During lunch Ivan found a very large iguana hanging out atop the mortar block wall in Julio 's room where the wall does not quite reach the roof. He called us in to see it, but after a single picture, the iguana became spooked and clamored noisily up to the metal roof where we could no longer find it, in spite of our best efforts and the amplified sounds of its occasional movements.

         After lunch, I put my dirty laundry in my backpack to take to a sort of non self-serve laundromat (Susanna had apparently forgotten to retrieve my dirty clothes for a very long time and I quit asking her to do my laundry long ago because she always got weird when I did) and then put together a list of descriptive computer characteristics to take to the printer of the raffle tickets in Libertad. I called Ivan in to make sure the computer terminology I had selected was acceptable Spanish. He said that it was, but Julio, who had come in to see what we were talking about, insisted Ivan just go along with me to the printers to "assist with the language." I told them that all of that wasn't necessary and that I had written out on paper any words that might prove tricky. Still Julio persisted.

         I did not want Ivan to go because I had a backpack full of dirty laundry that I didn't want the family to know I was having washed in town. They would find that immensely offensive. For women here, the housework they do is a huge part of their identity. If you are a stockbroker and brokering is your life, when your brother goes elsewhere for investment tips, you take offense. Without sweeping the floors, washing the clothes and cooking the food, women here would rightfully feel purposeless, rather than indispensable. They do not have a life outside of the maintenance of their family. Housework here isn't considered an obstacle to all the tennis lessons and laying by the pool you would otherwise be free to do- it is womanhood itself. But just the same, I was sashaying around in my last pair of clean underwear and my supply of white t-shirts (or more importantly, the t-shirts that do not show how profusely you are sweating during a noontime visit to town) had been long sullied. I was tired of the waiting game.

         When Ivan appeared in my doorway with hair freshly splashed with water and town clothes, he said "Ok, let's go…. to the beach." We laughed at first, but it was a good idea. I asked him if he really wanted to go to the beach and said I would change into my swimsuit right that minute. He was game. I changed and we were off to the printers in Libertad.

         To have 2,500 raffle tickets printed up in Libertad, it will cost, as we found out $38.00. I was not expecting it to cost that much. The first place we checked out quoted us $49.00. I apparently wasn't the first person to think of the multiple numbers on a raffle ticket idea, as we were told that raffle tickets are always printed with 1, 2 or 4 numbers on them (but never 5).

         When we left the store, Ivan asked me which beach I wanted to go to: Ballenita or Salinas. I told him that whichever one has fewer people is better because I have my backpack to look after. He asked me why I had brought a loaded backpack with me when we were only ordering raffle tickets. Because I hate to feel penned in by secrets, I flatly told Ivan that my backpack was full of dirty clothes that I had wanted to take to the cleaners. He asked me, with no small display of discomfort, if I didn't want his mom to wash them. I told him his mom has almost too many clothes to wash as it is and as a result, had not gotten around to mine in about a month. "It's the same whether your mom washes them or a store" I said, hoping to nip in the bud the scenario he was sure to envision, which would involve my dissatisfaction for something in the way his mom washes clothes so paramount that it forced me to take the exceedingly drastic measure of taking my clothes into town. Ivan said there was a Laundry place in Santa Elena that we could hit on the way to the beach in Ballenita.

         After dropping off my clothes, we arrived at the beach in Ballenita in perfect beach conditions and without mass amounts of people to deal with. We found some of the Jehovah's witness girls on the beach that I had been teaching English to and we left my backpack with them. They stared vacantly at me as I painted myself white with SPF 12,000 sunblock and then pranced down to the water and plunked in.

         The waves at our section of the beach were at times large enough to body surf in, but usually risked flipping you down on your head in a kind of shore break. About a half-mile further down the beach, some kind of sub oceanic terrain was causing spectacular waves that rose a good distance from shore and rolled powerfully along until they smashed into the rocks of the abrupt shoreline cliff. We could see dark little specks surfing on various buoyant contraptions but were too distant to know if all that action was really in as dangerous an area as we assumed.

         On the return trip home, Ivan and I split up in Santa Elena: he lingered to meet up with a friend; I cruised directly to Tambo. I was entertaining the family in the kitchen area with the usual base hijinx for which our simple minds share a common appetite, when Lorena's sister came to the door. I walked out and met her before she had to call "a ver" and asked her what she was up to. This seemed to confound her pea-sized brain, as I had apparently taken the lead when it was she who was on a mission. She answered that she was "walking" and then, ironically, stood there. Some really ridiculous and strained small talk ensued until sister girl finally presented the message she was transporting. "Um, Lorena says that she is going to kill you", sister girl faithfully relayed, blinking and totally unaware of the ludicrous nature of the conversation we were having.

         "How nice.", I responded, "And to what do I owe this honor"

         This too confounded her because she had not been given that part of the message and I was also evidently speaking Swahili. "Um, she's over there", sister girl blinked, pointing vaguely across the street at a house. In a window, I could barely make out someone's darkened form, which then rose and headed for the side door. I walked across the street towards the side door of the neighbor's house knowing that in mere moments it would give birth to a live, full color Lorena del Tambo, who legend has it would subsequently "kill me".

         Lorena emerged holding the same tiny baby as she had been carrying around earlier in the day, followed moments later by El Tambo's sole fat girl and a miniature pigtailed girl who bore a striking resemblance to a turtle. The conversation that followed was predictable. She wanted to know why I had gone into town without her to which I rebutted that I hold told her to call when she was ready to which she said that she had told me to come get her which I contested that that had never happened. Then we all picked tiny disgusting fruits from a nearby tree, an activity that pleased the little turtle-faced girl to no end, and then I went home to eat, promising Lorena I would stop by later on in the evening.

         Lorena came strolling through the landscaped park-like area in front of the church like a proud housecat with its tail held high, purring softly in the shower of sunlight. It was only 10:06 am yet she was already feeling fully Latina, with her dark red lip liner and opaque sky-blue striped eyelids, her outsized clogs and fiery orange spandexy tank top bearing the word "nena" (baby). It was so entertaining a spectacle that I let her walk all the way past the shady enclave where I was sitting without making my presence known. When she finally spotted me, she sauntered back to my cove smiling and asked how long I had been waiting there- a rather irrelevant question as she was right on time.

         I took up the most pressing issue that I had that morning with Lorena right off the bat. I told her I had just witnessed possibly the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen a few minutes earlier in that a garbage truck was blaring an upbeat song about garbage from 2 loudspeakers atop the very cusp of its arched frame. The song was intended to be something from the Jerry Lee Lewis type genre but was performed by what was probably some really twisted musical family like the Osmonds, except a homespun Latin version. Lorena, who was smiling throughout my account, began singing:

The-e gar-bage

THROW a-way the gar-bage

The-e gar-bage

THROW a-way the gar-bage

         She then proceeded to sing about a stanza more of the song

         "How do you know the whole garbage song, you freak?" I blurted out in surprise, "You're worse than your sister singing that full soap commercial last night!" I caught a quick flicker in Lorena's eye that betrayed that she could probably sing the soap commercial as well. Of course, I was secretly thrilled that Lorena could sing the garbage song so I touched off a new round by starting with the only line I knew:

The-e gar-bage

THROW a-way the gar-bage

        Lorena filled in with the verses I didn't know while I pretended to be uncontrollably caught up in the song's groove and busted a ludicrous dance on the park sidewalk I thought befitting it.

         "We have a little problem." Lorena said abruptly. "When I told my boss I was still not feeling well, she got worried and said I needed to see the doctor. She's going to be calling my doctor later to find out what he determined is ailing me."

         "What? People get sick all the time without going to see doctors. Is she just testing you because she knows you are lying?"

         "No, she worries about me. So before we can pick up my sister who is waiting for us at my grandma's house to go to the beach, we have to go to my doctor."

         We descended the church's cliff staircase down to the small road that flanks the ocean and walked oceanside until parallel with the part of the downtown where the doctor's office is located. Then we skipped inland one block and entered the multi-floored, multi-doctored medical facility. In Ecuador, you do not need an appointment and you will not have to wait long if you want to see a doctor because the doctor here is not being pimped out by a greedy HMO that forces each doctor to see more patients in a day than he can reasonably take on. Plus, an office visit here only costs $8. I have no idea if the doctors have any idea what they are doing, but that is hardly a concern when you only have a fake illness.

         Lorena came out of the office smiling mischievously and furtively flashed a prescription for 3 different drugs at me. When we were outside, I asked her if her illness charade would include getting those prescriptions filled, to which she made a dismissive gesture pretending to toss the prescription over her shoulder- but then having made her point, folded the prescription neatly and stuck it in her purse. After mocking her for this and accusing her of being a secret pill popper, I asked her if she was sure the beach was such a smart idea, as she would return to work the next day visibly darkened from the sun when she had supposedly left work sick. She said was fine with that. I told her that I had also not been able to find my swimsuit this morning, thus if we go to the beach, I would have to buy a new one. I did not need a second swimsuit and for the same price as one, I could take us all to the movies in Libertad which would be a safer bet and would be cool because neither Lorena nor her sister had ever been inside a movie theater. She said we should go to her grandma's house to meet up with her sister and then decide what were doing.

         We took a cab to Lorena's grandma's house, which was a house more typical of houses in Ecuador than Julio 's. The floor of the house was dirt and packed hard in ugly, very irregular lumps, divots and ridges from foot traffic. The outer shell of the house was a mixture of mortar blocks and flattened tubes of giant bamboo. The inner "walls" were made of cotton sheets and plastic tablecloths hung from wire strung from one end of the house to another, which makes so ineffective a wall that I don't know why anyone bothers. The sister was asleep and non-responsive to Lorena's occasional bellows to "get up and let's go already" from the other room where she was socializing with relatives. Lorena was being too Ecuadorian to get up and go into her sister and wake her up directly and efficiently. Other similar, very common Ecuadorian activities include gently driving the same unwanted pig out of your yard 17 times in a single afternoon because you only say "shoo" and will not smack it with a stick or do something definitive enough to get your message across or responding to your dog's rabid near attack on a visitor by telling the dog "that's enough" and having it escorted outside.

         When we finally left the grandma's house, where we had wasted far too much time, we still did not have a plan and were as inefficiently arriving at one as Ecuadorian culture would dictate. We walked all the way back into central Libertad through the market, where I narrowly dissuaded Lorena from buying a chunk of hatcheted up pig laying at a stand beneath a pile of flies in the sun, which she said she would be cooking up for me in Tambo. We wasted even more time there in the market as she and her sister stopped 50 times to look over things they were not serious about buying. It was getting too late to do anything, so I ordered a full length mirror at a glass shop and then bought the supplies to make it possible to water the garden recently built behind Julio 's property.

         We drank batidas and ate cheese sandwiches at a food stand and then picked up the mirror I had ordered and jumped a Tambo bound bus. I got out in Santa Elena to pick up my clothes at the cleaners and Lorena and sister continued on with my mirror to Tambo. When I tried to pick up the mirror at Lorena's house 15 minutes later, she was again engaged in some kind of subterfuge that I didn't fully understand that somehow involved the next door neighbors asking why she was not at work and carrying a big mirror. Lorena did not want me to take the mirror at that very minute and since I didn't really understand or care what was up with this latest scam, I washed my hands of it all and went home.

         After dinner, Julio, Susanna, 2 neighbor kids and I went over to the "communal building" where town meetings are held, to see the paintings Ivan, Alex and a few other Tambonians were painting on the walls for what was to later become a daycare for local kids. I was surprised to find that Ivan is such a talented painter. The other people painting there had also done huge, rather elaborate murals, which I would not expect locals to be capable of due to their habitual lack of drive, aesthetics and attention to detail. I was very impressed. I snapped some pictures of the painters working at their murals, then went home to bed.

         I then told Julio that irrespective of whether or not it makes sense for the Femininos to ask for any money (and mind you we are already giving them two days wages per every 100 tickets they sell), if we are eventually going to have to give them more money to keep them happy we should beat them to the punch so that money given them out of the blue will be perceived as a nice gesture, thus they will feel appreciated and want to work harder. If we wait till they ask for the money, they will feel it's their due and they are struggling against unsympathetic bosses. Keeping the Femininos happy isn't just a nice idea, it is a smart investment. And to maximize their unexpected money gifts, rather than just say "your cut is now 15% instead of 10%", which will still leave them with the feeling that expenses are coming out of their own pockets, if we hand them $5 cash per booklet of 100 tickets (which is the same as a 5% raise) and call it "a little something to make your day go better while selling tickets", they'll all harbor the secret satisfaction that they are getting away with something they didn't earn. We'll even give them a pen with each booklet and pretend that we don't notice the pens are never returned so they actually feel they are somewhat preying on us by letting them sell our tickets. This will complicate any dealings with the Femininos in the distant future, but if we play this one right, we will make a killing and never need them again.

         Julio was enjoying this conversation immensely. He was very amused by the cunning and tried to keep the conversation going even though it was evident I was done talking. He asked me the fairly open ended question of "How can we get this town to raise pigs the right way?" I told him we'll soon have the exact money figures involved in raising a campo pig start to finish on commercial pig feed and if seeing the exact amount of money they can make (estimates at this juncture are $50 in pig feed will net $80-90 in meat, which means as high as an 80% return on your cash) using the exact method we describe (no mysterious variables = nothing to lose) doesn't persuade them- nothing will.

         Julio said that his relatives don't believe he has a 6 month old hog ready for the dinner table because pigs raised on table scraps alone take more than twice as long to reach market weight. Julio 's pig, of course, was raised on commercial pig feed, which contains the exact nutrition levels the pig needs at each stage of his 6 month life so that it grows as fast as it is physically possible to.

         That gave me an idea. Since we are the first people in the history of El Tambo to raise a pig on pure pig feed, and since the results of this are locally regarded as "unbelievable", what we need to do is get people to take a look at my pig. One way to accomplish that is to have a contest and whoever can guess the age of my pig in days will get to keep it. As clues to help people guess more accurately, we can say that this pig was raised on $50 worth of commercial feed and is roughly half the age that it is normal to kill a pig at. Julio smiled at this idea. We had another winner. (However, we have since changed the idea to professing the age and cost of feeding the pig and having people guess the weight. The prize may now be changing to winner(s) receive a free purebred piglet, to put a few people in the position and with the incentive to repeat our experiment)

         Then Julio asked if he thought it might really be possible for me to score NGO cash for a big community animal project. I told him yes, but we would have to have the project planned out before we solicited money, and he knows as well as I that we could not think of a sensible way to operate a communal project because it does not require more than 1 person to care for even $1000's of dollars worth of animals. If only one person does the work, how do we justify everyone getting a cut of the profits? If everyone splits the work, which is unnecessary, the project will fall apart like all similar projects have because everyone will try to let everyone else pick up their slack and things wont get done and the accusations of blame will fly everywhere. Yes, we could pay a single worker to feed all the pigs and then put the final profit into a big community fund, but the leaders of the community are totally corrupt. That money would be picked clean in no time. It happens here every time there is money.

         That's when I had another idea. If we could engineer a project that looked on paper like a single giant project but in reality functioned like a bunch of small individual projects, we could score an NGO grant and then the actual benefit of raising the animals would be spread out among only those that have worked and we wouldn't risk all the counterproductive bickering. But this plan is a long way off because we are already working on a similar (and I think better) plan that would be nullified by a big NGO grant.

         At 9:30am, I received another phone call from a woman who had called last night and left a mysterious message about "a work for volunteers". I had not recognized her name and her message didn't really say anything. Julio and I had spent an hour last night trying to decipher this message and figure out what was afoot. It turns out Lonne and Sally had given my name to a medical mission coming to Ecuador in need of translators. I am not sure how many doctors are coming nor for what, but I know they don't speak Spanish and will be stationed at and partially working in the beach areas of Playas- including a trip to an island- and will be staying in hotels and eating whatever it is that doctors in the US eat. That is plenty of incentive to run around for 10 or 11 days translating. I told the woman on the phone that I was definitely in.

         At 3:30 I went to Santa Elena to check my email. The phone lines were out of commission, so I continued on to Libertad. In the internet place there, I ran into another Peace Corps person who had come down from a vacation in Montaņita to do some shopping and internet. I left internet at 6:30pm and arrived home after 7pm.

         After dinner, Julio asked me if I wanted to go to the President of the Frente de Apoyo's house to tell her to have her Femininos rounded up tomorrow for when we pick up the raffle tickets so we can hand them out and take stock of who is leaving with what tickets, thus who is directly responsible for up to $90 of our money at any given time. I said yes and we were off. The President of the Femininos made the weak excuse as to why they could not meet around our flexible schedule tomorrow because they already had another meeting sometime during that day. This passes for horse sense in Tambo. Who has time for 2 whole meetings in one day when there is so much television to watch and porches to sit upon fanning yourself?

         We had been blown off and the subject was off the table, yet no one was saying anything and Julio was making no movements so as to leave. I looked at Julio. He was in the meditative trance that he eats in. His eyes were unfocused and staring into space and he was breathing deeply and rhythmically, as if sleeping. I glanced at the President of the Femininos and her husband (the ex-president of Tambo). They were just gazing off into space. No one's trance was at all disrupted by me in their peripherals staring at them. The silence went on for a very, very long time. It was like a scene from a sci-fi movie where time has frozen for everyone except he that is in possession of then gringo amulet. I was trying to figure out what was going on. Why wasn't Julio leaving? Why wasn't anyone acknowledging Julio standing there? Finally, without a word, the President of the Femininos went inside and dragged out chairs. The only thing I could guess was that they had all understood on some weird level that Julio had more to his agenda but didn't want to be direct about it.

         I then scrutinized everything Julio said after we sat down in chairs in order to test this hypothesis. It seems, based on the conversation that followed, that Julio wanted to get some advice from the ex-president of Tambo about some of the stuff he and I had been talking about lately. He also seemed to be on a mission to convert the president to the religion of Balanciado (commercial pig feed). He mentioned for the second time that the president should come take a look at our pigs. The president has a year or more old pig that is the size of a 2 or 3 month old because it receives inadequate nutrition from the table scraps it gets. All of Julio 's agenda pursuing was passed off as just shooting the breeze, but was still casual business he wanted to address. When the time to leave came, it came abruptly. Julio asked if I was ready to go out of the blue and I said yep.

         We peeked in on the continuing mural painting inside the Casa Comunal on the way home.

         After dinner, I tried to go back to writing but ended up with 7 year old Ines typing words and short phrases in Spanish on my computer for her to practice her reading with. I had been told many months ago that Ines could not read even though the rest of her class could. That was either an exaggeration or she has since picked it up just fine. We practiced reading until Tambo and Prosperidad was hit by a temporary power outage.

         When the lights went out, a multitude of scattered voices all over town screamed in fake horror like a class of obnoxious Jr. high students and everyone instinctively spilled out of their pitch-black homes into the pitch-black streets. The darkness outside was still so total that you could not even recognize who you were standing next to, though you could barely ascertain that you were in fact standing next to someone. We could see a faint glow in the clouds above Santa Elena and Ancon, so we knew that we and Prosperidad were the only ones in the blackout.

         The darkness had taken everyone by surprise. Very few people had candles. Alex was sent out on a mission to buy candles, but as the tiendas had been cleaned out, came back with only a single mini-candle he had borrowed from relatives. 5 seconds after we lit Alex 's mini-candle, the power came back on and voices scattered all throughout town let rip with a town-wide cheer.

         At 8pm, Julio appeared in my doorway freshly bathed and in a polo shirt, ready to make another attempt to get the ball rolling with the Femininos through their President. We walked to the President's house, but she was already talking with someone. We stood by forever until she ended that conversation and wattled over. Just as the last time, she was again offering vague excuses about all the stuff going on right now for why the Femininos were temporarily knocked out of commission. She obligatorily accepted a book of raffle tickets for herself and another for her daughter. When I pulled out a 10 dollar bill and plopped in down on the table, saying we are giving $5 extra dollars for whatever expenses they might incur, you should have seen her attitude change. She looked at the $10 the way a thief might look at a jewelry cabinet they had just watched a shop keeper forget to lock. Oh yes, the wheels started turning in her head when it looked like she might be able to seize that $10. She instantly began speaking and moving with 3 times the speed and energy of only moments before and ran immediately next door to where the only arguably legitimately busy Feminino was painting the future daycare in the Casa Comunal. Both of them came rushing back over to where we were sitting, as if they needed to cash in on the free money before we came to our senses. Fondling their books of raffle tickets, the "extra" cash long stuffed deep into their pockets, the Feminino's attitude about selling raffle tickets had clearly been overhauled. The $5 seemed to be working exactly according to plan. They smiled as they spoke about how they were going to start right away hitting up everyone they know to buy tickets.

         Julio and I then began taking books of tickets around to the remaining 2 Femininos willing to sell tickets, who rather looked socked in the gut at the revelation of the $5, but did not appear overtly overjoyed. There are supposedly 18 Femininos in total. Only 5 expressed a willingness to sell tickets. I am predicting that a few more ticket sellers- both Feminino and not- will approach us out of the blue when they see their peers selling tickets and hear that they received $5 cash along with 10% of what they sell. Even if our ranks swell to double, we are only just hitting our lowball estimate of 1000 tickets sold, unless, contrary to how they appear to be thinking at present, the ticket sellers go through more than 1 book. Julio and I are going to give the Femininos a head start, but in a week or 2 we are going to directly target high schools ourselves. About a week after that, we are going to pursue more ticket sellers in earnest, if a sufficient number of tickets aren't yet being sold.

         We gave the 5th Feminino her booklet of tickets at about 9:30 pm. 5 of 25 booklets are now passed out. The ball didn't exactly feel to be rolling all that hard. Julio and I went home to sleep.

         After dinner, I found Julio 's nephew and niece, Antonio and Ines, playing with a mammoth insect larvae/caterpillar-looking thing that they were trying to feed to Julio 's black pig. They pulled it out of the pigpen at my behest so we could play with the hideous creature and take its picture. Then I retired to my room with a book. After an hour or so of reading, I drifted off to sleep in my chair. I was awakened by the phone ringing. I snatched it off its hook; it was Lorena calling. I had woken up so suddenly that when Lorena asked me what I was doing, I had no idea and said so. She was calling from the park in the center of El Tambo. I was very confused and her cell phone reception was cutting in and out. She was firing questions at me at 100 mph and demanding prompt responses. I barely understood something about leaving the house and only at the last minute understood that it was not I who was to leave the house, but "we". When I hung up, I still didn't know what was going on, nor did I know who "we" were other than that "we" did not include me.

         I was too tired to continue reading, and as I had nothing else to do, I leaned back again in my none-too-comfortable chair to continue sleeping. I was unable to sleep well, but that was the point of sleeping there in the chair, rather than in my bed. I would be useless if I went to sleep for real. After about 40 minutes of fitful non-sleeping in a hard wooden chair, Lorena still had not arrived. I decided I no longer cared to hang out with anyone and shut off the lights and climbed in to bed.

         10 minutes later, I was awoken by the sounds of several footsteps rushing up to my open front window. I cracked open an eye. The silhouette of a head appeared in my window, followed presently by 2 more heads. It wasn't difficult to figure out that it was Lorena and her 2 sisters that had come- but they were too late. It was now 50 minutes after Lorena had called. I was in bed and no longer interested in entertaining guests. I rolled over in bed and ignored them, rather annoyed that they could see from a great distance up the street that my light was off and yet still came over to gawk in my window. They bounced a pen and a folded up paper off my taut mosquito net and whispered "Tdrain! Wake up! Amorcito! Psssst!" I continued ignoring them. After a few seconds, I knew they were not going to go away quietly, but given Lorena's religious adherence to Tambo's social codes, I was surprised at what happened next. I heard my computer table (cleared off because the window it sits under was to be open all night) sliding closer to the window. Then I saw an unsteady figure hoisting itself onto the window frame. The other silhouettes shot up a buttress of supporting hands to the wobbling figure's rump. Although if I could have waved them into nonexistence with a sweep of my hand I would have, this turn of events struck me as immensely comical and I had to fight not to laugh.

         Lorena approached my mosquito net cautiously. Tdrain! she whispered forcefully. Hola, Amorcito.

         I was still screwed up enough from sleep that I responded in English. She hesitated for a moment and then snatched up the front of my mosquito net and put her head inside. "What did you say to me? You insulted me didn't you?" I told her it was not quite an insult, but also not something you would want to yell across a church.

         Without their ringleader, the 2 sisters remaining outside became visibly nervous that someone would spot them standing around looking in the window of a darkened house and they scurried away to parts unknown. Lorena was amused by my fogginess and took the opportunity to antagonize me. Finally her sisters returned and told her to get outside already. Just as Lorena was climbing back out through the window, I jumped up and snatched my camera of a table and shot a picture of her scandalous act as payback. From outside the window, she put her hands on her hips and demanded I erase the picture immediately. Instead I shot another. This greatly amused her sisters, who are always in the market for any wholesale antagonism of Lorena. After posing for a few more pictures and even taking one of me, they disembarked for parts unknown, disappearing into the murky night up the street.

         While his sons held the pig down, Julio put the tip of the knife against the pig's chest up near the neck and with steady pressure, slowly sunk the large kitchen knife to its hilt. Julio 's face looked like the face of someone killing something. His eyes were wild and his teeth were clenched. His face was flushed and his entire body rigid and trembling. The blood poured out across his forearm from the wound as he rotated the knife slightly. The outpouring of blood gurgled loudly at times, like that suction tool the dentist uses to clear spit out of his workspace. The pig did not really alter the sound of his protest as the thing he was protesting switched from "unhand me you brute" to "damn, that rigid metal slat buried 10 inches deep in my soft organs sure feels unnatural". Julio had knifed the pig very effectively. The pig did not go through the half-hour of weaker and weaker moaning from a slow death. The blood loss was so rapid that he had no sooner begun choking on the blood entering his own airway than he was unconscious. The whole thing had taken about 2 minutes. The only sound was that of the light rainfall pattering down in the town wide muds of Tambo.

         With the pig dead, I went for new batteries. The pig was duly shaved and dismembered while I took the most morbid pictures I could catch. We found a huge amount of fat inside the body. Julio had been overfeeding the pigs. We had no idea; the pigs didn't look at all fat. This was going to hurt our economic figures because the pounds of fat that we had paid to create couldn't really be sold. The first thing that was done was a big pile of greasy pig meat was fried up and served to me dripping wet for breakfast. This was not how I would have opted to start my day. I had not only never eaten the body of a creature I had known personally, but I had never eaten the cooked parts of an animal in full view of a pile of the rest of its raw mangled flesh. From the doorway of the room we eat in, Julio could be seen, still hacking away at increasingly unidentifiable pile of carcass.

         All day, people came by the house to buy pig meat at $1 a pound (bones included). The rain continued falling and the power stayed off. Around 2pm, with the first rays of sunshine coming out, I went over to Lorena's to see what was going on. I had told her yesterday we could all go to the beach today, but until now it had not actually been an option. On the way, Rodolfo stopped me from his window all serious and asked me why I didn't tell him we were killing a pig today. I was taken off guard by the question, stammered quite a bit and eventually said that I had no idea he would have any interest in knowing such a thing.

         "Yeah, but he knew" Rodolfo said darkly, jabbing an accusing finger in the direction of Julio 's house. "Julio knew. He knows I go to Libertad every week to buy pig." I changed the subject abruptly by asking Rodolfo about his cat. Rodolfo likes cats. He said the cat had recently had kittens and I was welcome to one. I seriously considered it, then I continued on to Lorena's.

         The first thing Lorena said when I walked into her house was "Why didn't you tell me you were killing a pig today?"

         I shrugged flabbergastedly "Why the hell does everyone keep asking me that?! Rodolfo just asked me that same thing. I don't know why I didn't tell you. I didn't know anyone cared. I do lots of things without telling you." Seeing that the room was following every word I was saying too closely, but not smiling, I twisted my speech for the absurd. "Do you want me to tell you when I'm going to the bathroom too? Hey! I'm itching my arm now you guys! Now I'm going for another piece of gum!" The room was laughing while I plaed an imaginary piece of gum into my mouth with great showmanship, but unbeknownst to me I was behaving quite offensively.

         I slipped out of Lorena's house to go home to retrieve the pictures of the butchering I had taken earlier. I ran into Julio on his front porch. I told him that 2 people had asked me today why I didn't tell them about the pig. Julio 's reaction to this came as a surprise. He looked very embarrassed and waved a dismissive hand in the direction of both party's homes, saying, "Bah! They knew!"

         I clearly got the impression that Julio knew they didn't know. Suddenly it occurred to me that everyone that had bought pig meat today had been Julio 's or Susanna's extended family members and they had all been fairly exited about the ordeal. It began dawning on me that the killing of a pig must be something of an event here because it rarely happens and since the demand for fresh, easily obtained meat far outweighs the supply, it must be customary to honor your circle of friends by hooking them up with dibs on the limited supply of meat. This would explain Lorena and Rodolfo's reactions to having been in the dark about the slaughter. It would explain why people who had, in fact, been left in the dark, had heard word of the slaughter anyway. Because it was news.