over to his house and down the sawdust hill to the garden. After emptying the sacks, he'd return and we'd repeat the process. In the meantime, Rodolfo would exclaim "tdrain!" and talk about winter. Antonio, Julio's nephew, who had stayed home from school due to having gotten his toenail ripped off, thus being unable to wear 'proper' shoes with his school uniform, had been following Julio and I all morning taking pictures of us with my digital camera. Rodolfo's comments about 'how beautiful the camera is' outnumbered his comments about winter 5 to 1. He was taken aback when he saw a picture I had taken of him and laughed as he traced the parameter of his stomach with his hands. Lorena, who had stayed home from work to help fix her roof in preparation for the rains of winter, and her sister drifted across the street for a while to see what we were doing. I handed them a baby goat upon request and they remarked disapprovingly about how filthy I was. Me doing manual labor is an incongruous concept for Tambonians. By this time, the sun was too hot to continue working so we quit.

         Around 5pm, I went down to continue working on the garden in the low sun. Recall that the garden at this stage is a 12 by 18 foot pit excavated to a depth of about 10 inches. Recall also that I had brought the seeds from the States, planned out the most efficient garden one could make given the terrain and growth habits of the plants, and had begun the construction deliberately icy to the potential for the family to help out. The reason for this is that people here tend to take initiatives without using their heads. They alter your plans without informing you and usually it is for the worse. Ultimately, they will take over your plans altogether and nothing short of yelling at them and forbidding them to come near your garden will prevent this. They do not intend to be pains in the ass, it is just how life works here. Everything is a collaborative effort and they think they are doing me a favor by taking work off my hands. They do not understand the importance of the intricacies of my planning nor that I enjoy working outside, especially when the work is physically demanding.

         But, inevitably, the family did graft itself on to the garden. Alex did take it upon himself to build the fence really far away from the garden and then ruin the possibility of using that enclosed space to extend the garden by building a diagonal portion of fence to across it. And now, Julio and I had been going back and forth for days on how the garden soil itself should be created. My plan was to replace the hard, excavated soil we had removed with pure goat poop and possibly decomposed sawdust. If you are unfamiliar with goat poop, it falls as a cascade of individual pellets, which quickly dry and are easily trampled into perfect, fluffy, fertile soil. Up the street at Rodolfo's, mountains of goat poop are regularly produced and free for the taking.

         Julio had been insisting that we tear up, but not remove the earth at the bottom of the excavated pit. Into that loosened earth, he wanted to work in the poop and sawdust. My reason for opposing that is that once the pit is refilled, 99% the roots of the plants will never make it as deep as the natural floor of our excavated pit. And so what if they do? The plant is living so high on the hog with the extreme fertility of the goat poop that it will never matter if 1% of its roots have to contend with natural Tambo soil. Filling the pit with goat poop will be hard enough work without wasting portions of the poop by trapping it where the roots will never reach it. "These are just garden plants" I told him "not trees."

         Julio contended that the poop needed to be mixed with natural soil and refused to hear any talk about the depth that roots may penetrate. I told him that the natural soil of Tambo, no matter how fluffy you can make it (and I have mixed concoctions of poop and sawdust containing less than 25% Tambo soil), always turns into a rock after it's watered. He refused to see the significance of that. By the time the garden construction got to the point where we were actually adding the goat poop to the pit, Julio was hearing no reason and allowing no hand to work the soil but his own. I had already given him all the logic and could see he was now refusing everything but his own idea, so rather than tackle him and pry the shovel out of his hand, I shut out his stupidity and worked at the other end of the garden. When he had mixed a modest amount of sawdust and poop into the bottom of the pit to a depth about 12 inches, he directed my attention to it and showed that it was fluffy to a good depth (nevermind that that will all turn to stone when we water it). When I repeated that when the pit is totally filled, no roots will ever touch his handiwork, he said that filling it was unnecessary and the garden was good like it was.

         With mountains of free goat poop 4 doors down, the garden was good like it was? Minimally composted and growing in a solid brick of Tambo soil in a pit 10 inches below the surface of the ground? When I asked him why we had excavated 50 tons of hard soil if we were just going to plant in the hard soil again anyway, he said:

         "You excavated that soil-"

         "Yes, and as I've already said 1000 times, with plans to replace that soil with poop and sawdust."

         Julio thought for an instant and then tried out several rationalizations. "We needed the excavated dirt to level off the ground out there in the campo." "We need the garden to be in a pit to prevent water run-off."

         People here, or at least Julio and his neighbors, seem preoccupied with the idea of growing things in pits so they will be easier to water (recall that soil always turns to stone and probably doesn't allow water to penetrate much before it runs downhill. Of course, had Julio listened to me, we would not have any impenetrable soil to contend with). The next door neighbor, for example, inspired by our grand landscaping on the side of the house, dug a sloppy 2' x 4' pit 6 inches deep to grow flowers in (It apparently does not detract from the beauty of one's flowers, according to local aesthetics, to have them growing in a hastily chiseled hole). With the flowers thus prepared to receive buckets of water dumped upon them suddenly without the threat of annoying run off, how do you think the flowers died? Yep, because no one watered them!

         I was extremely peeved at Julio's highjacking of the project. He didn't do it to be overbearing, he probably thought he was diverting some disaster inherent in my inferior plans. I was not going to attempt any further discussion on the matter while he was being pigheaded. I would not initiate any more garden work while it was still foremost in everyone's mind and if I found a chance to work on it when no one was around, I would simply continue on with the plans as I had originally intended them.

         A phone call from Ela got me out of the gardening scene gracefully but we kept getting hung up on due to problems with the phone lines. I called her back after a late dinner and we continued our call until about 9:30 pm, getting cut off and having to call back numerous times. When I was off the phone, I went into the other room where everyone was, as usual, hanging out. Ivan must have taught Julio how to make greeting cards, because he was planted in front of the computer, looking silly and extra small, feebly moving the cursor to tentatively click things. He was making hilariously sappy greeting cards to tease his wife with. A moment after I walked in, he unveiled his latest creation: A shrugging man in a suit under the caption "Why don't you like me, Susanna?" The family went into hysterics. Ivan clicked something to make the picture go full screen and the family fell on the floor. Julio's computer competence was now 15 minutes old.

         Julio came over and asked me 'what I was imagining' when he saw me staring long and hard at an under utilized portion of ground next to his house. This led to a discussion of where I should plant a few young "barrel cacti" that will eventually grow to be giants. Julio made many really bad recommendations, which I deterred with perpetual gentility. This somehow segwayed into a discussion of the big raffle/animal project competition. Julio thinks that rather than burn up all the money on a free, one-time batch of projects, that I should turn the money into a lending institution for animal projects that will endure indefinitely. I had originally forewent that idea under the assumption that the big no-can-do whiners of Tambo would not get up off their asses to raise animals for anything short of a handout. Priority number 1, in my estimation, was to get these people to feel that animal raising is a real possibility. I did not want to risk demoralizing them with the looming prospect of having to repay a loan. Julio also said that if the Femininos didn't want to sell the raffle tickets, that he personally would sell them. I believed his willingness to sell ALL the raffle tickets plus his inexplicable enthusiasm for a project he could not actually benefit from (because it would look suspicious if one of my contest winners was a guy I lived with) was linked to the computer I had brought for his son. As a general rule, I prefer to keep the people I work with somewhat indebted to me, which I accomplish, when possible, through excessive generosity. For this reason I did not feel bad about giving Julio's son 1 of the 2 computers I had hauled to Ecuador, which I knew he didn't really need, because I knew my most important resource, my link to the town at large- Julio - would be made multiple times more compelled to be of assistance when I make suggestions or want to explore untested ideas. My sole interest is getting what I want to accomplish accomplished, which I can really only do here by keeping the wheels around me well greased. You're only ever as good as the folks around you.

         At 8pm, I was lying flat on my back reading and falling asleep, when Julio came into my room dressed up with his wet hair parted crisply to the side. He wanted to know if I wanted to go ask the president of the Frente de Apoyo Feminino whether or not the Femininos were going to sell our raffle tickets. There was nothing I felt like doing less at that moment, but I know you've got to harvest enthusiasm while you've got it. It would be twice the pain in the ass to try to get Julio on board when I felt like going to talk to the president.

         On the way over to the president's house, we passed Rodolfo, sitting in the street in wood furniture. He wanted to know what happened to our bike ride. I told him I was waiting for him at my house, but he had never come. He had been waiting for me at his house. We rescheduled for Friday at 2pm.

         Julio and I arrived at the president's house and got her to the door. She said she had put out the word, but we could all get together on Friday at 3pm to discuss a final verdict. We agreed. On our way back home, I decided that Julio's idea about loaning the money instead of giving it away was the better plan, which I told him and we made official. Then I went to Rodolfo's door to tell him I could not do a bike ride on Friday now because I had a meeting, but that we should reschedule. It appeared Rodolfo was thought I was blowing him off. He appeared crushed for a moment and then snapped into an air of forced cordiality. "Sure! Another time, then!" There was an tone of finality in the way he said that and he did not venture to specify a date and time of that future bike ride, which he had done the other 2 times. But I will catch him sitting in his wood chair out in the street sometime this weekend and demand that we secure another time for the big bike ride to "where the good watermelons grow".

         After lunch, I bussed to an area in Libertad known as "7 corners" to send a fax, use internet and look into the matter of acquiring internet at Julio's house. Then I went to Hipermarket and found seeds to grow red sunflowers, a very cheap powerstrip for the raffle computer, a very cheap ceramic pot (slated to go to Ela's house) in which I will plant a few of the plantlets I brought into the county that are too delicate to go in the ground at Julio's but are really cool nonetheless. Then I cruised back to El Tambo to do nothing that makes for good reading for the rest of the day.

         At 3 pm, Julio and I had our scheduled raffle meeting with the Frente de Apoyo. We sauntered down to the meeting in the strange manner that Julio always saunters to meetings or events. It's a slow, measured gate, like a Hollywood cowboy, but employs the same meditative fog that Julio always goes into at meal times. It's as if it is assumed that matters business are supposed to be an all day process, thus, only an idiot would approach the theater of business at a reckless (which is to say, "efficient") pace.

         We arrived at the meeting a calculated ½ hour late and were still the first ones to arrive. Going into the meeting, I had determined that I was not going to let myself get mad when people proposed impossible things or were pigheaded, self centered, stupid or ass backwards. I had to remember that I was going to them to see if I could impose work on them for which I myself would not be lifting a finger. It would be equally ridiculous of me, under the circumstances, to sit there infuriated that it was an hour and a half after the meeting was scheduled to begin and yet we still hadn't started, for example. The worst thing the Femininos could ultimately do is decline my proposal, which was their right, even if helping is the sole reason for the group's existence. However, to my surprise, not only did no one say anything stupid, but they were thoughtful, organized and asked intelligent questions. They were very supportive of my idea and thought it fairly brilliant. They're totally on board. They will sell 1000 raffle tickets for which they requested 2 month's time.

         The sole incident of epic stupidity came from a surprising source- Julio . I had asked him weeks earlier if 10% was a sufficient commission to entice people to sell my tickets, or should I go higher. He thought 10% was good. That was the offer we came to the meeting with. The Femininos had not only made several statements that intimated they were pleased with a 10% commission, they had agreed to sell the tickets for said commission after a quick deliberation. They had already agreed to sell the tickets at 10% commission when Julio asked the group "And then there's this other matter... is 10% enough of a commission?"

         My blood pressure hit stroke level in one second flat. The fool! I am as mystified as to how I kept from turning around and hissing "shut up you idiot!" as I am that he made so half-witted a blunder in the first place. If you ever ask a person if he would like to make more money to do the exact same job he was already obligated to, the answer- especially where the people make $5 a day- is an automatic yes. Add to that, that the people here think I come from unimaginable wealth (which, from much of the world's perspective is true) and you are sure to incite all the selfish squabbling that you had miraculously avoided the first time through the negotiation. Even if they decline the extra money, the fact that you offered it will begin to marinate in their minds. They will go about their work with the growing sense that they are not receiving just compensation for their efforts and they will slowly begin to resent their work. Asking them for any additional favors, no matter how insignificant, will be out of the question.

         The women dismissed the need to receive more money, as they would all have looked like total opportunists to me and each other by changing their tune after having been so obviously fine with the offer the first time through. Incredibly, unbelievably, that idiot Julio continued to press the issue. "You gotta consider that bus fare is involved, you'll be doing all kinds of walking around, the weather is getting hotter now…." I watched each face, uncomfortable at first at being placed in this situation, but then attentive as they were either listening to the points Julio was making or trying to divine what the secret motives could be for him carrying on like an idiot after anyone with a lick of common sense would have shut the hell up. I was reviewing my reasons for resolving not to blow up at anyone in a continuous loop. Even so, I nearly announced to the group that what Julio was trying to get at is that he wants to give everyone a $5 tip from his own money. That would have stopped this stupidity. Luckily he finally stopped his yammering without my assistance, leaving an awkward silence. Someone broke the silence by saying "10% is good but if you want to pay us more, that would be good too".

         Julio has lost his damned mind. Hasn't he lived here longer than me? Shouldn't he already know that the soil here gets rock hard when it's watered? Shouldn't he know that El Tambo has a history of destroying community projects because everyone is more than happy to rip the golden goose limb from limb in pursuit of their own personal piece of the pie? Even MY dumb, gringo ass knows this stuff. I'm not trying to be a slave driver by paying the ticket sellers less, it's that the raffle money is supposed to be an investment that will perpetually benefit a lot of people for a long time, not a handful of women for a few days.

         We got out of the meeting without further incidence and cowboy moseyed back home. Soon after arriving home, Julio and I began toying with a few ideas- or rather, I ran a list of ideas past Julio and he tweaked them so as to give them a real life application in Tambo. I told him I wanted to put an Ecuadorian face on the lending institution that our raffle money was creating. I didn't want it to be construed as the lowly locals coming to kiss the ring of the great white father to ask for favors. They should feel it is possible to do things for themselves. Besides, I wont live in Tambo forever. Someone's got to take over the lending after I'm gone. For these reasons, my suggestion was that we get Julio's 2 neighbor guys that we know we can trust and with Julio and I, make sort of a panel that reviews each loan application. This way there is no specific face that corresponds with one's accepted or rejected application, thus the process is made more impersonal. I would judge the soundness of an application's proposed animal project, and the other 3 would basically be there to screen out applications from people we should not trust (while hopefully learning in time how to know a good animal project from a bad one).

         "So would we be forming a group or a cooperative? Julio asked."

         "What's the difference?"

         "Um, I don't really know."

         "Ok then, let's say it's something more like the Supreme Court, except that a single 'no' vote, rather than a majority rule type thing, will result in a rejected application. Plus, we would never rule that Bush was the legal winner of the 2000 presidential election."

         I was in the middle of a sentence about something totally unrelated when I had an idea. In order to be a credible raffle in Ecuador, a date is declared in which all raffle ticket holders should check the national lottery numbers in the newspaper to see who won the local raffle. The raffle itself does not pull a number out of a giant hat or anything because that opens the door for all sorts of corrupt practices. But if the last 3 numbers of the national lottery on a specific date are said to be the ones by which a local raffle will also declare its winner, there is no chance of corruption. But this, we originally figured, limited our choices to selling 1,000 tickets and using the last 3 numbers of the lottery, or selling 10,000 tickets and using the last 4 numbers. As selling 1,000 tickets is far more feasible than selling 10,000, we had assumed 1,000 tickets, thus $900 (when commissions are subtracted) was our magic number.

         However, the idea I had just had was to put 4 or 5 different numbers on each ticket, so we could use the last 4 numbers of the national lottery, which would mean we would no longer be limited to a mere 1,000 tickets, but neither would we have to sell a full 10,000 tickets because each ticket was knocking out 4 or 5 numbers (of course, there would be nothing overtly unscrupulous about not selling all of one's tickets, thus creating the possibility that there may be NO winner, but that isn't the most reputable way to do business). If each ticket contained 5 numbers, we could sell up to 2000 tickets; with 4 numbers, we could sell 2,500 tickets. And for that matter, we could put 2 numbers on each ticket and sell 5000 of them. We were only really limited by how many tickets we thought we could sell.

         Julio and I allowed ourselves the momentarily morbid muse that we would probably sell more tickets since seeing several numbers on each ticket makes you feel like you're more apt to win, though the odds are the exact same. Then we straightened up because we do not approve of conspiracy. I mentioned to Julio that we had already told the Femininos that there were only 1,000 tickets, would we now just be springing on them an additional 1,000 or more tickets? He said we would not. We could bring it up to them much later and if they reject the idea of selling more tickets, we'll just find another way to sell them, even if we have to do it ourselves.

         Then I had another idea, we could keep half of the numbers in storage and wait to see how well the first half sells. If the first half goes like hotcakes and the Femininos find their commissions were easy money, we crack out the second half. If the Femininos barely manage to sell the first half, we just assign each of the second half tickets to the people that have purchased the first half. So the person in possession of ticket 37, for example, would also secretly own ticket 1,037. Who would object to winning a computer because a number hit that they didn't even know they had owned? In this way, our bets are hedged all the way around and we ensure someone wins the computer. This is an idea that Henry Ford upheld, but that the big corporations of the world have refused to respect in the time having elapsed since- it is possible to make a killing and be generous with everyone involved. The Femininos are making a commission, even though their manifesto says they work for free. We end up making up to $2,500 dollars on a computer that was worthless in the United States, where it came from, someone wins a computer for a dollar, which they could never have hoped to own otherwise and El Tambo gets to make money on animal projects that were not possible before we acquired this fund to lend.

         Oh, incidentally, my idea was to lend at 0% interest for the first year and only charge a miniscule interest if the fund was so popular that the money was always completely lent. However, Julio seems to think that it will be just that popular from the get go, as there are almost no local lending institutions that will lend to people other than their own shareholders. Julio talked me into 5% monthly interest, thus $100 borrowed for 1 month repays $105, but if kept for 2 months repays $110. This sounds stiff to me, but he assures me that 20% monthly interest is common here, and that even the Caja Solidaria, which only lends to its own shareholders, lends at 10% monthly interest. Plus, our lent sums come with free advice for your animal project, not unlike the IMF, except that we aren't waiting for your country to default on its loans and implode before we step in. In fact, we will loan to you even if you know nothing about animals, as long as you agree to let us instruct you in every step of your project.

         Call all of this the "Before" snapshot, because things are suddenly going far too smoothly to be taking place in Tambo. Our glory days may indeed be limited only to the planning phases. Shall we rise up from tugs to our own bootstraps or will we screw the proverbial pooch? Stay tuned!

         I found Lonne and Sally in the mall's internet place and talked to them a while before getting online myself. Then I placed an hour-long call to Ela from the mall's phone place. I had left Tambo built up to see a movie and be gone all evening, but having thus run out of things to do, I returned home.

         At 8:30pm, I went over to Lorena's house. Very little was going on there. Soon, I found myself falling asleep in my chair and made an abrupt exit. It was 10pm.

         Justo and I conversed for 2 hours. Without the impediment of Julio trying to act as mediator between me and everyone I encounter who may not be entirely familiar with me, in this case Justo, we were free to run riot with the one most outstanding thing he and I have in common- rabid mischief. When I left Justo's, I exited via his backdoor into a street different than the one by which I had come to his house to avoid the borracho gauntlet I had passed through earlier. I got caught in the back street by a group of borrachos who flagged me down as I passed their drinking circle. After an initial period of the typical drunk ass imbecility that borrachos are known for, it came out that I was in town to do stuff with animals (ostensibly). It shouldn't still surprise me to find that people don't know that, but it does. Have another drink, guys. They thought I was here for Jehovah's Witness or Mormon type stuff. This is understandable as the only caucasians you ever see here are here for just that reason.

         At the mention of my so-called animal expertise, I was dragged into the house to a woman that was in the middle of cooking. The cooking woman was as put on the spot as I was, as she had no idea who I was and I understood little of what the drunk was babbling. The woman rolled her eyes at her husband's behavior. I, in turn, acknowledged her transmission and gesticulated that I had no idea what was going on either. 2 of the most obnoxious pigs I have ever seen were outside doing the pig equivalent of trying to kick in the door to the room we were in because they had decided it was time to be fed.

         The woman finally began to explain that she had a chicken out back that "had a fever". I thought she was using some kind of rural colloquialism to express 'generic illness', but when we went out back to see the chicken in question, she snatched it up from the ground and took its temperature by placing her hand around its neck. After a moment, she nodded confirmation of "a fever" and stuck the chicken out at me to try it myself. I had never heard of anyone being able to discern abnormalities in chicken temperatures before, but knew that even if it were possible, the fact that the black chicken was just captured from the raging equatorial sun would have certainly obliterated any subtle nuances in temperature, thus she was probably imagining things. I placed my hand on the chicken's neck and nodded gravely, but not too emphatically so as to inspire them to ask what they should do about the problem.

         Over the noise of her stark raving mad pigs, who were now engaged in what can only be described as a cross between Sumo wrestling and a dog fight, the woman told me the chicken had not eaten for 2 days and asked if I had any pills that would treat the problem. Ecuadorians put a lot of trust in pills. You'll note that no one was even taking a stab at what specific illness we were dealing with. She probably thought for sure that as a gringo animal guy I'd have a 'chicken pill' on me that could fix all ailments. I told her I didn't have any pills because I am not a veterinarian. She bought that logic unquestioningly. She asked me if a human antibiotic would fix the chicken. I had no idea, but took a stab.

         "Um, no."

         "Oh hell! I already gave the chicken one."

         At that moment, I had to take drastic evasive measures to avoid having my legs snapped at the knees by the out of control pig battle that swung through where I had been standing. Recomposing myself, I asked when she had given the chicken a human antibiotic.

         "Yesterday."

         "Oh, well then it should be alright." I had no clue what I was talking about. Neither did the woman, of course. According to her story, the chicken had not eaten for all of 1 day before she had concluded it needed a human antibiotic for its fever. She affirmed that the chicken was otherwise behaving normally. I told her that its appetite may just be responding to the heat, like my pigs currently are, which was the first sensible thing I had said, though who knows how accurate it was. Soon thereafter I took my leave and went back to Julio's.

         As I was typing in my room, as usual, Julio drifted in, as usual, and as usual we began floating between us whatever topics of potential interest had occurred to us since the last time he had drifted into my room. He asked if I had heard that "problem in the street" last night. I hadn't. He laughed and leaned in, telling me that the "father of the Iguanas" had tried to burn his own house down last night.

         The "Iguanas" are a particularly strange family that lives in Julio's part of town. The Iguana children are poorly taken care of, perennially filthy and covered in rashes and insect bites. They seem to be vaguely autistic and do not interact with other children in the neighborhood, wandering among them instead as if they were invisible. The Iguana mom is missing a front tooth, has one blind sky-blue eye jingling around in its socket and a big facial scar from the time she accidentally set her own (nylon?) mosquito net on fire with a candle and it fell molten atop her as she slept. Neither is Iguana mom like her peers in Tambo. She is as friendly and uninhibited as she is brash. I think she's cool, personally, though the evidence would suggest she's mad as a hatter. I have only ever seen Iguana dad shuffling twitchingly from his house on the left of Julio's, to his in-laws on the right of Julio's. No one knows why the family is called the Iguanas, but it is a name used openly in front of them.

         "Why did Iguana dad try to burn down his own house?" I asked Julio.

         "He was mad at his wife and drunk", he said. "She was inside the house at the time. He got as far as pouring gasoline all over the bamboo front of the house, but then everyone ran down the street and stopped him from igniting it"

         "What did Iguana mom do?"

         "Cried"

         "No, I mean to make him so mad"

         "Oh, she had horns a while back (an expression here used when a woman cheats on her husband)"

         "Someone was Iguana mom's beau?!" We had to pause the conversation at that thought to clasp our hands over our mouths and tip over in our seats laughing.

         "Yeah, I don't know who he was" Julio continued, anticipating my next question.

         "So what brought this all to the surface again last night?"

         "I don't know. It's never an issue unless someone is plastered. Like today, no one in the Iguana camp acts like anything ever happened. Last night Iguana dad was burning the house down."

         There was a long silence as we pondered that. Then Julio suddenly began talking again. "Once, we were all hanging out at night at [unintelligible] during [unintelligible] when the sky lit up really brightly. When we all ran down the street to find out what was going on, we found that Iguana dad had dragged all of Iguana mom's underwear outside and set it on fire." At that point I fell out of my chair. Julio continued talking with an absurd grin on his face, relishing the ridiculousness of his own story "For a long time after that, when Iguana dad walked down the street, people would yell out 'Hey, Burningpanties!'"

         Oh man, how I would liked to have seen Iguana mom's reaction to finding a big pile of her panties on fire! Then I told Julio of another funny marital spat I had seen going down last night in dramatic fashion at the neighbors. Julio laughed at my description of everyone acting so out of character and said the woman in my story "had had horns too". She not only had had horns, but she had left her husband altogether, though she came back home after only a week. I was shocked. That was the last woman of the last family I would have suspected. So I began probing and asked Julio about every single married pair that I knew of in Tambo (except for Julio's close relatives) and found that every single married couple I could name had had at some point one or both members of the marriage embroiled in a big infidelity scandal. I had no idea the scope of this sort of thing here was so large, but it rather seemed to clarify the curious encounters I am always having with local women. I don't know if this is a cultural thing or just a serious drawback to marrying the first person whose eye you catch when you are 16 years old.

         When darkness fell, I headed to Merci's tienda to buy water, hoping that the cover of night would make it harder for the drunks to spot me and harass me to join them. It didn't. I was called out to by slumping and teetering clusters of silhouettes the entire way there and back. Even Lorena, whom I had deliberately ditched earlier in the day, spotted me sneaking past and called out from her porch in a singsong fashion about how she was going to kill me.

         Back at home, the phone rang. It was a Peace Corps volunteer who had notified me a few weeks earlier that he would be on his way to see me when he finished his routine medical stuff in Quito. He was to be making a tour of the coast, of which I and Salinas were the final stop. His projected date of arrival was in 2 to 4 days. I had told him to give me a call when he knew something for sure about when exactly he would be arriving.

         "Oh, hey!" I said, when I found out who was on the other end of the line, "you didn't sound like you. Where are you at?"

         "Quito", said he.

         "Quito, what happened?"

         "Well, dude, are you sitting down?"

         "Hold on", I said walking over to a chair and plunking down "Ok, yeah"

         "They're deporting me. I got busted with an ounce of pot in Esmereldas. I've been in jail the past 2 days"

         "WHAT! Are you serious!? What happened!?"

         "Man, it was one of those night bus checkpoints leaving Esmereldas. The cops there were out of their minds. They just singled me out. They were screaming like, 'This [Peace Corps Issued] ID is fake! Are you Colombian!? I don't believe you! Do you have a backpack!? Do you have bags in the bus storage compartment!? Show us which is your bag!' They went ripping through everything I had. The pot was in my bag under the bus. That's where they found it."

         "Agh! Didn't you know you could buy your way-" "

         "I tried! They wouldn't take the money! They were like 'No! You have to talk to the chief!' I had $300! Then they put the handcuffs on me and we all walked down the street. They were shoving me and roughing me up and screaming 'Traficante! Narcoista!' They put me in the back of a van and then went cruising down some dark ass back roads. I thought I they were going to kill my ass. I was like, 'Alright, dude, here it comes. Get ready'. But then we went to the jail. Let me tell you something, you don't wanna go to jail here. The cops in Esmereldas are insane. They were sticking their pistols through the bars at the inmates. They brought this kid in- a 15 year old kid- and they were beating the hell out of this guy. The kid only had bangs- like, a shaved head with just bangs- and a cop grabbed the bangs and ripped them off with a big knife. Then they tripped him. His hands were cuffed behind his back. They just grabbed him by the shoulders and did a foot sweep, like, BAM! The kid was airborne and landed on his face because his hands were cuffed behind his back. The cops were kicking him-"

         "What'd the kid do?" I queried.

         "Murder. He killed a cab driver. That's the kind of people they had me in there with. We were just all together and everything was filthy and smelled rancid. Prostitutes just came walking in and out of the prison and were like 'BLEH!' and lifted up their skirts and stuck their shit out at the bars. I had a big knife in my pocket. The cops put me in there with those guys and I had a big knife on me. It was insane. I was in there for 2 days. They told me I was looking at 4 years in there. The embassy got me out. The cops just came and let me out and Ruben was on the phone and asked me if I was ok and I said 'yeah' and he told me to come to Quito. They're deporting me! I've got to meet with Ruben tomorrow. He has to come in to work on a holiday. They're putting me on a plane Tuesday. Ruben said-"

         "Ok, let me interrupt you. Is there any chance you would want me to come to Quito? If I get my stuff together right now, I can catch the 9:30 pm TransEsmereldas bus to Quito and be there in the morning."

         "Man, if you could come to Quito to kick it with me on my last day in Ecuador, that would be great."

         "Alright, then let me hang up and get moving here and I'll see you… around, probably 8:30, 9:00am."

         "Cool. Just come to the Arupo. I should still be around there at 8:30, 9:00."