"Ancon? Why?"

         Julio then began a wide-eyed tale about a neighbor that had lived next to his family 30 years earlier when most of present day El Tambo was still sparsely scattered squatter settlements in the surrounding campo. In those days, there was neither running water nor electricity, thus as long as you didn't build your house in a dry streambed, no place was any more or less advantageous to live than any other place. People built randomly. The woman of the family that built close enough to Julio's family to be called a neighbor had gotten fed up with her drunk, abusive thief of a husband and bolted for the United States to live with a few of her adult children already living there. This was back in the glory days of immigration, when your visa would come after a mere 6 months of waiting, rather than the 7 years one has to wait today. Julio's neighbor had up and left her husband standing the sandy chaparral north of Tambo one fine afternoon and never looked back. That was 30 years ago. Now she had returned to visit Ecuador for the first time since having left.

         A raspy falsetto screech outside remarking about Julio's shoes signaled the arrival of El Chino (Julio's dad). Julio was for some reason wearing his son's zip-up quasi-aqua sock looking tennis shoes. I have never known Julio to wear tennis shoes ever, let alone to "dress-up occasions", which would include events such as simply going into Libertad. I had to wonder if this stemmed from a conversation we had had earlier in the week when Ivan had reported seeing a gringo at a local University teaching English in flip flops. When Julio and Ivan looked at me to see if I would be as scandalized by this revelation as they were, I told them I wear the same thing sometimes when I teach. Julio asked why gringos are like that, to which I gave my usual answer that gringos are not very formal. So it is suspicious, then, that the first time I have ever seen Julio in tennis shoes was when he was visiting an Ecuadorian expatriate having lived in Gringoland for the past 30 years. El Chino, by contrast, was looking quite dapper. He was wearing the standard issue old-timer-in-Latin America shirt, which is a lightweight, usually white, short sleeve button-up shirt with 2 broad bands of ruffled fabric running the length of the shirt over each pectoral. The shirt bottom is cut straight and is made to wear untucked. The duo waited in the street until Julio's "mommy" came, and then they cowboy moseyed out of site in the direction of the bus line.

         After lunch, Ivan and I went to Santa Elena to check on the progress of the computers, but the guy who was working on them was not in. We then bussed to Libertad, as Ivan had 3 rolls of film to develop (1 from New Years and 2 mystery rolls that Julio had found in a drawer) and I needed to buy Balanciado for my pig. We dropped off the film, went to the agriculture store and paid for the 88 pound sack of pig feed but did not physically remove it from the store, then walked to the Kung Fu school to inquire about lessons ($20 per month, maximum of 20 hours of lessons in that month), then popped into internet, then picked up the film. We got a taxi for $4 to take us to the agriculture store to grab the Balanciado, then to Santa Elena to see if the computer guy had returned, then to Tambo.

         From Julio's 2 mystery rolls, only 2 pictures came out. They were from 7 years ago. The family went ape for all the pictures. The 3rd roll contained pictures of a recent Christmas musical that the kids of Tambo put on, which appeared to have had several big choreographed dance numbers I was sorry to have missed. Julio had taken some really good pictures of his parents, the type of picture meant to immortalize, which in Ecuador entails as grave a face as one can muster. I had never seen El Chino's face when it was not wearing either the surprised expression with which it reports mystery, or the beaming-with-mischief expression it wears the rest of the time. El Chino's grave "immortal expression" made his face look like someone had stepped on and smashed in its center. He looked preposterously bitter, which, ironically, immortalized the polar opposite of the real El Chino. The picture of Julio's mom was unaccountably intriguing. It was the perfect immortal portrait. I don't know her real age, but she appears in the picture to be about 75. The wind is slightly lifting her hair at the ends. Her demeanor is vaguely weary but her expression is so placid and her eyes so soulful that her picture seems to be asking a question. I wont attempt to define the exact question I presume the portrait to be asking, but surely it is a question about life that only those who have run its full course know to ask. It is a picture that if reprinted in black and white, could more easily be passed off as having been taken 150 years ago rather than something recent.

         I wrote from 5:30 to 7pm, then simultaneously ate dinner and talked on the phone to the States. The phone disconnected several times and finally it went dead for good. Then I continued writing until 9pm.

         In training, my last real contact with these people, it seemed that nothing was ever good enough for them. In spite of some very novel sociological insights, the brass clearly demonstrated unreasonable expectations and the flakiest of formulaic approaches to human interaction. It was like they expected us to become full-blown politicians under their direction. They tried to tell us that we were "on duty" 24 hours a day 7 days a week and that we should "dress the part". If you were to tell the brass, "Hey, I've only been in my training site one week and already I know 90% of the local residents", they would say "Why don't you know the other 10%? Didn't you go up and knock on their door and present yourself? Didn't you bring up their names to the rest of town and make it common knowledge that you were trying to meet them? Didn't you take up their religion so as to corner them in church on Sunday morning and force the topic of animal projects on them? Didn't you stand out in front of their house at 6am each day with a bullhorn presenting yourself loudly and giving them a brief history of the Peace Corps and telling them that you would not go away until someone in the house came out so you could schmooze with them and feign interest in their lives to stroke their egos to get them to do animal projects?"

         In training, the Peace Corps brass were also the classic card-carrying self-professed liberal types: they leapt to the soapbox anytime your statements carried the slightest hint of political incorrectness or generalization about the poor, huddled masses (which they fancy themselves the saviors of) but when they roll up to your town in the campo in their air-conditioned SUV's, they are patronizing to the locals and obsessively use wet-naps on their hands after touching anything. [Note: the preceding was more impressionistic than literal]

         In the interest of fairness, the Peace Corps really did have quite a lot of golden insights that have come in handy since training. However, in their efforts to "motivate" us to be superhuman, they wound up routinely contradicting themselves, being willfully unrealistic and worst of all they wasted our time with endless flaky activities that caused training to resemble a cross between cheerleading camp and kindergarten. I don't like cheerleaders. I don't like kindergarten teachers thinking for me. I don't like to have to treat major wastes of time like they are valuable under penalty of being blacklisted and I really don't like anyone being all up in my grill trying to force their obviously warped perspective on me. Therefore I hated training with a passion. Training brought out the worst in me and that is the impression the brass (as well as most volunteers) carry of me today. Volunteers that play the cheerleading/kindergarten game with the brass automatically get blatant favoritism and the eternal benefit of the doubt. "You say that all you've done since you arrived in your site is organize a weekly soccer match and play games with the kids? That's both 'cheerleader' and 'kindergarten'. Outstanding!" But people like myself, who enjoy kids a whole lot but do not consider playing with them to be pivotal to the economic future of my site, will be only reluctantly given credit for the boring underpinnings they have established, which are the necessary precursors to real economic advancement. Everyone has discovered since training that you cannot force the people in your site to do work or take interest in their long-term well being any faster than lichen grows on a stone. In lieu of any overt measure with which to gauge and demonstrate one's productivity to the brass, it is perhaps stubbornness or just a lack of common sense that keeps me from seeking out some symbolic effort like kids games to flash in front of the office folk in Quito. In any event, win or lose, the brass can kiss my ass.

         Julio wandered into my room to spice up his workday with the usual ½ hour or so of conversation he gets each morning during breaks from his furniture building out back. When he found out what I was writing up and embellishing my accomplishments, he jumped right into action giving me fancified versions of my true progress while creating plausible excuses for my shortcomings. People here in general, but especially Julio's family, are extremely protective of me. They go to bat for me without missing a beat the very instant they perceive that something detrimental to me is afoot. If any real harm were ever to come to me, I would not be surprised to see the perpetrator lynched in the street.

         Julio and I have a long history of working to confound what we perceive as the tyrannical scrutiny of the Peace Corps brass' treacherous evil eye ever seeking to entrap me. Julio coughed up a number of items of great interest that I had never been able to extract from him in a sufficiently coherent form before, such as that the peninsula was forested in the 1940's. The fragile forest was plucked clean by the poor settlers who had come to the inhospitable peninsula seeking either construction work in what was becoming Salinas or in service industry type work around the British oil men of Ancon. Throughout Julio's childhood, there hadn't been any signs of plant life to speak of in the campo. It was a totally barren wasteland. Then came the El Niño of the early 1980's, which caused massive flooding on an apocalyptic scale by what Julio says was a full year of uninterrupted rainfall. Food had to be helicoptered in to the stranded residents of El Tambo. When the rain finally ended and the waters subsided, the campo sprang up green again. The grown trees we have today sprouted in 1983(?) following that massive flood. There was a second El Niño in the 1990's, but in spite of this, the residents have been steadily plucking away the trees of the campo faster than the subsequent years of drought can replace them and again the campo is turning back into the barren wasteland of Julio's childhood.

         I skipped out to Santa Elena briefly to grab a few emergency rations of coffee to keep my attitude amenable while waiting for the brass to arrive. I also grabbed my mail from the post office and bread and butter from the store. Upon returning home, I resisted writing and tried to engage myself in activities that would not turn me so introspective. I finally ran out of things to do and opted for the even worse idea of reading. I even drifted off to sleep for a while.

         The Peace Corps brass finally arrived around 3:30pm and found me wide-awake, sufficiently coffeed up and pacing around my room reading a Newsweek. They parked in front of the house and climbed out of their air-conditioned SUV. Ruben Hernandez took center stage as the rounds of handshaking commenced. I was taken aback at how unsure of themselves they looked away from their office. They seemed somewhat nervous; Marilyn Murphy especially so. When I missed my cue to offer to give a tour of the house, Ruben requested one sheepishly. "Oh! Sure!" I exclaimed and marched through my doorway about 6 feet away from us. When I looked back, Marilyn and Ruben were frozen by the doorway and peering cautiously about the room like it were a butcher shop fully strung with dismembered animals. Michael Kettering simply propped himself in my window from outside in the street. There was a barrage of possibly genuinely curious questions about coffeepots and computer parts lying around my room. I mentioned that the computer stuff was part of a fund we were creating via raffle to lend for animal projects. The brass had only been in town one minute and I had already found occasion to work my biggest potential accomplishment into the conversation. But no one said a word. Michael gave a tight-lipped smile intended to communicate approval, but besides that, no one had anything to say. Maybe I should have thrown in something about playing games with children? Tough crowd.

         Ruben asked me if I would like to see a charla given by the Peace Corps volunteer that lives in Santa Elena, Calla Brown. Except for one brief encounter, I had never really met Calla in spite of her living a mere 5 kilometers down the road. Even if I had not wanted to appear so amenable, I would still have said yes to going to Calla's charla. Then the group implied that they wanted to see the rest of my house. When I tried to lead them to see the rest of the house, they proceeded forward with an outrageous amount of caution, as if leery of unfamiliar nooks and crannies that could potentially be harboring attackers. 2/3 of the way through the tour, when they spotted Ivan kicked back in a chair watching TV, they recoiled and motioned that they were changing their mind on wanting to see the house. This I found very surprising. They were asking for things and then behaving like I had inflicted upon them some warped version of the thing they had asked for. They clearly wanted to minimize their contact with locals, possibly because of time constraints, possibly because they are more cynical than they let on about the true value of meeting random Ecuadorians across the country. "Let's go watch Calla's charla" Ruben suggested abruptly, which seems to lend more plausibility to the former explanation for dodging locals.

         On the way to Santa Elena, Michael Kettering asked a few questions about the vicinity out of genuine curiosity, but none of it really pertained to my work. The other 2 asked nothing. When we got to the site of Calla's charla, we found that the Ecuadorians did what they usually do, which is to not show up. Calla was going door to door rounding people up, which is textbook Peace Corps promoted behavior. Calla's charla was about STD's, as she is what we call a Youth and Family volunteer and not an Agriculture or Animal Production volunteer. That's the type of thing Youth and Family volunteers talk about. Given the nature of her charla, perhaps dragging people in wasn't an entirely bad idea, seeing as these women's husbands are frequenting whorehouses and the women are likely unaware such diseases exist. However, for agricultural themes, I have to quote the late, great Jennifer Sterling, who said "If the people aren't coming on their own volition, the interest to put your ideas into practice just isn't there."

         I was amazed that the STD charla was so short and involved so little information, albeit very important information. I personally would not have bothered anyone to leave their houses to listen to my charla for anything short of triple the information she gave. Even slightly more bizarre, she split the charla's tiny workload with a girl she works with at some agency. Each girl took one half of a very tiny charla. The charla itself lasted about 5 minutes. Following the charla, the brass praised Calla's excellent job and her incredibly shrewd idea of keeping the charla so short. I understood that the socially acceptable thing to do after sitting through someone's charla is to praise it, but the brass was either laying it on a bit thick or they actually believed what they were saying. The brass then took me home.

         When we arrived at the house in Tambo, I climbed out of the car fully expecting the sly onslaught of probing questions to begin, but the brass simply announced that they were continuing on up the coast, shook all hands in the vicinity and left. Again, for about the 15th time during their visit, I was surprised. They had gone to the bother of coming all the way out here and had then not even in passing bothered to scratch the surface of why we all even know each other. I was fine with that, of course. More than fine, just very surprised.

         I stood outside Julio's fence where I was dropped off, talking with Julio who was standing on the inside of said fence for a very long time before I drifted inside to write. I went to bed at 9pm, but then woke up again at 1:30am and climbed out of bed to write until 3am

         While I was playing with plants and getting myself sunburned, I received a call from the veterinarian Oswaldo Leon asking me if I could hunt down an NGO in the States that would give El Tambo $1000 to build a big cement corral to grow 40 pigs. Oswaldo said the new president of Tambo had been to Ancon to visit him today and had discussed an eagerness to get the ball rolling on this project. I asked Oswaldo if the 40 pigs were going to be sold to the Canadian pork factory, which still, to my knowledge, does not exist. He told me no and that the Canadian pork factory is never coming to Ecuador. I was already 90% sure that was the case, but Oswaldo would never be up front about this issue when I asked him about it (recall that Oswaldo personally contacted the Peace Corps and asked that someone be placed in Tambo specifically because a Canadian pork factory was to be built and the Tambonians could thus become a supplier of pork if they could just learn to grow pigs efficiently).

         When I pressed Oswaldo for clarification on the specifics of this animal project, he was evasive and gave vague responses and half deferred my questions to the new president of Tambo. I hung up the phone having no clue whether something well thought out and already organized was afoot or if the president of Tambo had been fed the idea by Oswaldo with no thought as to its necessity or feasibility. But I did know one thing for sure, I no longer trust Oswaldo. I do not trust anyone who deliberately withholds information from me under what is ostensibly a benign setting. I was asking simple questions. If you do not know an answer, say "I don't know". If you have some reason to want me to engage the president directly with all the specifics of the project, simply say "It's probably easier if you just meet with your president to hammer out the details". When someone I am casually probing avoids giving direct responses, no matter how innocent the real answers may be, they are behaving identically to someone who is up to no good. The older I get, the less tolerance I have for this sort of thing. I have given Oswaldo plenty of room to keep a low profile, to keep his life private and the rest of the world out of it, but to call me up and ask me to do work without even an explanation of the major details? I've just reassessed the history of his behavior and his benefit of the doubt has now run out.

         I told Julio who had just called and why. Julio said, with more conviction than I and without my even prompting him, that this doesn't sound right. Julio was basing this conclusion on the new president of Tambo's shady past. In fact, even recently, Plan International, an NGO, put money into an account for Tambo to start a homespun clothes making business. They have purchased all but 1 of the machines necessary to begin work, but there is no money left in the account for fabric, thread or anything else because the president used part of it for his own purposes. Julio thought the dollar amount Oswaldo wanted me to find, $1000, is suspicious because it happens to be our public estimate of how much we expect to make with our raffle.

         Building a $1000 dollar pig raising facility is a waste of money anyway. One doesn't really need to spend any money to build something to pen a pig in because a 25 cent roll of wire and campo sticks will suffice. People here refuse to pen their pigs because table scraps alone will not keep a pig alive and they do not want to spend any money on commercial pig feed. You could build a $50,000 state-of-the-art pigpen and it will stand here empty because it still costs people money to feed a pig that cannot root for its own food in the outdoors. And given Julio's story about the president using part of the seamstress account for his own needs (which is the status quo here- the seamstresses are mad, but not surprised by the misuse of their fund), I don't doubt that someone involved in this "raise 40 pigs" scheme has the sole motive of skimming from the earnings when all the pigs are sold off for one lump sum.

         In the afternoon, Julio and I weighed our pigs. Julio's pigs are big enough now that their fighting not to be weighed means that their next weighing will have to be post mortem (82 and 90 lbs., respectively). My pig, a month younger than the other 2, weighs 69lbs. Mine should make it well over 100 lbs. before its doom.

         Ivan called from Santa Elena to tell me the computers were ready, so I bussed out to meet him and we dragged them to Tambo. Upon my return, I continued working outside with the plant beds until dinner. Afterwards, I called Ela in Baeza for about an hour.

         I then caught a bus to Libertad. My first order of business was to withdraw money from the ATM in the downtown, but the machine was out of order. I could have taken a bus to the mall's ATM, but I decided to walk it so I could pop into Lorena's work on the way. Lorena's boss was home and sitting out front and told me I would find Lorena somewhere inside the house. Lorena was nowhere to be found but someone was inside the bathroom taking a shower. I stood around for a few minutes and then just continued on to the mall, figuring I would not be long there and would catch her on my way back.

         At the mall I pulled out money, made a mental note that "Kill Bill" was now playing at the movie theater, bought Kit Kats, Snickers and Pop-Tarts at Hipermarket, bought speakers for a computer, internetted, tried to call Lonne and Sally about scoring some pure bred pigs and then left. It was 4:45pm. I figured that the earliest time I could get to Lorena's house would be 5pm and soon, if not already, she would be cooking food for the family. I skipped Lorena's and went straight back to Tambo.

         As soon as I arrived home, Lorena called on the phone to find out why I had left her house without waiting for her to get out of the shower. Julio, whose brain is way, way underemployed these days was curious about who I was talking to and stood gaping at me from my doorway. Lorena does not want anyone from El Tambo to know that she calls me on the phone because El Tambo (and to varying extents, the country-at-large) subscribes to a strict, archaic moral code of conduct that it in no way practices.

         According to this code of conduct, interactions between unmarried males and females that have not been painstakingly made into a public spectacle are considered "sneaking around," which can have only one possible explanation. A phone call, by its very nature being nearly impossible to turn into a public spectacle, is highly suspect, especially when you are a 25 year old unmarried female. Julio, for all his open-mindedness, subscribes to this code of conduct. Even Lorena herself subscribes to this code of conduct, although she is obviously willing to cut herself some slack.

         In fact, unless some bone-headed foreigner is involved, the precepts that bolster this code of conduct are probably pretty accurate. What mutual interest- outside of biology- could the Ecuas possibly share? Few are the males whose pea brains are not entirely spent on soccer, alcohol and a jr. high perspective regarding females and the gross imposition thereof. Few are the EcuaFemales with anything on their pea brains at all, much less something that would interest an EcuaMale. What in the hell else could they want with each other?

         So it's not that I don't understand how EcuaCulture applies to poor little old-maid Lorena, it's that it is a pain in my ass when she calls for frivolous reasons and I have to disguise who it is that I'm talking to because Julio is standing around in my room bored and trying to find out who just called on the phone. In the past, I've just started speaking to Lorena in English and she catches on and says "Oh, is someone in your room?" and curious members of Julio's family drift away to seek their entertainment elsewhere. But I have grown tired of this charade and have become far less cooperative about covering up something that it shouldn't be necessary to so. I've told her it is more my style to just do what I want and tell everyone wielding their petty little gossip scorecards to kiss my ass. Of course, reputations here are forever, so I half obliged her one last time until I can tell her this weekend not to call me if she doesn't want me to just talk openly.

         Julio's family eventually went down to sit at Merci's tienda, which is unusual for them on a Friday, and I talked on the phone with the States for the rest of the night.

         In the afternoon hours, Julio and sons announced they were going down to put the finishing touches on my future vegetable garden. I went down with them, even though I knew they wouldn't let me work, just because the garden had been my idea. But then the sun came out and the humidity from the wet soil made standing around swatting at gnats unbearable. I went back inside and continued writing. At 8pm, I switched from writing to reading. I wasn't in the mood for about 80% of the scenarios I could imagine taking place over at Lorena's, so contrary to my promise to her, I skipped going over to hang out. Out of principle, neither did she come looking for me. Tonight's rain induced explosion of insects: flying ants. I went to bed at 9:15pm.

         I woke up at 6am, drank coffee and wrote a letter. By 9am, I fired up the coffee maker a second time and drank even more coffee. If the marks on the side of my coffee pot are to be believed, this totaled about 8 cups.

         Julio told me that a drunk had cut his wrist last night being a stupid idiot and slamming a beer bottle he was holding into the wall. As is always the case with local borrachos, the drunk was angry at his estranged wife. Julio said the drunk's family lives across the street from us and he had heard them earlier grumbling that it was the wife's fault that the drunk had injured himself. Lorena is somehow related to the injured man and had gone along to the hospital during the big bloody panic. Julio knew nothing more.

         At 1:20pm, I bussed to the mall in Libertad to catch the movie Kill Bill at the theater. You cant find out movie times until you arrive there in person, but by the time I arrived, I only had about an hour until the 3pm showing. I went to the mall's internet place where I found Lonne and Sally. Somehow I knew I was going to. The movie Kill Bill was awesome. It was the best movie I have seen in a very, very long time and possibly among the best movies I have seen ever. Brilliant. Editing, screenplay, acting- all of it perfect. It was only me and 2 other people in the theater and I guffawed the whole movie through because it was just that brilliant. A work of art. Not just some stupid industry film. Tarentino really pulled this one off. See this movie, but be forewarned that it is only the first part of 2 movies and ends abruptly and unexpectedly. I read an interview with Tarentino and apparently it is the second movie where a lot of the plot pay-offs happen. Oh man, I can hardly wait.

         I grabbed a bus back to Tambo. The whole way I was watching for an open hardware store, but it being Sunday, everything was closed. I arrived to Julio's house in roaring spirits from having seen such a good movie. During dinner and until about an hour afterwards, I watched Ace Ventura 2 on local TV and then took a phone call in my room from the States. Lorena eventually came over, which precipitated an end to the phone call. Lorena said she had bolted for the hospital so fast the night before that she had not for a while even realized that she was in her "sleeping clothes". That was what she called them. She didn't say pajamas, so I'm not sure what exactly we are talking about, but she seemed more preoccupied with that fact than that she had been rushing to the hospital with a slashed wrist drunk. The drunk needed 22 stitches and Lorena ended up pacing the whole night in blood soaked pajamas, which she informs me smelled terribly after the blood dried. She returned home by taxi the next day at 9am mortified to have made the journey in blood-soaked "sleeping clothes".

         At 11pm, Lorena's sister was sent to retrieve her. Before leaving, Lorena asked if I was going to be around tomorrow because she was going to call in "sick" to work. I told her I wasn't sure when I would be around because I had a bunch of shopping to do in Libertad. Shopping sounded good to Lorena, as long as it wasn't shopping that begins too early in the morning. I told her we could leave anytime, even after lunch. For whatever reason, she didn't like the idea of beginning a shopping expedition after lunch either. Not too early but before lunch? I told her to just to call me when she was ready to leave.