Lorena called later in the morning to complain about how bad her muscles hurt. I needed to go to Lorena’s work in Libertad anyway to get back some of the seeds I lent her because Julio wanted to plant them in his Very Own Garden, so I pulled out my Peace Corps medical kit to put together a Lorena care package. I found a generic version of Ben-Gay and calamine lotion (for sunburn). I also found the stupid sun block that I had searched for in vain in the medical kit yesterday before the ill-fated bike ride. When I went searching for ibuprofen in the big plastic suitcase that serves as a storage bin for books and warm clothes for use in the sierra, I found a Giant Ant ant farm flourishing in my stuff.

      I dragged the suitcase outside. The ants had gone into their emergency action plan and were furiously racing their multitudes of larvae to the undisturbed layers of clothes and books deeper inside the suitcase. This kept them contained while I pulled individual items out one by one, shook the ants off and stomped them. Julio, Susanna and Julio’s brother joined in the exclamation shouting and ant stomping.

      The ants were huge, about ¾ inch long. We didn’t know if they could bite or not, but we were not interested in finding out. When we got the last of my items out of the suitcase, the majority of the ants were still teeming inside the hard plastic suitcase in a futile effort to relocate their offspring to safety.

      We blasted out into the street of the sleepy neighborhood and flung the suitcase upside down, stomping wildly with a level of anxiety that only a spreading horde of insects can produce. Up the street, I could see neighbors sitting out in chairs with their jaws hanging open. Only moments before, they had been seated restfully, minding their own business, respirating from inside their browned skins, thinking about nothing or perhaps a bolo (a homemade popsicle). Then from the corner of their eyes came a flurry of action as the figures of distant neighbors burst out on to the street, stomping. Yes, we had disturbed the peace in grand style.

      The ants stunk. They had left a dark greasy scum on some of my clothes and books. I had to spend the morning cleaning and repacking each item. Then I wrote until 3pm, at which time I bussed to Lorena’s work. Only Lorena and her coworker were home when I arrived. We cracked the co-worker up with the story of the ill fated bike ride and the ridiculous accusations of blame we leveled at each other. Our respective slanted versions of the story contained outrageous discrepancies which fueled endless arguing over who had been the bigger nincompoop throughout the affair. Eventually the house filled up with various bosses and visitors, so I went home.

      At home, around 5:50pm, a neighbor kid and I planted some of the seeds that Lorena had been bogarting. Around 8pm, Julio came to see if I wanted to go around to each of the Feminino’s homes to see what kind of progress was being made. We confirmed the suspicions I’ve had of late- no one had been selling anything. I would like to report that this had some profound effect on me and led to some kind of exasperated revelation, but it didn’t. It changed nothing. This was exactly the level of performance I had been expecting from these people and would be the last time I go out of my way for El Tambo. Simply put, the people of Tambo are too lazy to get anything at all done and they are fine with being broke assed and backwards. So why should I care what happens to them? I don’t. Until further notice, El Tambo is just the town that I walk through on the way to the bus stop. And as soon as I finish what I started with this raffle, I intend to make good use of that bus stop and leave Tambo for as much of the time as I can. I can’t believe that I have only spent 10 months in Tambo with 14 more months to go. This is either the beginning of some kind of new existence here, or just the beginning of the end.

      When we returned to El Tambo, we found Ivan at home, whom we had sent out this morning to a high school in Santa Elena to sell tickets. When buying our raffle tickets from the print shop, it was the large amount of area high school students that prompted us to shoot for 2,500 tickets. Just within the 10 kilometers from Ancon to Santa Elena alone, there are well over 3,000 high school students. In our estimation, the high schools were where we were going to make our money. Ivan , a charmer like his dad, in a country full of Neanderthals, had sold all of 2 tickets. I asked Ivan if he thought the lack of sales were due to lack of interest or money. He said he didn’t know, which was the only possible answer he could’ve given at first, as social custom here dictates, but the eventual answer that found its way back to me through indirect channels was that the students did not appear interested in buying raffle tickets.

      I wrote from about 1pm to 3pm, then left for Santa Elena and internet. Around 7pm I went back home to eat. I got home after dark and sat with Julio on the porch, making jokes about the state of our raffle. There was really nothing else we could do but laugh. We decided we would give Montañita, a place circulating much more money than a fishing village, a try tomorrow in the afternoon. We liked this idea because even if we didn’t end up selling a single ticket, at least Julio would get his first glimpse of the infamous Montañita.

      “Wanna see the beach?” I asked Julio, as much to delight him further as to forestall the selling of the stupid raffle tickets. I did not have to persuade him.

      The tide was high and rising. Due to this fact, the place where we first popped out at the ocean on the edge of the town’s center, was cut off from the rest of the beach for anyone not wishing to get their shoes wet. I told him we could get to the rest of the beach, simply and with dry shoes, by backtracking one block and then cutting to the north one block before reaccessing the beach. This took Julio through an especially exciting part of town, the “decoration” of which (his word, not mine) astounded him to the brink of collapse.

      We popped out again on the dry sand of the part of the beach leading all the way down to “the point”, a formation of land that aids, if not causes, the infamous surfing conditions of Montañita. Julio was visibly rattled by the immodesty of the gringa bathing suits (Ecuadorians on the beaches of the peninsula are so conservative that females almost always wear t-shirts, and sometimes shorts as well, overtop their bathing suits. Swimming in long pants is not uncommon).

      I forget what we were talking about, Julio and I, but I recall that it was fairly involved subject matter. I recall that I was more passionate about the topic than he, and I have the vague feeling that I must have initiated the subject. Our gait slowed and for a spell we tuned out the fact that we were on a beach. Had it turned out to be nothing, I would never have remembered vaguely monitoring the approach of an object in the water over Julio’s shoulder. Had it turned out to be nothing, I would probably remember what it was that we were discussing so avidly. But, as there are many levels in our brains, whatever I was speaking of to Julio would soon be fatally undermined by the signals emanating from deep within the primal centers of my awareness. By the time I finally said “What is that”, pointing to the water 15 feet beyond Julio, I knew I had been unconsciously registering a human form floating for about 20 seconds.

      “Is that a dead person?” Julio asked, somewhat rhetorically.

      “Um…yeah!” I answered, as unclear for the moment about the reality of this as had been my questioner.

      A kid whom I had either almost walked into, or who had walked up to me upon his co-discovery of the body, began speaking to us with restrained hysteria. “There he is! That’s him! He drowned!”

      “When?!” I snapped.

      “The day before yesterday”

      The body was coming into very shallow water now. Knowing that it had not the urgency of a recent drowning nor the scandal of a heretofore-unknown victim, we looked upon it as if it were merely a mild curiosity. More people began gathering as the small group of us were noticed gawking at what was fast becoming, even at a distance, a clearly visible human body. About 15 people in total had gathered before the body began swiftly moving south down the beach’s edge. It had actually moved away so swiftly that it had taken me off guard. As the crowd began following the body down the coastline, it occurred to me that I was participating in something I despised- the idleness of crowds in situations demanding action. I have always hated how crowds are so prone to outnumber, say, a criminal hitting an old lady and wresting her purse from her after a prolonged struggle, 20 to 1 and yet stand there like impotent fools doing nothing. As the body began drifting back out away from the shore, I decided I would take the initiative and pull the body out before it gets lost again to the sea.

      Timing is a very strange thing. To think of all the things that could have happened to speed up or delay Julio and I being at the very spot on the beach that the body would wash up at the very moment of its so doing. If you broke up the 2 day period between the drowning and its discovery into 5 second pieces, the odds of randomly arriving on time to discover the body are 1 in 34,560. Hell, the raffle tickets we were there to sell have only a 1 in 2,500 odds. Meanwhile, what are the chances of us 3 (Julio, the floater and I) being the exact sperm to have won our respective Big Egg races and to have continued on to become the exact ‘us’s and lead the exact lives that would bring us all together on a single point in South America at the exact moment this distinguished occasion? You’re damn right you don’t know. But isn’t it intriguing to imagine hanging out on the ocean floor overnight and then drifting around down there with the fish for a day or so before coming back up again into the sunshine and riding the waves to the beach?

      I am now glad I didn’t pull the body out of the ocean. At least I think I’m glad. I mean, it would have made my story a lot better. Alright, let’s say I’m neutral on the issue. Just as I was glancing down for a good place to kick my shoes off into order to wade in, I noticed a middle-aged man marching down the beach in the direction of all us idle bystanders. They way he moved seemed to indicate he was some kind of authority. We had sent someone to retrieve the authorities, so this made sense. He continued walking uninterrupted into the water and circled the body once, glaring down at it with an air of incredulity. The body was swaying with the waves towards the beach and away in about a 3 foot undulation. When the body was on its surge in the direction of the beach, the man grabbed the floater’s hand and pulled with the incoming wave. He held the hand firmly as the water ebbed back out from the shoreline and then released the hand when there was a moment’s lull in the waves. He did this a second time and beached the body on to the sand enough to prevent it from becoming buoyant in the water, but the action of the waves was still able to roll the head fully side to side and cause the arms to travel their full spectrum from alongside the rib cage to “raised” above the head. It was unclear for a time if the body was going to stay put there, but soon it collected enough sand around it to mostly stabilize its luxurious movements.

      We all moved in and stood over the body. Aside from the skin of the hand the man had grabbed to pull the body ashore, which had slid halfway down the hand like wet newspaper, the body was in impressive condition. Sure, the stomach had become quite bloated, but it fell well within the range of unusual body types one might encounter among the population. The face was slightly darkened, as if bruised. Otherwise, you could not tell the swimmer hadn’t just died. It looked like a regular person in spite of having been underwater since “the day before yesterday”. I would guess the age to have been about 23. The nature of his tattoos (not simply their presence) suggested to me that the guy had fancied himself something of a hot shot.

      Word on the beach had it that the swimmer had been from Guayaquil and had been drunk at the time of his drowning. Though I could very easily see that being the case, this was totally unreliable information, given its source. A group of gringas that had annoyed me by their dramatic approach to scene from where they had been tanning themselves nearby, now stood around looking fairly traumatized. It reminded me of the news footage they showed after the Colombine shootings of students in the parking lot. I wanted to smack the gringas and tell them they have lived sanitized lives and to get a grip. They soon marched up to the body with an air of self-righteous indignation, as if to intimate a scolding to the crowd for their indifference, and draped a hand towel over the corpse’s face. Perhaps I have been too long in a country with bigger problems than the faux pas of being dead in public, but it seemed to me a prudish gesture. The difference between the life a person led and their discarded meat puppet on a beach seems all too readily apparent to me. Covering the face, while the body lays completely naked in full view of all ages is a curious demonstration of priorities. The gringas eventually rectified that little immodesty too. The Ecuas, for their part, kept a few hungry dogs away from the body that would not have hesitated to eat it.

      With the body completely covered and the authorities taking their sweet time in arriving, I asked Julio if he wanted to check out the surfing going on over at the point. This was callous even by EcuaStandards. Julio smiled irreverently, but gave the customarily appropriate answer of “I don’t know”. A few minutes later he suggested we go sell raffle tickets.

      Montañita has a strange mix of Ecua and non-Ecua Ecuadorians. The non-Ecua Ecuadorian shopkeepers are quite Gringoized. They have money, business sense and lead active lives. The Ecua Ecuadorian shopkeepers are slow, have nothing but time to kill, and in spite of the day-long non-occupation of their minds, never think about such things as streamlining their livelihoods in order to earn more than “just enough to get by for today.” I tried to convince Julio that 2 selling techniques were called for. Julio’s long-winded EcuaSales pitch, wherein he introduces himself, then me and our intended project, revealing like an infomercial that “all projects need money” and then holding the ticket book out like it were the holy grail before finally reveling the price, works just fine on his fellow campesinos. However, you are wasting your time with that crap on gringos. It is a turn off to monopolize a gringos time with disingenuous speeches that he could see the true motive behind from the second word having come out of your mouth. A gringo will appreciate directness and honesty.

      However, Julio is Ecuadorian and as such already thinks he knows everything. Sure, you can introduce a topic such as the reprocessing of plutonium rods, and an Ecuadorian will defer fully to your expertise, but should a normal facet of everyday life come into question, you cannot tell an Ecuadorian anything. They think they’ve got it all figured out already. If they were at all open to new ideas, maybe the Peace Corps wouldn’t still be here after 40 some odd years of “disseminating new ideas”. Julio did not like my “unrefined” sales pitch that omitted the mass amounts of flowery padding that his pitch had. Being like the fish in a fish bowl who knows no concept of “water” because he has never experienced “air” or “land”, Julio could not conceive that my approach to the gringo-like beach-bummish shopkeepers was anything but half-assed ineloquence and a waste of potential sales. Do recall what an ordeal taking care of any business in Tambo it is. To simply broach the subject of any kind of business with a Tambonian, say, 2 blocks away from one’s house, one must first bathe, get into dress clothes, assume the western-style business mosey slowly across town, knock on the door, enter the house in question, the hosts will bring chairs, all will sit, there will be long silences and occasional comments about non-business things to create an atmosphere of indirectness. Ecuadorians find directness distasteful. The town meeting in Tambo is so chock full of bureaucratic fluff for this reason, that it is no surprise nothing ever gets accomplished. In other circles, this sort of needless drain of time, energy and resources is called a “barrier to trade”.

      Julio only tolerated my taking the lead and doing the talking because he could not really stand up to me on my own raffle. But I was right. He didn’t notice that for the first leg of the selling, my sales pitch was only one selling tickets. He was turned down. Directness and honesty- it’s a simple formula. I would approach the young surfer guy at the counter and say, “Hey, what’s up? We’re going around today selling tickets for a raffle for a computer for $1 if you want in on that.” Often, the surfer clerk would bow deferentially and very respectfully, as one person making an honest living to another, say “No thank you.” Julio would then try to rush up and use his campo approach, beginning from the top as if the nature of our visit had not yet been revealed. This just wasted everyone’s time. In the end, we sold a total of 16 tickets.

      We arrived back in Tambo around 8pm. Around 10pm, Ela called from the Sander hotel in Guayaquil to say they that she and a friend visiting from the US would be passing through Santa Elena on the way to Montañita tomorrow if I wanted to join them. The phone reception was horrible and we got cut off several times. Ela finally just said she would call tomorrow from the bus station as they were about to leave to head this way.

      On the way home, Rodolfo snagged me and invited me into his house. We sat in chairs for a while and talked about animal projects. Do recall that Rodolfo is abnormal, thus productive. When I told him that I have been trying to assemble a group of proven workers to solicit cash from an NGO for projects, he said that he was very interested in joining Julio and whomever else was involved (of COURSE he was interested in free money, but at least he is a proven worker and has been a friend since long before the mention of cash). He said he knew of another man he could get that would be a good worker and promised that the 2 of them would come over to Julio’s house on Sunday to discuss this matter.

      When I got home and told Julio I had taken care of the Femininos rumor, he was shocked and amused that I had gone over alone. However, when I told him that we’ve now got Rodolfo in our group of proven workers for future, Julio seemed less than ecstatic at the news. Just before lunch, Ela called saying she and her friend were leaving Guayaquil and that I could catch them switching busses in Santa Elena in about 2.5 hours.

      I left for Santa Elena just before 2pm, dropped a load of laundry off at the cleaners and then went to where one catches Montañita-bound busses. I took a seat in the shady benches placed in front of the Tourist Center, which is conveniently located across the street from where people catch busses up the coast. Noticing a foreigner sitting in front of the building, a man came out of the tourist center without solicitation and handed me a book of tourist destinations complete with pictures. When he began extolling the virtues of the area’s many attractions, I withheld the information that I was not a tourist and had been living here a year, just to see if he had anything to say about the area that I did not all ready know. Finally Ela and her friend Lora showed up and I excused myself.

      I hadn’t seen Ela in about 2 months. There was much to talk about on the bus ride north. When we arrived in Montañita, we got all got a room in the Casa Blanca, then went for a short beach walk, then got something to eat at a restaurant. After eating, I followed Ela and Lora around while they shopped for necklaces and then we all retired to the room. The guy from the front desk came up to see if we could move to a smaller room, claiming the room we were in had been reserved for someone else. It was probably not really reserved, but as we had been remarking earlier that they were stupid to put us 3 in a room that could sleep 6 comfortably, we figured they had probably just caught their error and we went along with the room change without complaint. However, we stole the oscillating fan from the old room that our new room didn’t have.

      When we got back to the room, the electricity that had gone out at 3am had finally come back on, so the electric pumps that give the hotel water pressure were again functioning and we could shower off the ocean and sand. Then we loafed in hammocks and then went to eat again. After eating, we could think of nothing else to do so we returned to the hotel. I fell asleep when the girls went out to hunt down cake or desert but woke up again when I was tapped by a cold ice cream sandwich upon their return to the room. The last thing I recall before falling back asleep was the girls complaining to each other that they were wide awake and bored.

      When I arrived back in Tambo, the family was very surprised to see me. They had assumed for some reason that I would be gone weeks and asked me what had happened. I told them nothing had happened; the plan had only been to leave for a few days. Julio came into my room to get his usual fill of stories, and then, upon finding out what the forecast for my next few day’s activity was, announced that he had to go bake a cake. It wouldn’t dawn on me until a few hours later that that cake was almost certainly to be for my birthday in 2 days.

      Wrote for the rest of the day.