Upon my return back home, Adam called. He had made it to Catacocha and would arrive in Tambo tomorrow morning.

      At 3pm, Adam and I had an appointment to be at Lorena’s work. Lorena had wanted to go out on the town at night for my birthday, but since we were expecting Julio’s family to throw a surprise party, we limited Lorena’s role in the occasion to an afternoon visit at her workplace. We found Lorena hanging out with her friend Evelyn when we arrived. When I saw Lorena consorting with Evelyn out on the porch immediately after our arrival, I suspected for the first time that a birthday surprise was lurking about us. Evelyn left through the front gate as Lorena came back inside the house. Minutes later, Evelyn returned with a cake and rum and coke. I was given a sappy assed birthday card and was then asked to give a pre cake-cutting speech.

      Ecuadorians love speeches. You can’t ever really address any group of persons in this country without having to give a formal speech. The more flowery and pompous the better. “Hokey”, as a concept, does not exist here. If no one can understand what the hell you are talking about because you are filling the air with words that real people never use- even better. Folks will just assume they are hearing a really good speech. However, I rather disdain speeches. They tend to be disingenuous. Speeches cause people to show off because they are the focus of a bunch of people’s attention, or it may cause them to hide behind a shield of hollow statements for the same reason. In any event, I am not interested in watching someone’s personality flaws playing out under the pretense of having something important to say.

      As I am totally tuned out of whatever status quo world the rest of humanity lives in and will always draw a total blank if asked to make an impromptu speech for such a non-event as my own birthday, I announced that I would make the speech in English with Adam giving the Spanish translation. Then, for what I hoped was Adam’s amusement, I made a truly obscene speech about whatever random vulgarity came to mind. Adam, in turn, gave a heartwarming translation so perfectly suited to the occasion, that I was as impressed as I could have been. As is the tradition, my face was then pushed into the cake when I was lured to its edge under the pretext of taking a bite. Then I chopped off slices for all present and the event livened up considerably as the rum and coke flowed.

      Around 5pm or so, Lorena’s employer arrived and Adam and I headed back to Tambo so as to intersect with the surprise party we knew to be brewing. Surprise indeed. The surprise of the party was so crafty and so adaptable to changing circumstances that it did the unexpected by not coming at all. Adam and I sat around all evening waiting with our temperature gauges rising because we wanted to leave Tambo and go out on the town in Salinas or somewhere. It was not that I at all wanted a surprise party, but that we were certain one was coming and didn’t want to ruin it by taking off. Lorena had had a discussion with Julio about my upcoming birthday. She had said Julio knew the date off the top of his head, which is not surprising because people are really big on committing dates to memory here. They had baked a cake under what I thought was a fairly transparent lie. And yet, the surprise party never came. Neither did any recognition of my birthday of any kind. Around 9:30 pm, Adam and I concluded that for whatever reason the surprise party wasn’t coming, so we caught a bus out of Tambo.

      When we arrived in Tambo, I told Susanna, who was just beginning to cook dinner, that I regretted that we had not caught her before she began cooking because we had bought food and would not need her to cook us anything. Somehow they all misunderstood that message to mean “we have bought food for everyone, but since you’re already cooking, we’ll just cook our food for you all tomorrow”. Adam and I had not realized there had been any confusion until we were called to eat. By that time the food was already cooked and served and they would have understood nothing but the most antisocial of gestures if a guest and I refused to eat. We had been looking forward to the tasty, non-EcuaFood we had purchased, but we slouched down in our places at the table and gloomily ate our EcuaFood.

      It did not dawn on us until later that evening that the family must be thinking we had bought food for everyone. This caused me to be irate all evening because we would now have to cook our food clandestinely to stem off an incident in which we are forced to bring up out of the blue the fact that Adam and I were about to cook food that no one else could have, contrary to what they may think we said yesterday. Adam and I just wanted to do whatever we felt like doing and not play diplomat with anyone, but the family kept attaching itself to us and making us have to make overtly separatist gestures just to keep our activities on the track we had intended for them. We were behaving rather offensively which reflected badly on Adam because it appeared this segregationism had arrived with him, as this is not how I behave when I am alone. But Ecuadorians cannot understand anything not patently Ecuadorian. They would never understand our need to step out of the broken record of their EcuaLives and spin ourselves a makeshift gringo world.

      Adding greatly to my ire, Julio’s stupid female dog is in heat and tension between the 2 male dogs is sky-high. All night long the stupid beasts growled and fought with each other over the female. Then, whomever got the female would tie her up for 15 minutes and we would have to listen to her yelping and shrieking trying to pull herself away. This happened all night long and not one person in the house got more than 30 minutes of unbroken sleep. I repeatedly got up and threw rocks at Julio’s dogs and all the neighbor dogs that were gathering in the street in front of Julio’s fence because they growled competitively and snapped at each other and further escalated tensions between Julio’s dogs. And what’s more, my stupid pig went into heat as well and spent the whole night grunting incessantly and trying to push her way out of the pen.

      After eating we went to the beach in Ballenita. I didn’t swim very long because my sunblock appeared to be freely washing off me and I did not want another sunburn. Adam kept swimming. The beach is nothing to me because I see it all the time, but Adam was on a beach vacation. After swimming, we went back to Tambo to shower with every intention of leaving again for a destination yet to be decided- but we never did. Somehow our tiredness from sun and swimming had served us directly into the hands of Tambo’s lethargy. By the time we were served dinner, it was useless to attempt any kind of excursion without a specific plan of action, which we did not have.

      When I got back home, Ivan and Alex were playing the Nintendo in my room. I went straight to work typing on the computer. After I accidentally ruined Ivan’s game by bumping the loose wires of the gaming system that were draped across my notebook (which cut power to the system and restarted it) everyone filed out of my room in disappointment. Then obnoxious neighbor kid Pedro came over and propped himself up in my window. Emboldened by Pedro’s deed, a bunch of nearby neighbor kids who I see every day but have never once talked to also piled into my window. I had noticed that the presence of a second gringo in town with me had for some reason made me a lot more approachable of late. I had been noticing this not just in Tambo, but throughout the whole peninsula during Adam’s visit, and now I had kids in my window that I had not talked to in the 11 months I’ve lived in Tambo- in large part because they are from families that don’t like Julio. Knowing that meeting kids often leads to meeting the rest of the family, which could possibly facilitate a neighborhood peace process, I entertained the bunch by taking pictures of them with my digital camera and then showing them. A cheap, but very effective gag.

      DigiCamFest was interrupted by a massive dogfight in Julio’s backyard. The 2 stupid and supremely evil male dogs that are owned by Julio’s family and his usta-be-brother’s family were fighting because the female dog was in heat. The 2 male dogs, who are among the most ill-tempered dogs I have ever known, were fully trying to murder each other. Susanna ran out of the house and clubbed the dogs with a stick. Ineva, Julio’s usta-be-sister-in-law, ran out of her house and poured a bucket of water over the dogs and then beat them with the empty bucket. Nothing could distract the dogs from the fray. I took pictures of the fight because my camera was handy and because I hate the 2 male dogs and hoped very much they would kill each other. It looked certain to happen for a while and I was already enjoying how I imagined life would be without those worthless, noisy and dangerous savages. When the dogs kicked over a few of my recently planted cacti, I bounced a shoe off one of their heads. When this did nothing to move them away from my plants, I ran out of the house hoping to kick them repeatedly as hard as I could**. But by this time, each of the women had caught and lifted the dogs by their back legs and one dog had already been thrown over the street fence. The vile scourges will live to plague us with their presence another day.

      Then, as is the custom, the jokes flew and everyone laughed about the dogfight. Ultimately, everything in Tambo is a laughing matter. In this respect, they have about the healthiest outlooks on life that anyone could aspire to. Susanna laughingly repeated a story to everyone present that I had been hearing her tell people all day about how I had likened Julio’s idiot dogs to the people of Tambo. Noting that Julio’s dogs could tap the ever (and I mean ever) willing female dog day and night if they would just cooperate and not spend 80% of their time fighting to determine whose turn is next, I had told Julio they were just like the folks of Tambo destroying all their communal sources of income being greedy and quarreling endlessly. Susanna loves this analogy. She’s also made sure to proliferate the apparently comical euphemism I only vaguely recall coining when I used the term “working” to refer to the dog porno playing out in the yard. Everyone here refers to anything not purely loafing as “working”. Typing on a computer is not called “writing”, but rather “working”. Planting or weeding a garden, building furniture, or painting a wall- all of it referred to as simply “working” and almost never by words specific to the activity. It seemed to me the obvious choice of verbs when I had to refer to what the dirty assed dogs were up to in the yard in the presence of an 8 year old girl. Apparently the girl had accepted the term as legitimate and had deadpanned it later in some public setting, much to everyone’s momentary confusion. When it was discovered what she meant, the crowed died laughing and the term became immortalized. Evidently, the term has since filled a huge conversational void because I now hear everyone using it all day without any irony, whereas before no one ever mentioned the dirty dogs. Be that as it may, I would trade it all for a single dead dog.

      After dinner I wrote for the rest of the night.

      Just before dinner, Evelyn, the girl from my birthday party at Lorena’s work, called to say she was heading to Lorena’s house in Tambo. I was fairly unfriendly on the phone with her because I had the well-founded suspicion that when she got here she would have no idea what she needed to learn to pass her test and the whole thing would just be tossed into my lap, which I was not in the mood for.

      I was reclined and reading a magazine when Lorena, Evelyn and Evelyn’s husband suddenly appeared in my doorway. The suddenness of their arrival did nothing to improve my apathy towards the whole event. I was even less friendly than on the phone. Just as I suspected, she had come with no idea of what she needed to learn to pass her test to graduate and she intended for me to bequeath her with the insider’s secret we English speakers use in order to understand our language. People don’t understand –and I don’t know that I can even fault them- that speaking a language requires a much practiced coordination of vast amounts of fairly arbitrary information. You can not simply drop by and expect to be handed the ability from a native speaker. That would be like taking only one Karate class. It wouldn’t matter if your teacher were Bruce Lee himself, you’ll still get your ass kicked.

      Languages are such bugged out entities that one is hard pressed to figure out how even to teach their native tongue. I was never taught English. I just kinda picked it up. I couldn’t tell you how to move chewed up food from your mouth to your stomach either. I was never taught to swallow and I’ve never had to think about it in order to do it. I can teach to an English test, but I cannot simply hand over a grasp of the English language. Continuously running into this problem is very tiring. I gave Evelyn past, present and future verb tenses and then told her to come back when she knows exactly what her English test will require her to know.

      Lorena stayed behind to hang out after Evelyn and co. had gone.