Julio was immensely interested in the information I had obtained at the peace corps office about grant money for our project and he assailed me with eager questions. Then he went to work building furniture and I set to unpacking. Lorena’s sister stopped by with an apple and the rest of the antibiotics for my cold that I had accidentally left in Lorena’s purse. The day that followed was filled with ordinary events that don’t make for very interesting reading.

      At night, our chicken project group met in my room to discuss the new information we had concerning grant money from USAID and to decide what our initial steps should be towards knocking out the grant’s prerequisites. It was rather worthless, as meetings go, and would have been information more suitably communicated by just telling them in the street during one of the 50 times each of them passes the house daily. But people love officialdom here.

      Julio’s family spent the afternoon putting up a barbed wire fence around the little section of campo behind his house that they intend to grow bananas and chickens on. I took a few hour phone call from the States before, during and after dinner, and then dove into my list of vocabulary to study.

      During lunch, the electric company/military trucks returned unexpectedly and entered the neighborhood so rapidly that there was no time to unhook and hide our illegal power tap. All we could do was pull the finished wooden furniture in off the porch (where it had been awaiting pick up from the man Julio sells furniture to) so that we did not compound the affront of stolen electricity by openly displaying illegal wood products the stolen electricity had made. The cutting of Guayacan (ironwood), the wood which 99% of the workshops in Tambo work with, is regulated by the government to protect the species from unscrupulous over harvesting. The only way this restricted harvesting is enforced is through certain papers that one must show to officials upon request when transporting raw wood or finished products. But as a small bribe can get you off the hook when busted in possession of undocumented wood, the illegal trade in Guayacan accounts for the vast majority of the Guayacan one encounters. Had the military men wanted to turn up the heat on the illegal electricity tappers, it could have come over and asked to see Julio’s papers to prove his wood was not illegally harvested, which it was. The military men inexplicably snipped just the ends off Julio’s cables and drove off without confiscating the 70 feet of wire leading to his house.

      This joint campaign of the electric company/military is due to the near total lack of people paying for electricity in Tambo (and the rest of the country) as opposed to stealing it. It is impossible to stop people from stealing electricity and the electric company knows it. This new campaign of daily harassment is part of a simple carrot and stick approach to getting any kind of money back for the electricity they generate. The stick is harassment and line confiscation all week and the carrot part is a big town meeting set to take place at the end of the week where the electric company will strike a deal with each person allowing them to be hooked up legally and immediately to the power lines if they begin paying their current bills plus a small extra monthly sum towards their accumulated debts.

      I spent the rest of the day reading until it got too dark. Just before total blackness, Julio fashioned extenders and reconnected our snipped cables to the power lines. Then I switched gears and began compiling a vocabulary list on my computer for the rest of the night.

      After lunch I went into Santa Elena for internet and photocopies. When I returned home, I planted small chunks of grass sod throughout the circle of soil where the large-leafed tropical plant will grow. Then I worked on a few essays I am editing for someone who plans to use said essays in their application to the peace corps. Knowing what I know now about the peace corps’ way of thinking, I can direct potential applicants’ essays to say what the peace corps wants to hear without sticking their designer Sierra Club-approved hiking boot in their mouth. I worked on these essays until I went to bed.

      On a whim, I decided to see if I could find a way through the vast amounts of briar and bramble beyond the edge of Tambo and make my way to the distant bare hills that backdrop the view from Julio’s property. I skirted the edge of the vast bramble until I came across tunnels that had been chopped across the countryside when crews of oil men had come through seeking out new petroleum deposits, which never grew back in with plants because it hasn’t rained. Once inside the briar tunnels, one completely loses one’s view of the distant hills and even El Tambo. A loud radio blaring at the edge of town kept me vaguely oriented in the crisscrossing tunnels as to which way was El Tambo, but as I had first skirted the briar heading south for a while, the music from town was not directly behind me and I had to make educated and ultimately misguided guesses as to whether or not I was headed towards the eastern hills. The tunnels were endless and largely featureless, aside from the occasional 8 foot diameter termite mound built in the low crooks of the bigger trees. I stomped on patches of sand that I passed to leave footprints and make extra sure that I would not get lost on my return. Maintaining updates on my location within an imaginary map based solely on a loud radio, which in the curvy tunnels was capable of wild side to side shifts, was futile. There was evidence everywhere that people regularly use the tunnels to access the free wood of unprotected campo trees and the occasional big lizard rummaging in dry leaves gave me constant pause trying to make out if people were approaching. I gave up searching for the hills after an impossibly long hike without a single change in topography or forestry. My long list of memorized landmarks I had passed was seeming rather dubious, as it had amounted only in ‘fallen log, fallen log, fallen log, termite mound, fallen log, beer bottle, fallen log, fallen log, fallen log’. I decided just to head back.

      About 3 minutes after having turned back, I shifted somewhat abruptly out of a daydream I was having when I encountered a large unavoidable patch of sand on the tunnel trail that was completely without footprints. I peered intently at the sand looking for any evidence that I had walked there just minutes earlier, which I failed to find. I then stood there screwing up my face first in the direction I had just come from and then in the direction I had been trying to head. I was mystified that after all my memorizing and trail marking, I could possibly have lost the trail almost immediately after having turned around. Even stranger, I was 99% certain I had not even passed a possible turn off that might have confused me. I concluded that I had not left my trail, but had rather just walked too softly across this particular patch of sand, which being very fine and fairly deep easily erased my footprints. But a minute or two further down the path found me spitting a bewildered curse at a piece of garbage in the middle of the path that I should have remembered seeing. Just beyond the garbage was a fork in the path and I was now completely at a loss for which one, if any, had brought me there. I felt a pang of dread as I imagined myself stumbling from the briar wilderness 6 hours in the future and finding myself on the far side of Prosperidad or some other god forsaken place entering town through someone’s cluttered back yard where the gaping family therein is too taken aback to act upon their furious campo dog trying to kill me. Then the loud Tambo radio from earlier was either suddenly cranked up again or my brain quit filtering it out. I realized that even if I had no clue where I was, as long as I made every effort to take trails that kept the music in front of me, I would eventually emerge from the briar bramble to find Tambo in the distance in front of me. Ultimately that is what happened. Just prior to visual conformation of Tambo, the bramble thinned out a little and I realized I was somehow on a trail about 100 feet parallel to the one I had taken in. From there the return was easy.

      It was very strange to find myself standing at the clearing previously known to me as ‘the back of Julio’s lot’. My vegetable garden could scarcely have looked more foreign growing there in low, tender rows, after so much time out wandering in the harsh native bramble. As I ascended the sawdust hill into the flat, hard and perfectly barren ground of Julio’s yard, I suddenly felt what I had always known: that humans habituating this area is beyond a bad idea- it is preposterous. When I read about how people were selectively breeding plants and animals 1000’s of years ago and navigating seas and building trade networks and empires, I have to wonder what the hell happened to places like Tambo in the modern world. Why are people in Tambo trying to eek out an existence with starving inbred animals and piles of bootleg CD’s titled “Cumbia’s greatest hits”? The Incas lived in stone houses, but half of Tambo lives in shacks effectively built from garbage? Why are so many people living where crops are impossible to grow and there isn’t even naturally occurring fresh water anywhere? Did the cholos of the coast of the province of Guayas descend from a guy raised by Iguanas? It was a satisfying theory that the people of this area descended from war refugees and the exiled, but did the excessive sun here fry all the capacity out of their tortured brains and give rise to the only place in the world capable of enjoying Magica Latina brand cumbia?

      I re-arrived at Julio’s and continued directly on into Libertad to the mall in search of snack foods and turpentine for oil paints. A small can of turpentine at the mall rang up at $20, so after laughing in the clerks face and ordering a price check that was apparently beyond their capacity to perform, I continued the hunt for turpentine in central Libertad. It was not to be found anywhere. I eventually wound up buying something titled “Remover of Paint”, but wouldn’t know until I got home that it was not the right stuff. No matter.

      When I re arrived in Tambo, the neighborhood was in mid-fiasco as the electric company was trying to quit for the day before everyone had been rehooked legally to the power grid. Crowds of Tambonians were squawking and crowding in around the power company tucks and demanding to be hooked up. I don’t know why it was such a big deal, they could always have just rehooked up themselves illegally, the same as they had been doing for years. Julio was the second to last person legally connected for the day. He stood below the ladder of the man reconnecting his lines and lavished unsolicited advice upon him, as he has a tendency to do. However, it looked as though the power company guy on the ladder actually needed advice. It seemed like he had been hired only minutes earlier and had no previous experience with electricity. He almost laid his arm across more than 1 wire several times. He was completely clueless about what he was supposed to be doing up there and kept coming so close to electrocuting himself that I could no longer watch him and went inside. At the next house, the guy leaned his ladder directly on the crusty wires themselves. At 6pm the power company left. After eating I read for the rest of the night.

      After breakfast, I hid out in my room and played with my oil paints. Then I started a book called “First They Killed My Father”, which, apart from the clumsy title, is a pretty good book about an upper middle class family hiding out in Cambodia and pretending to be peasants during the country’s domination by the Khmer Rouge. After reading, I cleaned out and reorganized my room. Then I shoved a videotape of documentaries in my VCR and played it until night when Lorena and her cousin of came to my window and interrupted it. They were waiting for a Tambo town dance to begin. Town dances are frequent in May. As we talked through my open window, we heard yet another parade moving through the dark in our direction. I killed the lights of my room so our conversation would not be the only lighted thing along the parade route. The parade then passed just as it had earlier, except that everyone had candles. Then for reasons which I do not understand, but which are somehow related to a general lack of independent thinking, Lorena’s sister and nephew were sent over to retrieve her. They were sent multiple times in fact because there was no pressing reason that Lorena should need to spontaneously relocate 200 feet away to her house while in the middle of a damn conversation elsewhere. Yet they were repeatedly sent over to deliver the imperative that ‘the dance had begun’ until they were finally successful in bringing her home, where it is presumed that the small-minded grouped together and at erratic intervals stomped their feet on the dance floor to the exact same music that plays from loud radios all over town every day.