Just before lunch, Lorena called on the phone saying she was at “her house in Tambo” and had ditched work today. She asked if I wanted to come over. I said I did, but did not specify that I was going to wait until lunch was finished cooking and eat first. She reconfirmed very deliberately, “So you will be coming?” I answered yes.

      When I arrived at Lorena’s porch, I found her front door locked from the outside with a padlock, which her family does on the rare occasions when no one is home. This was confusing, yes, but I had just received a call that she was at “her house in Tambo”. I pushed on the door, knowing that when it reached the end of the slack the padlock afforded the door to swing, that it would bang louder than I could knock which would get the attention of whomever was inside. After the bang, there was nothing but silence from inside the house. I walked home, more annoyed than confused at what had happened to Lorena.

      Sitting at my computer 5 minutes later, it occurred to me that perhaps I was supposed to enter Lorena’s house from the back door, in spite of not being notified of this. A few days earlier her sisters and I had come in and out of the house all day through the back door because her mom had locked up the house and left earlier while the girls were all out. I decided to go back and try this plan out. The neighbors stared at me in vague alarm as I reached carefully through Lorena’s dilapidated back fence searching for the old shoestring that ties the gate shut. Finding it, I let my self through. Lorena’s young pig, who had been put out in the street for the day, tried to scramble inside the gate’s opening, probably to get at the chicken’s feed it knows is set out in the daytime. I found Lorena’s back door locked from inside the house. I returned home, even more annoyed, wondering what the hell had happened. Had I misunderstood something? I thought back and remembered her saying, clear as a bell, that she was at “her house in Tambo” and reconfirming that I would be coming.

      Back at home, after about 10 minutes, I decided that perhaps Lorena had fallen asleep and had not heard me banging around at her front and back doors. I decided that I would try one last time to knock, loudly and unmistakably, like a human being at a house soliciting attention from people inside. I decided to combine this with a trip to Merci’s tienda to buy a 5 gallon jug of water, because I needed water and because the underemployed neighbors were already sitting around on porches and in windows speculating amongst themselves why I was snooping around Lorena’s house. I passed by Lorena’s house and kept walking to Tambo’s center to buy the water and knocked loudly at her door on my return trip home. Again, silence from within the house. I gave up. To hell with Lorena and whatever specific time frame she had been subject to but had in no way mentioned to me. And why didn’t she call me back if something had changed?

      About 5 seconds into my return march home, I heard someone whistling behind me. I turned around at looked at the windows of Lorena’s house, where a sleeping person would have appeared had my knocking awoken them. There was no one there. However, beyond Lorena’s house about 2 doors down, Lorena stood on a porch, not hidden, exactly, but standing in such a way that I knew she “laying low”. How did she expect to know when I had arrived at her house from 2 doors beyond the furthest extent of my walk there? Obviously, she could not know, and wouldn’t have, had I not gone to the center of town for water. And from whom was she hiding out? And why is she always sneaking around? Who cares. I had wasted enough time messing with this stupidity. I turned back around ignoring her and continued walking home.

      At home, I read, napped, took a call from the States and eventually went out to internet. I got back at 5pm. After dinner, Julio and co. borrowed my Passion (Mel Gibson flick) bootleg DVD, but had to borrow 3 different DVD players to find one that was in good enough shape to read the cheap bootleg. I did not attempt to watch the movie with them.

      Sometime at night, Julio and I went around to collect our money and raffle tickets from the Femininos. The president of the Femininos had sold 22 (she said, but we counted 23 sold) and only had collected $20 of the dollars due. I would later conclude that since the president’s commission had been $2.30, she must be assuming we would not come back to collect the 70 cents more she owed us, thus fulfilling her innate Ecuadorian compulsion to scam something extra, albeit a mere 70 cents.

      The president’s daughter had sold 22 tickets, she said, and told us that she had ripped off the first 6 tickets, receipt stubs and all, from the book to give to someone else to sell, but had written the number 6 on the booklet to substitute for legitimate book keeping. However, according to the sequential numbers of her booklet, 8 tickets had been ripped from the front. The daughter was also trying to pull a scam. She did not figure we would notice she had sold 24 tickets, and by her official count, 22, her commission would have been $2.20. She gave us $19, meaning she too was banking on the fact that we would not return to collect 80 cents. She was pocketing $2.80 more than she was owed. Julio and I would later decide not to rip the cover off their scams, as we knew they would deny everything to the grave and we would cause very hard feelings and public scandal. Besides, there was slight the chance that they were innocent and just very careless, though, given how crazy the sight of money makes a Tambonian, I doubt they were so indifferent to the exact numbers of dollars passing through their hands.

      The third feminino, whose name I still don’t know, had doled out 21 tickets “on credit” at her university. She had not begun collecting any money, she said, but assured us that she could collect all of it tomorrow, as it was the last day of classes. Julio and I knew she would not collect a cent and then would have no way of doing so because the semester would be over. However, we did not suspect foul play at all, just bone-headedness. Ha, I should have asked her… being a female in an Ecuadorian university, she was almost certainly going to school for accounting. The irony of her doling out uncollected for tickets at a university, which she attends to learn accounting, would be sufficient ammunition to rip on her every time I see her for the rest of my stay in Ecuador.

      We did not catch any other ticket sellers at home. I went home and recorded and crunched all the new the numbers on my computer. We could not yet know how much the raffle was supposed to have earned us, nor, of course, how much we would even end up collecting.

      I darkly left the house with Julio. Our search for the last remaining Feminino ended in the busiest place in town- the day care. I made no attempt to decipher the girl’s excuse making in the din of parents dropping off their kids at the Casa Comunal day care, who then lingered about to socialize with each other. I let Julio do all the talking and glared down at the floor so I would not have to act the diplomat with a hearty “Buenos Dias” to everyone in the fairly steady stream of people passing through the doorway by which I was standing. I didn’t even ask Julio what the girl had said, though it was obvious she didn’t have our money, nor did I acknowledge the catcalls of Lorena’s cousins from their porch, which I assumed were in jest as I was clearly moping through town fresh from bed and glowering.

      David Lewis, a PCV in the province of Esmereldas, called in the afternoon in response to an email I had sent him. I had been wanting to check out that part of the country, as well as get the hell out of Tambo, and I had written him to that end. David Lewis was in the middle of changing his site, because his old site sucked horribly, and he technically, at that moment, didn’t have a home for me to visit him at. As we were lazily entertaining the dates in which we should plan my visit for, he asked out of the blue if I had any interest in helping him move. I said that that was a better idea than me just simply visiting him after he was all settled in and lethargic. He was surprised that I would have any interest in helping him move and told me that I would have to leave in a few hours because he was moving tomorrow morning. Just as I do every time someone interrupts my deep thinking to ask me what I am thinking, so too do I draw the blankest of blanks when someone suddenly asks me to drop everything and make an unexpected trip. When this happens, although I am fairly certain I have nothing at all on my calendar from now until I leave the country, I cannot peer through the suddenly descended cloud bank to verify whether or not I have any obligations in the coming days. I told David to call back at 6pm so I could make sure I was in the clear for a trip to Esmereldas.

      By 5pm I was packing my backpack and by 7pm I had confirmed with David that I was on my way to Esmereldas. I left immediately for Libertad, here I caught a bus to Guayaquil. In Guayaquil, I caught a $7.00 overnight bus to Esmereldas that left at 11pm.

      When I found a phone, I pulled out and dialed the phone number David had given me. It rang busy for 15 minutes. Then Andrea Vaughn answered.

      I had received an email a while back from someone calling herself Andrea Vaughn, “regional coordinator”, saying she was planning to be in Guayaquil at the end of this month and would ‘love to visit my site’. I had no idea who Andrea Vaughn was nor had I ever heard of a “regional coordinator”. Since I have no surplus of trust for the Peace Corps office, nor for the people with titles who yolk themselves to an operation that I do not find sufficiently forthright about their handlings, and since the only thing I knew for certain was that I had not invited any Regional Coordinators to visit me, I had decided not to respond to her solicitation. When David Lewis was explaining to me yesterday how to connect with him once I got to Esmereldas, I had asked him “You’re staying with who?!” David had assured me then that Andrea Vaughn was cool and that I had nothing to worry about by showing up on a little unauthorized trip at the house of someone who is technically Brass.

      The voice on the phone seemed friendly enough. It asked me where I was at. I answered that I ‘had no clue’. She told me what to tell a taxi driver and that all taxi rides in the city are $1. I hailed a cab and in 3 minutes I was standing in front of Andrea Vaughn’s house. I recognized Andrea the instant I saw her. Ela and I had caught a ride with her and the nurses from Santo Domingo to Quito months back. I seem to recall having used the words “vapid twit” to describe her on that occasion. However, the annoyance factor emanating from any group of Peace Corps people grows exponentially when they are free to unite their respective white-bred social phoninesses. I was about to find that Andrea Vaughn, when isolated from the white-bred social phoniness of others, is actually really cool.

      Andrea welcomed me to her house and let me through the gate. David emerged and shook my hand in a manner that would not convey to bystanders ‘two people having not seen each other in months and meeting again under unusual circumstances’. The duo got sucked into a really stupid Shaquille O’Neal movie for a while, and then we bought food to cook at the house. While David gave me cooking instructions and tinkered with his collection of worldly belongings, Andrea entertained a steady stream of visitors who had heard she was making a rare visit to her own house.

      Sometime in the late morning, David and I climbed into a pick up truck he had rented to drive us and his stuff to a town called Muisne, about 1.5 hours away. While David bartered with the boat operators at the docks in Muisne for a ride to his new beach front home, I sat with the stuff in the pick up truck. David was far less cut throat than I am when bartering and only bartered as long as he did because I nagged him to refuse to pay $20 when we had been told boat rides were valued at $10. It already did not sit well with me that David had paid the pick up truck guy $50 for his services. But David did not feel like messing around with locals and delays and so consented to a $20 boat ride.

      We loaded David’s stuff into a boat, which then putted over into an area of houses built on stilts standing in the water of the inlet’s edge. The boat operator wanted to buy gas. For whatever reason, a more conventional means was not available and he ended up siphoning gas from a large plastic container. Then we set off on a boat ride befitting the imagery the world holds in their minds about what life in the Peace Corps must be like. It was very cool. David and I suddenly cared much less that the boat had been overcharged for. We raced along through an area of sheltered ocean inlets, watching colonies of stilt houses and palm trees passing by, remarking like tourists that we were doing something stereotypically “Peace Corps”.

      We finally reached an area where the open ocean and its breakers were crashing into the relatively shallow inlet. The boat drifted almost to a stop and sat there idling. The driver squinted out into the sizable breakers, looking for a place to safely enter the open ocean. We sat for a longer time than I would have thought necessary and then the throttle was ripped open. We did the watercraft equivalent of peeling out and what followed was something of a NASCAR slalom race, ripping hither and tither among the crashing breakers. We dodged and cornered wildly and soon found ourselves out among the incoming swells roaring parallel to them at high speed. David and I were as thrilled as tourists. I am not sure, but one of us may have even let rip with a “weee!”

      After about 20 minutes, we slowed down as we flanked a colony of bamboo shacks along the water’s edge. David pointed vaguely at the distant settlement and told the driver he could see his new house. The driver, apparently with much keener eyesight than me, whistled loudly and motioned at the shore. A moment later, a Caucasian-toned dash rose from a porch and started moving in the direction we were heading. That dash was named Allen, who I would soon find out is likely the coolest person ever to be placed in Ecuador by the Peace Corps.

      Our boat putted into the mouth of a river and the driver put the boat in idle while he looked for the best place along the shore to unload David’s stuff. It was too late by the time the driver noticed the breaker that had slipped into the river mouth intact. Spotting it, the driver ripped open the throttle and attempted to spin the boat into a position to meet the breaker safely, but we got hit mid spin and a few buckets worth of saltwater crashed into the boat, much to the dismay of my suede shoes.

      Allen and the ubiquitous assortment of bored kids that follow him everywhere appeared on the shore where we were now unloading David’s stuff. Some kids stayed behind to guard the stuff and others helped us carry things over to the house. David has hit the jackpot. His site, Cabo San Francisco is the bomb. His house is set right on the beach in a location that could be on a postcard. His town folk, if not non-Ecua, are at least reasonably motivated and very friendly. David will also inherit a group of perennially bored kids whom he can send to buy fish or do his shopping for a 5 cent fee.

      Later we would swim in the ocean, buy and cook a full dead chicken, and after David had a lengthy meeting with his new counterpart, we bought and drained a jaba of Pilsener.

      “So what do we do now with the computers?” Julio asked

      Julio has the irritating habit of asking questions that have already been very well hashed out and laid to rest. When one’s language skills are shaky, and someone asks a stupid question whose answer is completely self-evident (something campo Ecuadorians are very prone to do) it can be quite confusing. One automatically assumes, “You couldn’t possibly be asking what I’m hearing, so I must not be understanding something.” But no, you’re understanding perfectly. It’s just a boneheaded question. I have learned over time to suspend disbelief when such questions come from Julio and just answer them plainly. At least with Julio, when such questions are posed, they are intended to demonstrate respect for my sovereignty concerning the matter-in-question in that he does not seek to presume anything and is indirectly soliciting instructions as to how he should proceed.

      “We sell those bad boys” I answered.

      “And how should we go about that?” Julio queried, so readily it made the conversation feel staged, as if for a wiretap.

      “We put word out on the street first- tell all the guys that buy your furniture or sell you wood. Then if we haven’t got any takers, I’ll hang signs in internet places. Next, if nothing happens, we look into placing an ad in the… is the Universo the newspaper outta Guayaquil?”

      “Yep, it’s national”

      “Well then I don’t know. Maybe we’ll put an ad in that sucker if worse comes to worse.”

      David and I then ate pizza in a restaurant and checked our butts into the Cielo Azul hotel. We paid $10 each for a very nice room with a kitchen and 2 separate bedrooms containing a total of 5 single beds and a double. David napped while I flipped continuously through our multitude of television channels and periodically raided the mini bar. When David rose, he found me sitting at the table outside on the terrace of our 2nd story room, where he joined me. As the sun began touching down in the ocean, we closed up our room and set out for the main strip of bamboo shacks along the beach where the tourist might find himself a Pilsener or perhaps a mixed drink and there the night did steadily plod into oblivion.

      We had not eaten since yesterday’s lunch and I felt like hell. The bus we caught was so full that I had to stand for the entire 1½-hour ride with my ass cheeks clenching back the fiery admonitions of my digestive tract. The bus driver, clearly released from hell just to participate in this special occasion, drove like I have never seen an Ecuadorian drive before. He looked like a political cartoonist’s grotesque caricature of “corporate greed” and feared neither passenger mutiny nor the laws of physics. This man’s driving was straight out of the movie “Speed”- even stamping the brakes at one point and sliding with locked wheels for 40 feet when someone he had deliberately passed by without picking up had supposedly swore at him. I reminded myself nonstop throughout the bus trip that this would be a terrible, terrible place to fill one’s pants to the brim with diarrhea. The driver then, incongruously, pulled over, stopped and patiently waited while a man climbed down from the bus to pee. Several high school boys seized the opportunity and forced their way up through the crowd to descend the steps and pee as well. The carefree and talkative passengers took to playfully pestering a late arrival to the pee party, a particularly small high school boy that everyone on the bus seemed to know, by alternately yelling from the bus windows his name and the command to pee. Everyone screamed “Orine! Orine!” and laughed like idiots until the boy returned and reported ruefully that he had been unable, sending the bus into celebration and hysterics.

      When we reached Muisne, David and I walked to and arrived at the docks at the exact moment that Ginger and Allen were arriving to land in a boat. Maybe it had been their intention to head us off and catch us as we arrived? I don’t know, but a few moments later, it would have been a failed plan. The 4 of us paid a boat to take us to a low tide sand spit for which going into the open ocean was not called for. From the sand spit, we would walk more than an hour until arriving at a beach and presently, David’s new home. The very moment our boat shoved off, what had been an almost imperceptible drizzle became, in one instant, a hard rain. There was nothing to do but sit there and get soaked. Allen informed us that this sort of infuriating soaking is a frequent occurrence here, and many a time he and Ginger have been leaving for Quito, dressed in jeans (because Quito is cold) and carrying a few days worth of clothes, etc. (because Quito is also far) only to get soaked to the bone, belongings included, before even stepping off the boat in Muisne.

      Our boat let us off on a suddenly visible lump of sand in what appeared to be the middle of a watery nowhere. We did not appear to be in an ocean, though raucous waves were visible in the distance in one direction, nor did we appear to be in a river. Standing atop the sand spit, which may have only recently popped out of the water during the ebb of the tide, it was unclear what was sand and what was water. Indeed the two were barely differentiated and both surfaces were very wet and thus reflected light, like water. It wasn’t even obvious what direction one must walk to find land. I imagine one might conceivably get lost on the sand spit until the high tide found them neck deep in water and panicking. But Ginger and Allen knew the way.

      We walked a very long time. Sand Nothingness gave way to a sudden, low, general greenness of plant bramble and coconut palms, along which we walked a narrow strip of sand beach. The green bramble gave way to rock cliff and an even narrower sand beach. Then the beach began opening up wider and rises and falls of landscape moved further inland. In another 45 minutes, we would come upon settlement and David’s house. I was soaked, woozy, hungry, exhausted, full of diarrhea and needless to say, not brimming with conversation.

      At the beach house, I fell asleep in a deck chair until a guy from Quito named Humberto came to retrieve David, Ginger and Allen to go look at the land for sale. Their land venture would take them on a grueling jungle hike with mud and falling down and a giant purple spider and cool vistas from their prospective purchases atop oceanside cliffs- but I was not up to going with them. I needed to sleep. I slept the whole time they were away.

      When they arrived back, spaghetti and garlic bread were made and I ate my first food- ravenously I would add -in 24hrs. Then we sat on the porch dreading Ginger and Allen’s Despedita (a farewell party) because it would essentially be a gringo excuse for the local Ecuas to have an EcuaParty. It was being thrown by their Ecuadorian counterpart and there was nothing that could be done to get out of it.

      Allen told David that the locals live for Saturday nights. On Saturday nights, locals dress up and the entire town hangs out on the gravel road through the so-called center of town, walking up and down the main drag and eventually packing into the thumping discotechs. We took a jaunt into town just to see the EcuaShow of humanity, then returned to the beach house porch, where Ginger and Allen recorded David playing various songs on his guitar that he had written to mock Ecuador.

      Then we crashed the Despedita and to all of our surprises, it wasn’t horrible. It was pretty cool in fact. Though a segment of the partygoers were hell bent on dancing to EcuaMusic (which itself was not played overly loud), they did not harass the rest of us who wanted to sit around and pass the whisky bottle. The men, unlike those in the peninsula of Santa Elena, were reposed, not vile. Their Spanish was intelligible and their joking not overly “harharhar!” I rather enjoyed the lot of ‘em while I was still capable of understanding Spanish.