"Are you Justin?" I asked the guy on the couch. He was, in fact. I spoke with him for a minute or so. Ela was right; I liked him. Then the volunteer I had come to see came strolling out of a back room.

         "What's up T!" he said extending a lively handshake. "Thanks for coming out. Can you believe this shit?"

         We walked to the room where he and Justin were both staying. He was getting dressed for his meeting with Ruben. I too had to change my clothes. I had been so long in the hot coast, I had sort of forgotten it is too cold in Quito for shorts. Then he, Justin and I went out for breakfast. After breakfast, He went to meet with Ruben at the Peace Corps office and Justin and I went to throw a frisbee at the Parque Carolina. I didn't do too badly at this, seeing as I can normally not even walk up a hill in Quito without dying, due to the 9000 foot change in altitude from Tambo.

         While sitting in front of the restaurant waiting for Ela to arrive, I decided it was high time I drafted a contingency plan for if I ever get caught out of my site again and am consequently dispatched back to the States. But before I get to that, let me talk about something else that occurred to me sitting there. Julio had asked me if the fund that the raffle will create for people in Tambo to start animal projects will also be available to make loans for whatever other needs people will have. I told him 'no, just animals'. However, sitting there, greatly anticipating the pile french fries I was soon to eat, I realized that unless the animal project fund is totally ignored by the folks of Tambo, it will continuously grow. Meanwhile, the need for people to borrow it for animal projects will theoretically continue to decrease. The decrease will happen because the portion of the population interested in raising animals will eventually, at least in theory, become self sufficient as their animal projects begin kicking back enough profit to allow the people to pay for their own renewing projects. Therefore, at some point, a portion of the fund- possibly a huge portion- will become idle. As it is foolish to let money collect dust and not be used to make more money, our fund will be forced to find new ways to invest in Tambo. That means non-animal project loans (but at 10% interest so as to not undercut and destabilize other homespun lending institutions). Even if that transition passes without incident, we will still be growing more money than we will eventually be able to loan out, thus, since there are no shareholders, yet another way to invest is called for. I haven't got that "other way" figured out yet. Something big, hopefully. Some kind of permanent asset that it would be impossible for Tambo to afford for itself. Hopefully this "permanent asset" would generate even more income for Tambo, but even if it didn't, the point of this fund is to improve life in Tambo, not simply to grow itself indefinitely. No one actually owns the fund, anyway. It is everyone's and no one's, like a park bench.

         Now, I realize I am getting way ahead of myself. The chances are good this fund will be very sparsely, if at all utilized. It will probably not outgrow its use as an animal project fund while I am still around. Eventually, something stupid and easily preventable will probably destroy it. But it is still smart to have its future mapped out. Even the simple mapping of its future is a great lesson to locals.

         So the contingency plan I mentioned earlier, upon receiving the boot, would involve working for a month or 2 in the States and then returning to Ecuador. Baeza would become my home base, but I would still spend a lot of time in Tambo furthering whatever work I still had going there. There would of course be plenty of traveling and I would probably pursue some kind of personal income generation that would not be entirely scrupulous if done while in the Peace Corps, like taking money for English classes and exporting cheap artisan products or something.

         Nothing else that would make for an interesting story happened for the rest of the day.

         Around 2pm, I went to the mall in Libertad and killed 1.5 hours until the first showing of Lord of the Rings 3 at the mall movie theater. Movies in Libertad cost $2.60 on weekdays and are usually very sparsely attended. Unlike every commentary I had been given about the Lord of the Rings 3, I thought the movie was merely OK. Sure, the special effects were great, but I never read the Lord of the Rings books and unless you are already a fan of the books, the story line of the movie cannot stand on its own. I doubt anyone even realizes Lord of the Rings 3 had a story line because they were all so rapt with the action, but it was there and it was totally uninteresting.

         Around 7pm I arrived back in Tambo. I was happy to have missed eating the small burnt fish the rest of the family had for dinner, and even happier to receive 2 fried eggs on rice in place of it. The fried egg meal, always handed to me apologetically when I arrive home late for dinner, is one of my favorites. Eggs are great but we never eat them. Susanna usually opts to buy fish from vendors in the street or nasty, nasty, nasty pieces of red meat. The meat they can't sell in the market in a city they sell to the people who can't get out to the markets and be choosy consumers. Luckily, organs and guts are readily sellable in markets. Skip the cow. Gimmee eggs.

         I was too tired from last night's substandard sleep on the bus to do anything interesting after dinner. The family dragged wood furniture into the street, which is their new summertime activity and ate homemade popsicles sold by the neighbor. Note that January is actually a "winter" month, but if they can call rain "invierno (winter)" because it always coincides with winter, then I can call the hot, sunny season "summer", even if it happens to fall in what is known locally as 'winter'. In fact, the more I think about this, the more interesting it becomes. The names of the seasons are just generic and meaningless terms for parts of the year. In places like say, Ohio, 'summer' refers to the warm part of the year and 'winter' the cold. I just turned around and asked Ivan what season we are in. He said "we are in 'winter' because this is the time of the year when it rains". When I asked him what happens here in 'autumn', he said "Autumn does not exist here. Only summer and winter." I asked him what then 'winter' means if both Ecuador and the United States are in 'winter', and yet here it is the hot season and there it is cold. He acknowledged it is a confusing situation, but didn't really seem inspired to ponder it. Then I asked him what happens in Argentina in 'spring', hoping he would say "all the leaves fall off the trees" but instead he said "I don't know what happens, but 'spring' exists there." Whatever that means.

         A little later I made a brief trip to Santa Elena to pick up 2 rolls of wire to make fencing out of and unsuccessfully tried to mail a letter to Quito. In the afternoon, Ivan and I opened up and cleaned the 2 computers I brought back with me from the States. The raffle computer now looks great.

         Whenever I wasn't doing the above, I was writing. This website is arguably too much work, but I prefer to have too much work rather than the massive amount of idle time that would open up if this work were to vanish. At night, Julio and Susanna sat in wood furniture in the street.

         I had been refusing to move on to new material until the students could spit back the vocabulary list that I had taken from a section in my English book titled "Words that most Latinos already know". Ha ha. That was the first list I took from the book and by exam time we were still working on it. I would drill them and drill them until by the end of a class period everyone knew most of the answers. Come the following Saturday, no one could tell me anything. Heads of stone.

         I handed out the exams while all the other teachers present slouched in chairs across the room conversing with each other and making no effort whatsoever to pass themselves off as teachers. It occurred to me then that for quite a while now it had seemed like I was the only one teaching anything. I had never really paid that much attention to the other teachers because I was always teaching- from the time I entered the school to the time they locked the doors. But watching the other teachers sitting there conversing like it had never crossed their minds that they might do something else on an exam day made me realize that they were simply not doing anything. Ever.

         And then the students proceeded not just to simply fail the tests, but to blatantly cheat and THEN fail the tests. At first, I took away their dictionaries when I caught them trying to use them and moved people around so they would stop looking on each others exams, but the moment I turned to address one person's exam malfeasance, the rest of the room would began exchanging answers and peeking into their bags and books to find the answers. A small girl who was not even a student ran to student's houses to retrieve dictionaries to slip them and would come whisper answers to people upon request. The one student that actually knew most of the answers finished his exam and then moved table to table giving people help. I would check correct questions wrong on his exam each time and show him and he would stop what he was doing temporarily. They cheated and cheated and didn't care that they got caught because the moment you turned your back to them they were at it again. It was a losing battle. I was not going to scream at them. It was obvious they knew nothing and sooner than scream, I would rather allow them to freely cheat and then simply fail them all as a result. Of course, even if I fail them, Guido will probably just change all their grades to passing before he turns them in so the people in Guayaquil wont suspect that our school is a joke, not that Guayaquil cares about anything like that as long as the tuitions keep rolling in. And the whole time I was running around the room vociferously trying to stem the tide of cheating, did even one teacher look over to see what was going on? No. And there you have the recipe for country-wide failure. No one has any standards or ethics anywhere.

         I walked out of the school with the stack of exams I had no intention of grading and went home to write. At 8:30pm, I was still writing when Lorena tried to sneak up behind me in my room. I'm not sure I'm much liking this newfound ease with which she is paying me visits these days. I kinda liked it when I controlled whether or not I hung out with anyone. But just the same I was an entertaining host.

         I was ripping on the incomprehensible worthlessness of that brainless den of weasels, referred to in some circles as "my English class", when Lorena, who has always been made uneasy by my lack of hesitance in calling a spade a spade, suggested for the 1000th time that I probably rip on her mercilessly to all my gringo friends. I thought for a long moment and then asked Lorena if she could keep a secret. She said she could. I knew she could, but I wanted to be difficult, so I brought up a few instances I knew of where keeping her mouth shut would have been in order and asked her if she had. She said she had, naturally. Then I told her I have this little site on the internet where I write about what happens to me each day. Before I put a password on this site, I was getting about 1600 visitors per month. Lorena was very impressed by that and asked me if I 'could write books'. I told her it was possible, but that was another matter entirely. "My point is that everyone I know has access to this site. If you want to know what I tell my 'gringo friends' about you, give me a date we hung out. When was that one time when we went shopping?"

         "November, um… 24th" she said. I knew she would know the date. Dates are very important to Ecuadorians. They commonly name streets and coops after dates. Even Julio can crack off interesting, if not important, dates upon demand.

         I called up the MS Word document on my computer for the week containing November 24th and translated it line by line. She was intrigued that I would tell the world "she supplied large amounts of opinion to my shopping decisions" and wanted me to clarify what I meant by so doing. I explained that I could ask anyone- Julio, for example- if I should buy a pill that would save my life and the response would be-

         Lorena and I did theatric Ecuadorian shrugs simultaneously. She had seen where I was going with my point. Ecuadorians will never tell you how to spend your money, even when you directly solicit their advice to help simplify a dilemma you are having. Incidentally, an "Ecuadorian shrug" is a gesture similar to the comportment one affects when ice water is poured down one's back.

         We checked out a few more entries and I explained how I substitute code names for Julio's family members when I write so they won't walk up behind me and see their names floating 16 times on a page and be compelled to ask me what I am typing about. I always tell just them I am writing letters to home. If they knew they were starring in a website I would never again be able to lose myself in an afternoon of typing in therapeutic solitude because the family (and probably the neighbors as well) would gather behind me every time they heard my keyboard clicking away and speculate out loud as to what today's episode contains and then ask for a translation when their curiosity could no longer be contained. I restated the importance to Lorena of keeping quiet about the website. She confirmed that she understood. When she asked for the web address I declined to give it. I know she does not know how to use the internet and would have to get someone to help her every step of the way- which is a security breach.

         Then all the bonding and cross cultural exchanging broke down into a dance party of the absurd when I cranked an Old Dirty Bastard CD to annoy Lorena, who had the last laugh on me by not at all hating the music, as she normally does, which destroyed my pretext to accuse her of being Latina, an allegation I find amusing to level at her because it makes her grimace, as she is "regular" in her own estimation and I am the only one in the room with any appreciable ethnicity. This made me have to 'up the ante' by running into the next room after a CD of the most obnoxious Cumbia music in existence and cranking it along with my impression of Ecuadorians dancing. Rather than having her goat gotten, Lorena laughed and denied that Ecuadorians dance that way. This ridiculousness continued until her sisters came and got her at 10:30pm to take them to a party their mom would not let them attend unaccompanied.

         Sometime in the afternoon, a bad thing happened back at the pigpens. Julio's white pig, who has dug himself out a depression beneath his door so he can nap in the daytime with his snout and face poking out into the fresh breeze, was napping in exactly this manner when I wandered out to see if the pigs needed cooled off with a splash of water. Seeing the lazy pig's snout poking out from beneath the door and always having wanted to pinch it to see what it was made of, I reached down and seized the end of it with my thumb and index finger. The pig jolted awake and I snatched my hand back. Upon seeing that shifting from deep sleep to blissfully-about-to-be-asleep mode was going to be the extent of his reaction, I again extended down my pincher and seized the end of his snout. This time no movement.

         The snout was stiffer than one would think watching all that sniffing and reaching and tilting of the tip that pigs' noses do. I pinched higher up on the snout to see where the bone began and from there probed a long indent that ran up the skull almost to between his eyes. I checked the pig to gauge how much of this he was going to abide and made a very disturbing discovery- he was loving it. I scratched at the side of his snout and between his eyes. The pigs eyes grew glazed over and distant and a stupefied expression slid over his face. He was responding to scratches exactly as my cats back in the States do. I then remembered Alex once roughly scratching the pig's ass and it melting to the ground and rolling over on its back like a dog. We all laughed and then went about our business. It had somehow failed to register then. I had been regarding the pig as just a commodity- foul brute at best- and was deliberately trying not to perceive otherwise. I get the impression now that if allowed into the house, Julio's white pig would crawl into my lap and sleep as I watched TV on the couch, in hopes of having its head scratched. Many pigs are not this way, but then dogs also come with varying personalities and temperaments. Julio's pig is just an Irish Setter with bad manners- a really malodorous Irish Setter who is going to die execution style next month. This is a messed up business we're in.

         I rose slowly to my feet and narrowed my eyes, and said "This never happened, pig."

         Julio's pig frantically began stuffing its face into the depression beneath its door and calling out "No! No! You have to tell the world my story! Tell them I am not just an unthinking commodity! I feel, damnit! Do you hear me? I FEEEEEEEEEEEL!!

         Later in the afternoon, I sought out a place to plant a few cacti I had brought from the States. Up to this point, the cacti had been planted in pure sawdust inside the shade of a wooden fortress behind the pigpens. They were back there trying to wake up out of their winter dormancy from the Ohio December they had come here out of. A few days ago I had noticed they were putting out a tiny bit of growth and were thus awake and ready for stronger sunlight.

         I admit that I am very meticulous when it comes to arranging plants in outside beds. Note that I did not say "landscaping". Landscapers get paid $7 an hour to do grunt work for some abrasive, thirty-something boss who is fast losing control of a drug problem. That is landscaping. I said "arranging plants", hoping to invoke the same sort of connotation as arranging flowers. I will not ascend a soapbox to argue taste, class or any other such matters of opinion, all I ask is that one be a little conscientious, when they engage in high profile ornamentation of their property that may endure for decades. People put more thought into what they are going to wear to a single social event than they do the stuff they plant in front of their house.

         I plucked a single ½ inch ball cactus from the sawdust of its fortress to accompany me on my tour of the yard for inspiration. I had 3 of such cacti in total and a definite idea of what I wanted to do with them. For me, nothing short of perfection will suffice when it comes to actualizing the plant arrangement in my head, thus it is always prudent to reevaluate and re-reevaluate the expediency of any proposed theater of plant/soil intercourse.

         However, there is a factor involved here that is not completely under my control and it involves the secret little catalyst that is the keystone to all sound Peace Corps work: consensus. It is not my yard and the family to whom it belongs possesses a vastly different aesthetic than I do. While it is true that I raised the little cacti from seeds and nurtured them through their first few years, at times even leaving them with a baby sitter (thanks Mrs and Jeanne, you did and are doing a great job) when I was away from home, and as yet remain their undisputed owner, it is also true that I brought them to a country I will permanently leave in 15 months (but who's counting) and the people who will stay behind to look at these plants for the next few decades have very small lives and will not regard the development of these impressive specimen with any less wonder than their original owner. Thus the quandary.

         I opened the floor to ideas with Alex, who was, as usual, watching me work in the plant beds from the window. He declined to extend a proposal for planting the cacti and deferred to Ivan, standing nearby. Ivan, used to pontificating at school children, gave the matter approximately 1 second's consideration and then proposed the very bad idea of making a diagonal line from the window Alex was propped up in, through the yard to the gate, which would obstruct walking, almost certainly lead to damage of the plants, and would not even make an attractive line (insofar as diagonal lines are attractive) because there were only 3 ball cacti and would hardly even be recognizable as a line. Then, with no more forethought than his last suggestion, he proposed that the 3 cacti be planted as a triangle in the corner of 2 already planted beds that come together in a 90 degree angle. This was a bad idea as well, as each cactus would eventually grow to be a giant globe shape. A triangle of giant, spiky globes would do nothing but disrupt access to the existing beds. It turns the carefully planned perpendicular plantings back into an amorphous patch in which none of the plants characteristics are decisively presented. I would sooner begin planting along the side of Julio's ex-sister-in-law's house, with which Julio's house shares a common mini-courtyard (full of idiot dogs) than allow all the plants to be needlessly crammed all on Julio's side. Why not be surrounded by thoughtfully framed design when standing in the yard? Why illustrate the exact thing that is wrong with this town by planting everything in a single possessive and unsightly clump on only Julio's side of the courtyard? When we share resources and work together, everyone wins, right? The family knows this. Perhaps they do not realize that this concept extends beyond work projects and is applicable to aesthetics as well. Or perhaps it is because they do not have a sense of aesthetics that is making them behave like the average Tambonian.

         We were at a diplomatic impasse. Instead of choosing a final placement for the imported plants of the wooden fortress, I planted everything in the bottoms of various dismembered plastic 2-liters. In this way they were graduated to stronger sunlight and negotiations could continue without a sense of urgency. While I was planting in the 2-liters, Julio's sister-in-law wandered over to watch and make inquiries. Somehow she was aware that some of the "succulents" would do well as houseplants and asked if she could have one of them specifically. I did not cart these plants all the way from the US to have them holed up in someone's house, but I had to admit that the potential for the plant to become an esteemed house plant for someone was better than my plan for them. Actually, I was as yet still formulating a plan for them as Tambo's equatorial shadelessness was a major problem for the somewhat shade-loving plants. I gave Julio's sister-in-law 2 plants of the variety she had asked for instead of 1. Who knows, maybe if the plants prosper in her house, they will eventually make it back outside in some future patch of shade that will arrive long after I am gone.

         Wrote the rest of the night.