Within 15 minutes of my arrival at the station, I was again leaving on a nearly empty Baeza-bound bus. I spent the first 2 hours of the ride sound asleep, while the bus made stops every 20 seconds to pick up and drop off people along the route. Due to the borderline absurd amount of stopping involved in our trip, I had no way to gauge our distance from Baeza. Sometimes at the 2 hour mark, one's bus is about to enter Baeza, other times it could happen beyond the 3 hour mark, but who knew when to expect Baeza when the bus was loathe to break 10mph for fear of flying past even one precious potential passenger, of which it seemed there was no shortage. Sometimes thoroughness and efficiency are mutually exclusive terms, yo. I pulled out my book All the Shah's Men, a book about the 1953 CIA sponsored coup of the democratically elected Iranian government, an event which marks the symbolic, if not de facto divergence of America from the noble principle's it had (sporadically) adhered to since its inception, and the beginning of a bunch of really, really bad ideas concerning US foreign policy, which go a long way towards answering America's recent, though perhaps short-lived muse "Why do they hate us?"

[A rant was edited out from right here because it was too long and not directly pertaining to Ecuador Rant]

      I wasn't really even in a reading mood when I pulled out my book on the way to Baeza, but I kept getting sucked into it anyway. Every few pages I would look up and wonder if there was any chance we had passed through Baeza while I was reading and not paying attention. I would then watch out my window for anything I could remember passing on previous trips to Baeza, but without success. I would look at my watch, conclude that it was theoretically possible that we hadn't yet come to Baeza and then go back to reading my book, thus starting the cycle all over again. I relaxed when the bus picked up 2 people who told the ayudante they were headed to Baeza and within minutes I began recognizing the passing scenery.

      I stepped off the bus in Baeza a little after 9am with my ears totally plugged from my head cold and feeling somewhat in a fog. Ela, who I hadn't seen in 3 months, spotted me approaching from up the road and came out to meet me. She had breakfast all ready to hit the stove and in minutes we were chowin down. I took cold medication and came out of the plugged ears/fog within an hour, but by noon I had fallen asleep, which, but for the exception of waking briefly to eat and attempt to start a movie on the laptop, is how I stayed until the next morning.

      As it turns out, the visitors were not bad people, but that is not the point. The point is that I would not have traveled 13 plus hours to hang out with them. I would not have crossed the road to hang out with them. Again, as far as human beings are concerned, they were probably good and more than nominally interesting, but I am not someone with a strong need for other people. Moreover, most people in the Peace Corps have an "entitled" edge to them the same as any fraternity kids in Your-College-Here have. If you were to ask around, 99% of people in the Peace Corps would strenuously deny this assertion, but it is true just the same. Just as you can note who are the fraternity kids in any massive lecture hall in any college in the US because everything they do is infused with the vague certainty that they are special, so too has it leaked into the Peace Corps psyche that being some poor community's "savior" automatically makes them smart, funny and good-looking any other place they may grace with their divine presence. And in answer to the question in your mind: no, I actually quite enjoy being this rabid, just as you secretly enjoy letting a massive fart when no one's around. Incidentally, like the Peace Corps volunteers, 99% of you would probably deny that you enjoy farting, which you certainly do. Hey, hose down the entire free world with your big, bad, inflated public image, but to thine own self be true.

      I tried not to let my quiet peevedness at the interruption of the movie devolve into ire. I attempted not to engage in this unsolicited social event as if I was merely tolerating it. I had gone of my own free will to a place that has a standing invitation for people to drop in whenever they feel like it- I should choke down the consequences without wincing. However, I was unable to come by any amount of contrived enthusiasm and inside me I could feel my rivers beginning to shift course. Sediment was piling up in the river bends even as the flow of water was undercutting the banks on the other side. I saw the option of ever returning to Baeza slowly beginning to fade. My walk has always been in shadows and Baeza was becoming a progressively sunnier place. My "doors" are always locked and you cannot find a key in any flower box in the world.

      We asked inside at a tienda about the possibility of more busses passing through Baeza that night, but we received numerous contradictory responses, which is absolutely par for the course. We decided I should wait up the road ˝ mile at the junction of 2 major highways coming from Baeza and Chaco so that I would be in the position to catch any bus heading to Quito from anywhere in the Northeast part of the country. We motioned at various automobiles leaving Baeza in that direction, but no one stopped. Over my misgivings, Ela flagged down a police truck and asked if they could take me up to the junction. They happily consented, which rather surprised me. The Police were out of control polite and friendly, which would almost certainly never happen in the Costa. They asked lots of friendly questions about what I thought of the country and even asked me if I didn't think it would be better to wait by the "Police Control" rather than just at the junction (whether a Quito bound bus comes from Baeza or Chaco, all must pass the police control another mile or so beyond where the 2 highways intersect). As that idea sounded much more interesting than waiting at the highway junction, I enthusiastically consented. Amid a shocking flurry of courtesies and warm salutations, the police dropped me off as they passed the control station without even hinting at a payment. This is where I would spend the next hour waiting for a bus.

      After a while, I noticed a sign painted on one of the buildings that referred to this checkpoint as a "counter narcotics station" and a little while later, a bored policemen wandered over to me when there was a big lull in passing traffic. He struck up casual conversation and I soon asked him how often they seize drug shipments. He must have misunderstood my question because he answered "almost always". I knew this was a lie, both because of the way he reacted to my question and also because I had been sitting there watching the way they inspected cars. With no drug sniffing dogs and ridiculously half-hearted searches, they were only going to find the most obvious stashes of drugs. Plus, how could one really be certain that what they were finding is 'almost all' or even the majority of what was passing through?

      After a while of questioning of the officer, I learned that the station does supposedly have drug dogs but they don't work all 24 hours of the day and it is "base" they seek to intercept, which I am assuming is coca paste, although that doesn't really make sense to me. "Base, from the Colombian laboratories", the policeman asserted, when I asked if what he meant to say was "cocaine". It doesn't seem at all logical to me that anyone would transport coca paste down from Colombia when they could easily fully refine the drug in the labs up there, thereby packing much more value into the same package they are risking their ass to smuggle into Ecuador. He says the average bust is 500 grams (about a pound) and that smugglers are almost never armed. I asked if it was Colombians or Ecuadorians doing the smuggling inside Ecuador. Ecuadorians, he told me. I guess this makes sense because a Colombian ID would make one suspect. They might even be Colombians with fake Equa-Ids for all anyone knows. This kind of thing, as well as fair trials and regulated sentencing is impossible to enforce with any degree of certainty in banana republics.

      Naturally, the policeman became suspicious of me, as I too would have become suspicious of anyone scoping out the drug checkpoint and asking lots of questions. If I had a major shipment of drugs to transport across Ecuador, you best believe I would case out the anti-narcotic checkpoints. I saw him casting glances at my partially unzipped backpack and he finally worked up the nerve to ask if he could look inside my backpack. I told him to go right ahead. He was very thorough, I suspect, because he was more interested in my things than he was in finding drugs. He liked my battery charger and was especially interested in my CDs. Another policeman wandered over and asked friendly questions about how I like Ecuador with a big smile on his face. They were curious about my pill box. I told them what each pill was used for. It was all just basic stuff like antacids and tylenol. The new policeman pulled out what I had said were "diarrhea pills" and looked at the packaging.

      "Immodium…" he said, "this is what smugglers use when they are carrying drugs inside their body. Do you have drugs inside your body?"

      When I finally realized and reacted to what he was asking (with a smile on his face), we all laughed and then walked across the street to where they had a CD player going so we could sample from the music CDs I had with me. As a bus could come at any moment and I would have to scramble to put away all my CDs and get back across the highway, I made sure the album "Ice T: Original Gangster" was the first one we tried out. All the policemen broke into smiles and one even exclaimed that he had "never heard anything like this before", which is not at all surprising when you consider the prevalence of crap cumbia in Ecuador. I started looking for "Beck: Mellow Gold" next, but realized with chagrin then that it must be back at Ela's. A policeman put in "Tom Waits: Big Time", but found an awkward spot on the live recording where there was little more than crowd noise and poorly enunciated mumbling by Tom himself to band members. Then a bus appeared up the highway. I started scrambling to collect my things, but the police told me to relax because they would have to empty and search the bus anyway. They wanted to hear more music. I dropped a few CDs on the ground and sent policemen diving everywhere to catch them. The policeman holding the CDs got all excited when he came across Eminem because Eminem is fairly popular in Ecuador. Then they acquiesced to my gathering of my things, asked if I could give them a CD (to which I said no) and I entered the newly arrived bus just as everyone (with the exception of one man who's bag the police were searching) was climbing back aboard.

      Minutes after we pulled away, to my surprise, I fell straight away to sleep for most of the ride to Quito. We arrived in Quito around midnight (as it had been a 9pm bus I had caught at the checkpoint) and I found the bus station to be rather sketchy at that hour. The incongruous amount of questionable people moving around inside when compared to the near total lack of ticket windows still open didn't sit well with me. I kept up a steady gait until I came across an open window selling tickets to Guayaquil. I made it look like that was the window I had always been planning to get my ticket from by an effortless swoop in its direction when I noticed there was still someone inside. From there I went directly to my bus.

      Outside, I found the whole bus lot empty except for 2 busses, both bound for Guayaquil. One was huge and new and upscale and bearing the company logo of the cooperative Ela had told me to make sure I took, and the other was an EcuaBus with bundles of crap piled high atop its roof. I had purchased a ticket to the EcuaBus, but I did not exactly kick myself for this mistake as I had not seen any other ticket windows open and I was not about to broadcast my uncertainties in the bus station by aimlessly wandering around in search of open ticket windows nor did I think it wise to proceed past an open ticket window at the risk of finding no others and having to backtrack through where I had already made my presence known. The bus inside was cramped, but not as bad as it could have been. Nevertheless, I largely failed to sleep throughout the night.

      When Ivan came home, I deferred to him a problem I was having with a disk of computer games I had brought from Ela's. Ever since Ivan has returned to his polytechnic university and gotten all smart and stuff about computers, he has been a lot more relaxed around me. His claim to fame before my arrival was being Mr. Educated Smartypants and pontificating about stuff concerning the greater world while his spellbound parents deferred to his uncontested cerebral supremacy- and in fairness, he is highly educated for an Ecuadorian, especially when one considers that he is from the sticks, not Quito or Guayaquil. But when I came to Tambo, I dethroned him most abruptly. I was far more educated and was none too pleasant to engage in intellectual discourse because I can be rather dismissive and condescending. It was not my intention to cause friction, but that is what I caused to some extent. Ivan seemed rather to avoid me and any conversations we did have were not fabulously over-enthusiastic. But now that he has regained his status as Illuminated One by upstaging me in the field of computer knowledge, which I go out of my way to emphasize his supremacy in, he has again become something of a comrade. Lesson learned: everyone needs to feel useful. A useful person is a person people need and depend upon. A person without dependants is forgotten. No one wants to be forgotten.

      The rest of the daytime hours consisted of little more than fussing with my plants, unpacking and working a little on filling out forms for grant money. In the dark part of the evening, The man who is buying my computers came by to drop off part of the money and pick up part of the equipment. Then the whole family piled into my room to laugh at pictures of themselves that I pulled up from a CD I had made on Ela's laptop. They have gotten used to the sight of me passing through the house with my digital camera in tow, thus I had tons of pictures of different events they had not known existed because their guard had been lowered to the point that having their picture taken does not attract their attention. At 9pm, thoroughly backwards from how people here do it, I hung a load of wet laundry on the line. I am the perfect reverse of a Tambonian. I shower in the morning, they shower at night. I am not tremendously active in the first hours of the day, nor the last, but rather in the central expanse of daytime. They are fully active immediately upon awakening, and then a few hours later, productivity hits a standstill until at least after 5 or 6pm. After lunch, at the precise time the world is taking an unofficial siesta, I am fully energized and leaving the house to do anything I have to do in town. At 8 or 9pm when I am going to sleep, the whole town is just leaving the house for the prime socializing hours. And when do they wash/hang laundry? In the morning only.

      While we were discussing what to name the group, a group of 5 students and 2 teachers from Don Bosco showed up on the front step of the house to ask me to come back and teach English. This was interesting for many reasons. One is that I know how difficult it is to round up those students to do anything, let alone to get them to walk to the far opposite corner of Tambo together immediately after school was out for the day. Another is that these are people who don't have enough interest in education to go to a real high school, even though the majority of them sit around bored all day while real high schools are in session. They go to "school" simply to get a diploma. They get a diploma if they are present at least part of the time for the 6 years of schooling a high school "education" here involves, whether or not they learn anything. English class, which they never studied for at all, theoretically only adds to their workload (even though it seems that when I am present, it is only I teaching anything. The other teachers take a daylong break). It was not as if they were actually learning anything from what I taught. So why would they go out of their way to ask me back? Because they like me, that's why. And I agree with them on that. Irrespective of who I may be as a human being, I am a very cool English as a second language teacher. They need me to brighten their school day.

      But a third way this event was interesting is that I had never renounced the school. The school started back from a few month break one day and no one (actually, Guido, who runs the school) told me anything. I found out school had started when I ran into an ex student 2 weeks after the fact who asked why I was no longer teaching English. Julio and I do not believe that Guido, who is my HAHAHAHA "counterpart", could have possibly forgotten to tell me about the beginning of school nor could he believe that I would know what date to report to school if he himself did not inform me. We suspect I was deliberately not asked back and we can not think of any good reason this should have been. Guido spent half the school year doing absolutely nothing with the students and in the times where he did actually teach, he didn't teach even 1/3 of the classes that I taught. Even the best among the other teachers cannot claim to have taught more tirelessly nor to have captivated the classes attentions than did I.

      Guido, though young, is a teacher of the old school. This means he is a pedant and subscribes to rote memorization as the only method of learning proper to a respectable education. He loves meetings and sees the endless talking without saying anything typical of meetings in this area to be no problem whatsoever. He once took me aside and told me that much contrary to the way I was teaching, I needed to make the kids write vocabulary words over and over and make the whole class repeat after me. But as only one of us had ever learned a second language and as only one of us comes from a country whose educational system even remotely functions, I simply returned to teaching as I had before and disregarded his advice. Guido became Vice-President of El Tambo in December. Perhaps he, like every other 10 cent politician in office in Tambo, now fears me. They fear me because I am a source of power hanging out in their jurisdiction with absolutely no respect for their so-called authority. I make no attempt to cozy up to the establishment, nor do I seek their advice or help. The few times any of them have sent their wishes my way through indirect channels, I have ignored them as I will continue to do. No one approaches me because they are not altogether certain of what I might be good for and have probably heard some of my open criticisms about the way the town is run, as well as that I am exceedingly direct, do not respond to pressure and do not fear confrontation. They fear that in a twitch, I could do something bigger for this community than they could in several consecutive terms of bureaucratic paper shuffling and grandstanding, and worse than that they could not take credit for it and would look impotent, they could not control it and rob from its coffers. Perhaps, for these reasons, Guido secretly doesn't like me and that is why he did not ask me to teach English before the school year started, nor today when the students and teachers showed up where I live to do what he could have done with a single phone call.

      I told the students I would be busy this weekend and next because my friend was flying in from the States, but after that I would most definitely show up to teach. I agreed to teach the students-who-don't-learn for the same reason they asked me to teach the subject-they-don't-study: because I like them too and our classes are usually the highlight of my Saturday.

      Tomorrow Julio and el Chino and every available male from their family will work on ripping down el Chino's old bamboo house (as el Chino and his wife have moved into Julio's brothers house 3 doors down) and transporting it across town to the area of campo behind Julio's house, where it will become a chicken coop. The coop will then be used as something like "collateral" for lack of a better term to help us secure grant money for our grand Finca Integral "Our Ascent". I worked all day on various numbers pertinent to our solicitation of money. After lunch I dug a horseshoe shaped flowerbed around my beloved Cactus Cereus Peruvianus.