retro: into that good night

Over the course of my travels, I have slept in many, many beds. It's frequently been the nature of my work to sleep wherever there's a bit of free space: innumerable thin foam mattresses, a dozen creaky canvas cots, couches and floors and beds so hard they may as well have been floors. I have spent countless nights lying awake on these beds, tormented in turn by the heat and the cold, illness and nerves, itchy fleabites and upset stomachs and, on one memorable occasion, a particularly loud colony of frogs. Just the other night I discovered flying ant larvae nestled in my blankets, and have been suffering phantom creepy-crawlies ever since.

But never, and I mean never, have I had so much trouble sleeping as I did as a volunteer in Nicaragua.

Ironically, my allotted sleeping space was pretty nice. The bed was a real mattress, a luxury I have since rarely seen even in more affluent towns. No doubt it was my host parents' bed, quietly surrendered to me with the sort of selflessness usually seen only in anonymous kidney donors. There were no sheets to worry about; I just sprawled across the bare mattress, travel pillow smushed securely between my head and the wall. For the first couple weeks, my little sisters took turns sleeping with me. 11-year-old Julieta tended to tuck in close behind me, huddled against my back, while 9-year-old Marta was an aggressive cuddler, wrapping her arms and legs around me every night like a spider monkey. I was forever carefully unwrapping her and rolling her over onto her other side, only to watch as, like a perpetual motion machine, she instantly rolled back over and clung onto me again.

At some point, they both stopped sleeping with me. To this day, I sometimes worry that my host mother found out they were disrupting my sleep and ordered them to let me have the bed to myself. It's a stupid thing to let ruffle my conscience, but if I've learned one thing from my mother, it's that you can never have too much guilt or garlic. I feel guilty for stealing a piece of a stranger's pretzel when I was five years old, I feel guilty for things I've done in dreams, and I feel guilty for unintentionally forcing my host sisters to sleep three to a bed.

Our town had no electricity, so everyone went to bed shortly after nightfall. I got in the habit of reading to Marta and Julieta in the evenings - after we watched our novela on our cousins' car battery-powered television, of course. I had brought a stash of Spanish-language children's books, and every night we would sit on the edge of my bed, the girls pressed up close against my sides, and read Dr. Seuss. One of the girls would hold up a little white candle for light, dripping wax on the pages and occasionally "accidentally" singeing a piece of my hair.

One night, during a particularly spirited recitation of Cómo el Grinch Robó la Navidad, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Snagging the candle from Marta, I turned around to investigate, only to discover that the wall was swarming with ants. Not tiny, harmless ants, like the kind that would later plague my cereal in Granada. No, these were big, black, ass-kicking ants, the panzer division of the ant army. I knew from experience that a bite from one of those bad boys felt a lot like getting hit in the hand with a baseball bat. A baseball bat covered in spikes.

"ANTS," I said, calmly, to my sisters.

"Ants," they agreed. Julieta reached over and flicked one off the wall.

"ANTS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."

I believed then as I do now that compromise is key to cross-cultural understanding, but I straight-up could not sleep with my head tucked up against the Demon Ant Super-Highway. I began to sleep curled up at the foot of my bed, like a dog. My legs stuck off the edge of the mattress, but who cared? At least I had put a safe distance between my body and the ant battalion, although frequently a handful of them would trek all the way down the mattress just to see how I was getting on.

Then I noticed the scorpions.

Well, okay, I had noticed them before. What I hadn't noticed was that they tended to mosey across the outside wall. The wall I was now snuggling up to every night.

In other words: "SCORPIONS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."

Reasonably, I thought, I began pushing the mattress away from the wall a few inches. My 15-year-old sister Milagros thought I was insane. "They'll just walk across the floor and up the side of the mattress and get you that way," she said.

"LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING," I replied.

So that took care of the ants and the scorpions. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.

One night, I woke up around 1:00 A.M. feeling sick and over-hot. Venturing out to the latrine was not an option; at night, it swarmed with cockroaches the size of small dogs. I resigned myself to hours of misery, hoping vaguely that I would drift back into sleep but knowing enough not to count on it.

Half an hour into my ordeal, I was distracted from my suffering by a strange, clicking, sibilant sound. The house was built into the side of a hill, so that the top of my bed was level with the ground outside. And something was out there, on the other side of the wall. Something...hissing.

"Milagros," I whispered urgently. "Mili! Is that a snake?"

She sat bolt upright. "What? Where?"

I shushed her, indicating that she should listen. A moment later, we both heard it - a whistling hiss that trailed off into a series of clicks.

She swallowed audibly and said, "It's just crickets." She seemed uncertain, and I wasn't buying it. Crickets my ass. Since when did crickets hiss? Or have teeth?

Satisfied with her assessment of the situation, Milagros kicked Marta's legs away and went back to sleep. Whatever my fate was to be that night, I was going to face it alone.

I want to take a moment to clarify that I'm not particularly afraid of snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of earthquakes or axe murderers or deadly nightshade, either, but when brought face-to-face with these things, I think it's only natural to realize with sudden clarity that they can in fact kill us. Some of the biggest assholes in the animal kingdom can be found in Nicaragua - this is, after all, the country that gave us freshwater sharks - and various parts of the country are home to coral snakes, bushmasters, and the good old fer-de-lance, each of which are bound to ruin your day.

Quiz time!

Q: Was the snake outside my house really a horrible, astoundingly deadly pit viper?
A: Unlikely.

Q: Was I, armed with a single drippy candle and my pocketknife, really about to go check?
A: Fuck off.

Throughout that long night, as my stomach twisted and cramped, I listened to the snake slide back and forth on the other side of the wall. The roof was only casually connected to the walls, leaving plenty of room for a determined death-bringer to squeeze through and kill us all in our beds. Could snakes climb walls? I was pretty sure they could. On the other hand, most of my snake knowledge came from Jumanji and The Jungle Book. On the other other hand, it was a really short wall.

Either Disney lied to me about wildlife abilities and behaviors (ha ha, like they'd ever do that), or snakes aren't actually too interested in sweaty, unshowered gringa as a main course. Whatever the reason, the snake didn't slither over the wall that night, or the next night, or the next. In fact, it stayed outside for the next two weeks, jealously guarding its territory every night, until the day I left. I know this because I was awake for every one of those nights. I never intended to stay awake. I would doze off after storytime, then jolt awake a few hours later, my heart in my throat. The bastard was always there, gliding leisurely along the length of wall that separated us, occasionally slowing down as it passed my head as if to suggest that this was the night it would come over the wall and eat my face. I could never fall back asleep, so I would lie there listening to it until dawn, scratching my mosquito bites and amending my mental hierarchy of nocturnal enemies.

In this way, we passed our nights together: the snake moving back and forth along its familiar path, hissing and clicking, and me curled up at one end of my mattress, mud-flaked toes twitching nervously in midair, wondering what else might be hiding out there in the dark.

retro: the scorpion king

I talk a lot of crap about Paraguay. Tripe this, Nazis that, demonic host mother wah wah wah. It's actually a fine country, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from going there. The thing is that, on a personal level, my time in Paraguay was without question the most unpleasant travel experience I've yet had. To this day, I have semi-regular nightmares about being sent back to live with my host family.

There is one arena, though, in which Paraguay stands heads and shoulders above the competition: bugs.

As in, there really weren't any. There was the occasional spider the size of your hand, but they were fairly passive and easy to kill. Our most serious pest problem involved frogs. And fleas. And foot parasites. Okay, on second thought, there were plenty of bugs in Paraguay.

Nicaragua, though - Nicaragua presented a whole new set of plagues. The latrines were filled with equal parts human waste and genetically-enhanced cockroaches. I was beset by swarms of mosquitoes, which had been virtually nonexistent in Paraguay. Worst of all, Nicaragua was the country where I discovered scorpions.

Scorpions are the worst.

I was only stung once during my first summer in Nicaragua, but it was more than enough to put me off the whole thing for life. The incident in question occurred when a scorpion of unknown size, species and political loyalties scampered over my hand in the middle of the night and thoughtfully decided to leave his calling card. If any of you would like to experience such a thing for yourselves, I would recommend that you get a friend to wake you up by stabbing you in the hand with a cattle prod. And then have them turn up the voltage. And then kick you in the stomach, just for laughs.

I jolted awake to a burst of fiery agony, pain flaring across the back of my knuckles and up my pointer finger. "HURGH," I said, clutching my hand to my chest. "GLRRK. HRBRBTL." Deprived of both oxygen and vowels, the only coherent thought I was able to process was that I had to be quiet, so as not to wake anyone up. Imminent death is one thing, but there's just no excuse for inconveniencing folks.

I rocked back and forth for a while, mouth open in a giant, wheezing O - the only time in my memory that I have ever been too incapacitated to curse. My fingers didn't seem to be moving very well, but I figured that was just a side effect of my failing nervous system, so I wasn't too terribly concerned. I looked forward to it, actually. Sensory deprivation sounded like an excellent idea at that point.

Looking back, it's clear that I probably should have said something. "Hey, Josefina," I might have whispered to my host sister in the next bed. "Listen, I hate to bother you, but I think I'm dying." Instead, I heaved one shaky breath after another, fingers fever-hot and swelling up like balloon animals, and eventually passed out.

I was fine, of course. My hand was swollen in the morning, but the searing pain had given way to a dull throb of discomfort. Within days, the soreness and the swelling had both vanished, and I pushed the incident to the back of my mind, a mildly amusing story to tell my friends when I came home.

A few days later, my partner J and I were sitting on my bed, preparing for the next day's class. I was sitting against the wall, head tilted back against the rough dried-mud surface as I tried to think up a better strategy for wrangling 45 small and insolent children. Anything had to be better than our current tactics of menace and bribery - though, admittedly, we would happily have carried on with these if they had actually worked. (Is it any wonder I went on to study politics?)

Out of the blue, J said, "Hey, M, could you come over here for a minute?" In retrospect, she was remarkably calm, especially for someone whose own run-in with a scorpion had resulted in the kind of screams known to shatter glass and knock satellites out of orbit.

"Why?"

"Just come here," she said evasively.

Confused, I scooted over to her part of the bed, at which point she grabbed my face and turned me around to see the World's Largest Scorpion sauntering up the wall right next to where my head had been.

It is impossible to exaggerate the size of this scorpion. It was larger than my hand; very possibly it was larger than God's hand. I've owned smaller cats. I could not believe that something so huge and evil-looking was allowed to exist. It seemed to upset the natural balance of things. Like, surely if this monstrosity was allowed to roam free, the world should also be filled with giant kittens and bunny rabbits, to compensate.

When I get to this point in the story, people invariably ask me the same question: So how did you kill it?

To which I invariably reply: Motherfucker, are you high?

Because, of course, I did not kill it. I didn't happen to have my armor-piercing bullets with me, and a grenade might only have made it angry. In all seriousness, the only weapon that could have taken this thing down was a machete. Besides, it was almost certainly some sort of god, and I wasn't willing to risk bringing its wrath down upon my unprotected head.

Too stunned to beg for mercy, J and I just watched with shock and awe as the scorpion strolled up and over the wall, easily slipping through the gap between wall and roof, and disappeared from our lives forever.

I've since encountered lots of scorpions: big scorpions, baby scorpions, brown and red and orange scorpions. I've found them under my cot, inside my mosquito netting, investigating the contents of my backpack. I am notoriously trigger-happy when it comes to bugs - except for the occasional pet spider - but despite the fact that I hate and fear scorpions above all other vermin, I have yet to kill one. I'm intimidated by the difficulty of such an attempt, especially considering that my hand-eye coordination leaves a lot to be desired. But I'm also worried that, should I succeed in slaughtering one of the little bastards, I'll wake up one night to another visit from the scorpion king...and He won't be happy.

retro: a terrible thing to waste

I love brains.

Yeah, I said it. I hate stomach, intestines make me gag, and the next person who tries to feed me bull testicles is getting a sharp stick in the eye.

NOT FOOD.

But brains - oh, delicious brains. I am a fervent disciple of the Church of the Sacred Encephalon. I would eat that shit with a spoon. Straight from the skull, if necessary. Straight from your skull, maybe. Watch yourself.

I have not always been this way. I did not sally forth from the womb as some slavering, brain-hungry zombie child. In fact, for nineteen years, I lived a full, happy life totally devoid of brains in any form.

Picture unrelated. What?

Then I went to Mexico.

Michoacán had great food. Have I mentioned that? I cannot stress it enough. Mexico has one of the highest obesity rates in the world, right behind the U.S., and I don't blame them one bit. If I lived and ate in Michoacán full time, I would be the size of a house.

Our little city was swarming with taco vendors. My staff came to favor one near the town square, a small but efficient operation that sold the world's most delicious soft tacos for less than it cost to buy a corresponding antacid tablet. The meat was finely minced and expertly grilled, spicy and savory. I couldn't get enough.

I assumed, like an ass, that the meat must be beef or pork. In my own defense, let me remind you that I was very young, very stupid, and very, very hungry.

Anyway, it wasn't until the third or fourth taco that a fellow staff member let the cow out of the bag. "You know that's brain, right?" she asked around a mouthful of tortilla - so casual, like she was remarking on the weather or the latest project gossip. No big deal. You know your bra strap is showing, right?

I looked down at my half-eaten taco. What had so recently seemed innocent and nourishing now represented a personal betrayal on the scale of long-term adultery. I considered discreetly disposing of it via our entourage of street mutts, but I knew I'd never live it down. Besides, it was pretty tasty, brain or no brain.

So I ate it. And then bought another, and ate that too.

All told, I ate an estimated five billion tacos that summer. They were all delicious beyond the telling of it, and every last one of them wreaked unspeakable horror on my G.I. tract. Totally worth it. Besides, in the end, that little taco stand provided me with not only the best damn tacos I've ever had, but also an incomparable source of entertainment.

Let it never be said that one man's troubles cannot be made more bearable by foisting cow-brain tacos on his unsuspecting volunteers.

Sure, a couple of them said they'd never forgive me for tricking them, but I expect they'll come to appreciate my deceit in time. In the meantime, I remind you all that you should search me out when the zombies come. If I'm clean, I've got a machete and a frighteningly over-thought strategy; if not...well, I know a great supplier.

retro: the way to my heart

I love milanesa. Of all the foods I tried in Paraguay, milanesa is one of perhaps three that I would voluntarily choose to eat over, say, fried cardboard. It's a pretty simple dish, just pieces of thinly-sliced beef or chicken, breaded and fried, often with a dash of cumin. It's not so different from chicken-fried steak, I guess, except that chicken-fried steak is uniformly disgusting, whereas milanesa is a gustatory delight. Don't ask me to explain the wind, okay?

One evening in mid-July, my partners and I returned from our mid-summer break/training session to find that our host mother had made milanesa for dinner. Thank God. Finally, something we actually wanted to eat. Dude Partner and I dug in happily while Lady Partner, a committed vegetarian, looked on.

As we ate, DP and I discussed the food in front of us. Was it chicken or beef, we wondered? It looked too pale to be beef, but it didn't taste like chicken either. Curious, we peeled away the breading to get a better look at the meat within. This was a mistake. The meat looked distressingly gooey, as though someone had blown his or her nose onto it before frying it up. We chewed more slowly, pondering this development. The milanesa was awfully hard to cut. And it was so chewy, like trying to sink your teeth into a whoopee cushion.

"What kind of meat is this?" we asked our host brother.

He shook his head. "No, no, it's not meat."

The generic word for meat in Spanish mainly refers to beef or pork, which explains why our vegetarian partner was frequently served chicken and, disturbingly, hot dogs. ("I'm sorry, I don't eat meat." "...and?") We tried again. "What animal is it from?"

This he could answer. "Cow."

Well, that narrowed it down. "What part of the cow?"

Mouth full of the mystery non-meat, he merely hammered on his chest.

My partners and I fell into a hushed, heated debate. Heart? No, heart would be too tough. Lungs? Who eats lungs, anyway? Pancreas? Gallbladder? God, what else was even in the chest?

By this time, our host brother was laughing at us. "Tripa," he said patiently. "It's tripa."

Tripa. Sounded like - but, no, that wasn't in the chest. The guy had worked at a carcinería, a meatpacking factory. Surely he knew where the damn stomach was.

Well...he didn't.

At least the milanesa was edible, if somewhat less appealing after we registered its gummy, goopy nature for what it was. The real challenge came a week later, while our supervisor was visiting. Strangely enough, our sup was also a vegetarian, so it was a particularly bad night for our host mother to serve Broiled Stomach Pilaf.

The milanesa had masqueraded well, but this dish was unmistakably composed of offal. Fat, rubbery chunks of stomach nestled on a bed of plain rice. The smell was nauseating. The "meat" was plain, unadorned. It was unashamedly stomach, grayish and weirdly furry on one side. My partners and supervisor and I stared at it, and then each other, each silently running through the same list of options.

A. Eat it. Die.

B. Don't eat it, thereby insulting host mother and risking starvation. Die.

C. Flee on foot, heading for the mountains. Stumble upon the ghost monkeys or the rumored al-Qaeda training cell. Die.

The future was bleak.

Daringly, our supervisor attempted to cut the Gordian knot with an advanced weasel maneuver. "I'm sorry," she simpered apologetically, eyes artfully wide and innocent in her face. "I'm awfully sorry, but the thing is, I'm a vegetarian."

Our host mother frowned. "So?"

Thrown by this brusque response, our supervisor faltered slightly, then pushed on. "Well, I mean, I don't eat meat." Her eyes were growing wider by the second. She looked not unlike a Bratz doll.

"It's not meat," our host mother said, shoving a forkful of innards into her mouth.

Our sup was persistent. "But, you see, I don't eat any part of the animal." Clear, straightforward, unambiguous. Even a master weasel like our host mother couldn't argue with that.

"Ah," our mother said, appearing to concede. "I see. Well, why don't you wait a moment, and I'll get you something else." She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

It seemed that, against all odds, our sup had emerged victorious. She flashed us a triumphant smile. "Was that so hard?" she whispered, a touch patronizingly.

But we had all underestimated the magnitude of our host mother's cunning. Our sup realized her mistake moments later, as Mommie Dearest returned from the kitchen, self-satisfied smile firmly in place, with a plate piled high with cold, slimy hot dogs.

retro: meet the nazis

I have a confession to make. I am not generally fond of owning up to my mistakes, but I also have a wildly overactive conscience, and the guilt is killing me. So here it is, my big confession: for the last six years, I have been telling people that I knew a family of Nazis in Paraguay.

This is totally, totally wrong of me. Prejudiced and sophomoric, more concerned with cheap laughs than human dignity. Honestly, I'm a little ashamed of myself.

The truth is, they were only probably Nazis.

To their credit, Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis managed to blend in much better than my partners and I did. Despite their misleading title, they weren't a married couple, but rather brother and sister, and each had made respectable marriages to local (i.e., "real") Paraguayans. The man was fair of hair and square of jaw, tanned to within an inch of his life, like Val Kilmer in Top Gun. His sister was equally blonde, a large agreeable woman who sold sweets to the kids at the primary school. Our host mother referred to them both somewhat liberally as her cousins. (I don't mean to sound snobbish, but in a town with a whopping three surnames to go around, everyone is your cousin.)

Obviously, something was off. One look at their pale eyes and flaxen hair told you that these folks were not from around here - and before you nerds get all het up over recessive genes and shit, can I just remind you: three surnames.

So how did these strapping Aryan specimens come to live in our town?

Paraguay, as I like to think I've made pretty clear, is not a place to which any sane person would relocate. Your average emigrant would sooner stock up on Tang and freeze-dried ice cream and blast off for Mars. But self-imposed exile in the ass-end of nowhere becomes a lot more attractive when your alternative is life in prison for your enthusiastic participation in a brutal genocide.

See, a lot of Nazi soldiers and higher-ups flew the coop at the end of WWII, and a number of them ended up down South America way. (You know, like Portugal.) Like many of its neighbors, Paraguay was at that time under the control of a military dictator, a charming son of a gun by the name of Alfredo Stroessner. As a fervent nationalist and grade-A dick - not to mention proud owner of one ugly-ass mustache - Stroessner naturally felt a certain affinity for Hitler and his regime, and so he cordially invited the fleeing Nazis to lay low at his pad until the heat died down.

Not pictured: one single shred of human decency.

Oddly enough, the heat never did die down. While Hollywood would have you believe that each and every escaped war criminal went on to build enormous nuclear weapons and/or torture Dustin Hoffman, the reality is that most of them took a look around their new homes, shrugged, and resigned themselves to relatively harmless, patently boring lives in exile.

(As for Stroessner, he was eventually overthrown and brought to justice for his terrible reign of repression, torture, and fear-mongering - by which I mean he hung out in Brazil for the last seventeen years of his life, drinking caipirinhas with a bunch of other exiled dictators and, needless to say, yet more Nazis.)

Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis were not old enough to have taken part in any genocidal activities themselves. No doubt their parents had settled in our town when Mr. and Mrs. were children, perhaps even before they were born. They had been raised Paraguayan and, as I mentioned earlier, had both happily married locals and produced a number of adorable non-Aryan children. There was no blood on their hands. They could not justly be condemned for the sins of their parents, and yet my partners and I did so instinctively. Their appearance marked them as alien, suspect, and we eyed them with distrust, hypothesizing amongst ourselves about the nature of their crimes.

Our host family did not feel the same, and so we occasionally found ourselves joining Señor Iceman and his family for meals. No doubt eager to impress the norteamericanos, his wife invariably served intestine soup. I am deliberately not calling this soup menudo. Both dishes revolve around offal, but menudo is generally flavored with chile, lime, cilantro, and other tasty condiments, while this soup was nothing more or less than intestines au jus. I could barely eat it, although my suffering was mild in comparison to some other volunteers'. I distinctly remember one entry in our supervisor's route journal that announced, K ate cow intestines and barfed TWICE!!

Our host was a loud, gregarious fellow, and he enjoyed chatting with me and my partners. One night, he took it upon himself to explain to us why we as Americans were perceived as intrinsically cold and aloof. Being lectured on our people skills by a Nazi was bad enough, but the worst part was that he was right. He spoke emphatically, frequently reaching out to lay a hand on our shoulders, and every time he extended a hand toward Lady Partner, she visibly shrank back in her chair. In her defense, she understood very little Spanish, and so was oblivious to the topic of conversation. Still, it was embarrassing. Here we were, trying to defend the generally affable nature of our people, and LP was cringing away from our cousin's hand like it was covered in horse shit and plague sores.

Night had fallen by the time we left his house, the new moon plunging our surroundings into a darkness unimaginable to anyone accustomed to street lamps and light pollution. My partners and I strode briskly off down the familiar road toward home, putting some distance between ourselves and our host family, and immediately fell to arguing. Dude Partner and I attempted to communicate to LP that her behavior had been embarrassing and insensitive; LP attempted to communicate that we should mind our own fucking business.

"I have personal space issues," she said defensively, storming ahead of us down the enormous hill that led from the primary school to the church.

"I have cow intestine issues, but you don't see me being such a baby," I snapped back, a bit disingenuously, as that evening's stew had brought me perilously close to a full-on meltdown. "Suck it up, already."

DP was a bit more sympathetic. "You have to compromise," he said. "You don't have to go around hugging everyone, but he's our cousin. That's just how they roll here."

I would have agreed, but I was distracted at that moment by the sensation of my foot suspended dreamily in mid-air. It was dark enough that we couldn't see the placement of our feet, and, rocket scientist that I was, I had unwittingly strolled onto a ridge of exposed rock. This wouldn't have been so bad, except that, as is often the case, the ridge stopped when it was good and ready. I did not, and so I face-planted off the edge, arms flailing like the wings of an angry goose, and skidded face-first down half the length of the hill.

Stunned into silence by the abrupt and dramatic nature of my fall, my partners stopped bickering and hurried down the hill to stare at my prone body. Twenty feet behind us, the darkness echoed with the raucous laughter of our host mother, who never saw an accident she didn't approve of. My knees and elbows were hot and stinging with pain; later inspection would reveal that I had managed to shave off several layers of skin, simultaneously packing the open wounds with sand. To add insult to injury, I was lying in such an awkward position that I couldn't figure out how to stand up without sending myself tumbling further down the hill.

Goddamn fucking Nazis, I thought.

Of course, it wasn't really their fault. It was my fault, for not paying more attention to the placement of my feet, and it was LP's fault, for being so goddamn obstinate, and it was God's fault, for putting that rock where it had no business being, and above all it was Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis' parents' fault, for moving to Paraguay half a century before and setting the whole thing in motion.

I rolled over, staring up at the pitch-black sky and the curious faces of my partners, neither of whom were making any effort to assist me. Our host family was catching up to us, tittering noisily in Guaraní. I hated them, hated all of them - our stupid nasty host mother; my stupid gawking partners who didn't care enough to drag me off the ground; the stupid neighborly Nazis who didn't even realize how out of place they were.

The fall had obviously rattled a few things loose - teeth, brain cells, my last remaining ounce of dignity - and I couldn't help wondering, as the blood rushed to my brain, what the original Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis would have thought if they could have seen me at that moment: the young idealist, the idiot, angry at a country that refused to let her save it. So quick to judge, to instinctively recoil from anyone who didn't fit into her view of the world. Unable to move past her prejudice, to reconcile her naive expectations with the strange, gloriously unpredictable quirks of reality.

I spat out a mouthful of blood-tinted sand and glared up at my partners. "Help me up, man," I demanded, "come on, what the hell are you waiting for," and DP stretched out a belated hand to drag me, stumbling, to my feet.

retro: shit happens

1

When I first applied to volunteer with The Company at the delicate age of 15, I would never have dreamed of discussing bodily functions - mine or anyone else's - without a gun to my head and a blood oath that the conversation would never be made public. Human waste was something to be discussed only by highly-trained medical professionals and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I would no sooner have discussed bowel movements in a public forum than I would have lobbed the foul results at the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Let's just say times have changed.

2

Lady Partner suffered intense constipation for our first few weeks in Paraguay. It was understandable, at least for the first week or so. Everyone knows that travel can mess with your system, and the food our family was feeding us was enough to cork even the healthiest G.I. tract. It didn't help that LP was a huge germaphobe; she could barely look at our flimsy little toilet, much less park her ass and get down to business.

Take your time, Dude Partner and I told her. Don't push yourself. It'll happen when you're ready.

Two weeks into the summer, though, we all started to get concerned. Two weeks is an awfully long time to store ten pounds of cassava in your large intestine.

In desperation, LP confided in our supervisor, a fellow germaphobe. We had thought that our sup might take LP to a doctor, or at least offer some suggestions for speeding things along, but instead she shrugged off our concerns, saying that when she was a volunteer in the Dominican Republic, she had gone a whole month without pooping.

A MONTH. 1/12 OF A YEAR. ONE WHOLE FUCKING MONTH WITHOUT POOP.

A normal person cannot not poop for a month. She would die. Her body would slowly fill up with waste, like a hot-air balloon being inflated. Like that kid in Matilda who's forced to eat a massive chocolate cake, more cake than most of us could comfortably eat in a lifetime, until he eventually reaches the consistency of a sack of wet cement.

It's just an analogy, you understand.

Our supervisor was not a normal person. An inspiration to obsessive-compulsives everywhere, she shamelessly admitted to us that she never sat down on a toilet. Never. Not at a hotel; not at a friend's house; not in her own personal bathroom that she shared with nobody but Jesus. Her quadriceps were formidable, like cast-iron thigh guards. It made a strange kind of sense that this young woman might go for months on end without pooping. If you can go through life without ever - ever - letting your derriere touch a toilet seat, you can probably do pretty much anything.

3

One of my fellow staff members in Mexico was a trifle obsessed with maintaining digestive harmony. Worried about the potential consequences of the substantially "heavier" Mexican diet, he saw to it that our small kitchen was always well-stocked with bags and boxes of food-shaped laxatives.

Half of our food was labeled Doble Fibra, which is exactly what it sounds like. We had Doble Fibra cereal, Doble Fibra granola bars, Doble Fibra bread, not to mention at least three other brands of bran cereal and a stockpile of yogurt the likes of which the world had never seen.

It was frankly a little disturbing, especially on those days when certain members of staff would slump down at our little plastic table and moan, "That's number fourteen since breakfast." As careful as we tried to be, intestinal turmoil followed almost inevitably from our work - traveling between four towns every week, eating and drinking with up to twelve different families, then returning to staff house and gorging on cheap street-stand tacos. (Okay, so maybe we could have been a little more careful.) Our tummy troubles never lasted for long, but the bouts of illness were ruthlessly productive. Being forced to consume more fiber on those awful days seemed downright cruel, like giving blood thinners to a hemophiliac.

4

In my experience, there are few things that long-haul Company vets love more than trading poop stories. Like the girl who shit her pants in the middle of the night, hid her malodorous pajamas outside, and emerged the next morning to find that the family pig had disposed of them. Or the girl who reaped Montezuma's Revenge in an agave field with a whole busload of people watching her, and then had to get back on the bus. Neither of those stories are mine, but believe me, I can hold my own.

This competitive poop talk may seem like an odd hobby, but to hardcore Company folks, excrement is a relatively unremarkable part of daily life. Not just our own poop, either, but that of the people around us. Supervisors routinely ask their volunteers about their digestive health. If a vol is sick, their business becomes our business. (So to speak.) We run their symptoms by a checklist of indicators that tell us whether they need to see a doctor; if they do, the accompanying staff member is often obliged to translate every last sordid detail. As a result of this ongoing dialogue, Company staff members tend to be pretty nonchalant about poop, not unlike soldiers desensitized to violence. If it's not bloody or explosive, it's not a big deal.

Oddly enough, this nonchalance does not cross over into the rest of my life. I very rarely talk about poop with any non-Company friends or loved ones - partially because it doesn't get you invited to many dinner parties, and partially because I am keenly aware that such a thing is considered deviant behavior outside the bubble of international development NGOs. Many people are ashamed to have anyone realize that they are even capable of such an activity.

(Not to essentialize, but by people I of course mean women. I have never met a man who is not quietly proud of his body's every output.)

Don't get me wrong: even I am not interested in the intimate details of my friends' morning routines. Still, it's a shame that the subject is so very taboo, even in the abstract. Lighten up, guys! Like the book says:

Except my former supervisor.

retro: bolivia

Editor's Note: The following is a series of journal entries from my trip to Bolivia in the summer of 2007. I was working with a professor at my college, an expert on the area who I shall creatively call Professor, to create a children's history textbook on the history of the Multiethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM) in the department of Beni. As part of the project, we went down to the TIM itself to present a draft to the Territory's leaders and rifle through their records. The trip was supposed to be relatively simple, easy, and productive.

I should have known better.

Wednesday: in which a plane is struck by lightning and La Paz is fucking freezing

I arrived in La Paz feeling like crap. I really shouldn't have been surprised. A contact at CIDDEBENI had said we should fly through Santa Cruz, as La Paz is unfit for human habitation. He was not joking.

La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, with an elevation of nearly two miles. (Suck on that, Denver.) The low levels of oxygen mean you're constantly gulping for air, always feeling like you're not getting quite enough. You get headaches and vertigo. Night terrors are common. So are isolated hiccups.

It's also freezing. Apparently it was the first day planes had been allowed to land in about a week, due to snowstorms.

Also, our plane was struck by lightning. It was...exciting. Professor slept through it. Mark my words: he will be the first man down when the zombies come.

We flew from La Paz to Trinidad in a wee little propeller plane manufactured by Fisher-Price.

Actual size.

It was so small that you could not walk to your seat, but were obliged to hunch over and shuffle. The extent of your crouch depended on your height: being short, I got away with Cro-Magnon Man, whereas Professor had to resort to Quasimodo's Brother Who Broke His Spine.

I sat at the front of the plane, near the open cockpit. I could see the pilots, and despite my initial concerns over the size of the plane, I was reassured that I was in good hands - not the pilots' hands, of course, since just then they were somewhat occupied making obscene hand gestures, but someone's. Also the pilots kept laughing hysterically, which I believe should be outlawed. If I am not allowed to bring toothpaste on the flight, the pilots are not allowed to cackle. It's only fair.

I was willing to cut them some slack, though, since it was obvious that they were just filling in for the nine-year-old boy who normally steers the plane via joystick. Anyway, I soon forgot to worry about them, since I spent most of the flight willing myself not to vomit. I had a very vivid image in my head of all the cells in my body, halfway through mitosis, gagging their little cellular brains out.

Thursday: in which I write a letter to the bats in my ceiling

Turns out that we arrived in Trinidad right in the middle of a cold front. The temperature hovers around fifty degrees during the day, then plummets at night. The hotel has no heating, and each bed is equipped with a single cotton blanket. Luckily, I'm alone in a three-person room. I do most of my writing and translating in bed, and at night I pile the three blankets onto one bed and sleep in my clothes. Still not as bad as Paraguay!

The water at the hotel comes in two varieties. Most of the time, it is delivered directly from an ice floe in the Arctic. In the early morning, though, the shower water is clearly piped in from Hell. Not the frozen, ninth-circle sort of Hell, either - I mean skin-scalding, blister-raising, pagan-incinerating Hell. Needless to say, there is no happy medium. Anxious to avoid third-degree burns on some fairly delicate areas, I ended up soaping up and sort of throwing water at myself, scalding my hands in the process. Real cute.

And now, a few letters.

Dear Professor,

One of the things which I don't really like about the way that you have, in the time that we have been working together, written the text of the book that we are producing, considering the variety of elements that go into our work and the time it takes for me to translate said text into elementary Spanish, is the tortured and grammatically implausible way in which you structure sentences.

Standing to the side so that the god of clauses may strike you down with precision,

M

ATTN: Family of bats, c/o my ceiling

You are SO LOUD. Quit the freaky bat sex or whatever and come down to eat some of these mosquitoes.

ATTN: Professor, c/o the Department of Redundancy Department

It is not okay to use the word "develop" three times in one sentence, no matter how long that sentence may be.

Dear young man who drives around and around Trinidad late at night with his car stereo turned up to 11,

You are going to Hell.

Regards,

M

Friday: in which we head to San Ignacio and somehow manage to not get ourselves killed

Today has been an exciting day. We left Trinidad about 8:30 this morning, taking a camión to San Ignacio. I have taken some fucked-up forms of transportation in my life, but this one is definitely up there in the ranks.

The truck is outfitted with a series of hard wood planks laid across the interior, creating makeshift benches. The only way to get on is to scale the side like a monkey (Professor's choice) or to haul yourself up the one little ladder and side-step along the edge like a suicidal stockbroker until you find a place where you can squish in with everyone else (mine). The "floor" is piled high with mounds of luggage and there are knees everywhere, so it's hard to find a place to put your legs, which is bad news once they start driving and you need to brace yourself. Most of the road between Trinidad and San Ignacio is extremely rough, and every time the truck hits a bump, everyone goes flying up into the air and then comes crashing down. Sometimes the planks fly up too, which is an adventure. My shins are ripped up and bruised from being braced against the bench in front of mine; I think I may need to have one of these splinters surgically removed. Needless to say, my ass hurts like hell.

Also, I'm covered in dust. It hasn't rained much lately, so the dirt road was relatively dry. Every time we passed another vehicle - truck, bus, car, bicycle, especially large lizards - we would all duck down and cover ourselves as a massive cloud of dust rolled through the truck. Ah, the many wonders of open-air travel!

The trip from Trinidad to San Ignacio is supposed to take three and a half hours; it took us nearly seven. You have to cross three tributaries of the Mamoré River on the way. Everyone gets off the truck, they stick it on a big floating wooden platform (powered and steered by a wee motorboat tied to the side), and you sloooooowly make your way to the other side of the river. This strategy worked well the first two times we tried it, but the water level in the last tributary was especially low due to the drought, so the ground was wet and the trucks kept getting stuck as they tried to drive onto the platform. They had to dig and construct a new ramp, meaning that we were stuck on the riverbank for a couple hours.

We eventually got to San Ignacio, where Professor and I fell out of the camión and took a couple taxis to a hostel. I suppose I should mention that all the taxis in San Ignacio are motorcycles. I tossed my bag on the handlebars, climbed on the back (side-saddle, because I am so ladylike and all), and off we went. I had a white-knuckled grip on the back of the seat, but mostly I was at the whim of gravity, my own balance, and the mood of my driver. It was fucking terrific.

The hostel is a nice little place with a pretty courtyard. The owner is a chatty old man who gave me chicha (a maize-based drink often fermented into alcohol) and, after a few minutes of conversation, asked if I was española. Not gonna lie: I love getting that question.

Saturday: in which Professor and I are not married, people like me better, and six men fall from the roof of a church

Apparently birds in the Amazon are fucking LOUD. Some of them sound like screaming children. That's not terrifying, or anything.

At lunch today, Professor was talking about how he's never received so much "positive attention" as we've been getting. He mused that perhaps it was because he's usually by himself, and loners tend to get left alone. I joked that maybe people just liked me better, and he laughed.

Dear Professor,

I was not really kidding.

Regards,

M

I keep getting addressed as Señora, which, okay - AWKWARD. It's pretty obvious that most people assume Professor and I are married, which is just...gross. When Professor obliviously introduces me as his ~*~student~*~, I actually feel guilty, like the two of us have run off to Bolivia to have a forbidden tryst under the guise of "research." Just typing that last sentence made me a little queasy.

Meanwhile, I'm proofreading the draft and the accompanying letter that Professor wrote to the subcentral [i.e., the local government], and I have to say, there's an awful lot of yo this and mi that.

Dear Professor,

Consider yourself warned: if you attempt to take sole credit for this book, there will be a throw-down.

Regards,

M

We went by the church, which was fascinating. It's the original Jesuit mission church, as far as I know, so it's at least four hundred years old. The roof is held up with huge mahogany poles donated by the Territory. Apparently they redid the roof a few years ago, and six people died - by falling, presumably. I didn't really press the subject, but I get the impression they're not huge fans of professional scaffolding here.

Saturday night: in which I sprain my ankle, or fracture it, or something equally stupid

Continuing in my fine tradition of falling down a lot, tonight I stepped the wrong way on a broken sidewalk and went down like a ton of bricks, spraining my ankle in the process. I've never actually done such a thing before, but I'm making an educated guess that such is the case, since my ankle is swollen and I can't walk or move my foot without incredible pain. Looks like I'm pretty well crippled for the time being. I guess I just have to take it in stride, since I seem to be a walking punchline these days, but in the end it comes down to this: if you didn't laugh at any of the jokes in this sentence, you have no soul.

Sunday: in which I hop everywhere and ow ow it HURTS

Okay, I'm less happy about this whole thing now. It hurts really bad, and I'm starting to worry that it's broken. I'm also worrying about how I will possibly get around for the next few days, never mind back to the U.S. I can't put any weight on it - how will I climb up the ladder of the truck and clamber over to a seat? Once I'm on, how will I brace myself? How will I get off and on and off and off and off and on and off again, like the trip demands? How will I climb the stairs at the hotel in Trinidad, or the steps of the plane? How will I navigate La Paz? How will I run through O'Hare to make our extremely tight connection? We'll make it work out of sheer necessity, of course, but it's going to be humiliating and extremely painful.

I can't put any weight on the ankle, so I'm reduced to hopping everywhere. Going to the bathroom or changing clothes is a major undertaking involving foresight and ingenuity. I have no idea how I'm going to bathe.

Professor brought food back for me, and we ate at the table in the courtyard of the hostel. Of course, the table is across the courtyard from my room, a distance that covers maybe sixty feet but felt like eight billion trillion miles as I hopped along, clinging to Professor's elbow. It was one of the more humiliating walks of my life. We finally got to the table, where we were joined by the hostel's owner. The three of us had a pleasant conversation, including a discussion of how Professor was going to have to abandon me here and I would become ignaciana. The owner offered to marry me, so I guess I'd be set.

Professor says I have very much endeared myself to the staff here, but I don't know how much I personally had to do with that. Everyone loves a gimp!

Monday: in which I bore myself to death

I am so bored. Other than translating - a pretty thankless task in itself - I have approximately fuck-all to do. There are a couple Internet cafés in town, which would undoubtedly help kill some time, but I can't get to them. The fact is, laid up as I am, I can't leave the hostel to do anything: attend meetings, get food, wander the town. Instead, I've finished reading two books, re-read The Economist about a million times, and played innumerable games of Solitaire and Minesweeper. It's starting to screw with my head. Last night I dreamt I was playing poker in an airport with Gordon Brown. I don't even play poker.

Wednesday: in which we might be trapped in San Ignacio

I woke up to rain this morning, which is not a good sign. A little rain will tamp down the dust, but if it really gets going, the roads will be wiped out and we'll be trapped. Such is the capricious nature of the Amazon.

Thursday: in which we ARE trapped in Trinidad

We made it out of San Ignacio yesterday, due to a bit of luck and a very capable driver. I managed to secure a seat in the cabin of the truck, which was fortunate, as it would have been hell to ride in the back with my ankle still acting up. I was squished in with another woman and her sick baby. It sounds terrible, but it was actually a very pleasant 3+ hours, all things considered. The woman was actually a girl, a very pale 17-year-old from the upper crust of Puerto San Borja who got knocked up at a young age (15, if my calculations are correct) and married her boyfriend, as you do. She was taking her daughter to a doctor in Trinidad. The two of us made friends, then chatted and played with the baby for the rest of the trip. What can I say? I love talking to people.

My new friend was obviously afraid of the water crossings. Apparently a friend of hers was on a truck that rolled off the back of the platform, nearly killing everyone on board. (Aaaaand I just realized why they make everyone get off.) Also, I mean, she was 17 and had rarely left San Borja. Not exactly a seasoned traveler. She clung to my arm and hid her face in my shoulder for all the crossings.

So anyway, we're back in Trinidad. In a couple hours, we'll leave for the airport, where we'll catch our flight to La Paz and then back to the States.

15 minutes later:

HAHAHAHA. Oh my God, I am like a bad-luck token. It turns out there's a paro here in Trinidad today, a work-stoppage, and so everything is shut down - including the airport. And all other forms of transportation. The paro doesn't end until 6:00 PM. Professor and I are going to try to take an overnight bus to Santa Cruz and fly out from there.

Friday: in which I ride my last motorcycle

Turns out that the mototaxistas in Trinidad are even crazier than the ones in San Ignacio. Or maybe it's just that they have more competition. Either way, there were many moments on the way to the bus station last night when I thought, Well, I guess I'm going to die now. MD is going to lord this over me forever. Of course, when I jumped off at our destination, my first thought was: Let's do it again! My brain is trying to kill me.

We had to wait at the bus station for a few hours last night. The mosquitoes were out of control, grouping in numbers so high I believe the scientific categorization would have been "plague." They were vicious, too. I woke up on the bus this morning to find the evidence of their handiwork: big, red, swollen bites all over my wrists and, weirdly, my palms.

Friday evening: in which we get stuck in Chicago and my foot has swelled to the size of my head

Our flight from Miami to O'Hare was randomly pushed back an hour, so we'll miss our flight to Cedar Rapids - apparently the day's last flight into Iowa. Professor and I have won the fabulous prize of staying overnight in Chicago. I normally like staying in hotels, but (1) Professor and I are going to kill each other soon, (2) I want to be home, and (3) if there were a hierarchy in Airport Hell, O'Hare would be the gigantic tri-mouthed devil snacking on Judas Iscariot. Finding your ticket counter, finding your terminal, getting to your gate: it really is the epitome of going around your ass to find your thumb, as MD would say.

And it involves so much walking. I hate to complain - okay, who am I kidding, I love to complain. If God did not want me to complain, He would not have made me so prone to bizarre twists of fate. Anyway, I pretend to hate to complain, but I've been stomping on my sprained ankle for a couple days now, and it hurts like fuck. My whole ankle and foot are swollen and throbbing. My other leg hurts, too, from the way I've been limping. It got to the point today that the thought of taking another step made me want to vomit. Professor magnanimously offered me some migraine pills, which ironically have helped with the pain but given me a massive headache.

Early Saturday morning: in which asdfjkdhjsjkfds

God be praised, we did eventually make it to our hotel, after a series of events so miserable and infuriating that I dare not recount them for fear of sending myself into a suicidal/homicidal rage.

I finally got the chance to unwrap my ankle, after two days of stomping on it, and...wow. You would not believe how swollen my foot and ankle are. I don't believe it, and I'm staring right at them.

You would also not believe how utterly blanketed I am in mosquito bites - angry, vicious red spots surrounded by white circles. They are everywhere, in the most unlikely places, including my eyelids and the palms of both hands. I counted 53 on my left calf alone. Between the swollen foot, the rash of red spots, and what are starting to feel like swollen glands in my throat, I'm frankly amazed that Customs allowed me back into the country.

Saturday: home sweet home

Made it home. Time to die.

retro: costa rica

Editor's Note: The following is a series of journal entries written in the spring of 2008, when I went to Costa Rica with my Sustainable Development seminar. My classmates and I spent two weeks in the cooperative community of El Silencio, working on various parts of the coop and studying how the town functioned. For the record, El Silencio is a lovely town and everyone there was very patient with our weird surveys and diagnostics. If you're looking for a chance to live and work in a small Costa Rican community, or if you'd simply like to see a small-scale agro-ecotourism project in action, check them out. Give the macaws a good kick for me, would you?

During our time in Costa Rica, I also turned 21 and accidentally won $300 in a San José casino. Good luck duplicating that.

Sunday, 16 March

I guess I may as well admit this: the hills of San José are making me nervous. People generally have one of three responses to my weird hill phobia, or sometimes all three: (1) that's stupid; (2) that's crazy; (3) get over it. If I may respond to each of these points in turn:

(1) Well, no shit.

(2) See above.

(3) GREAT FUCKING IDEA, I'LL GET RIGHT ON THAT. GOLLY, WHY HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT.

Tuesday, 18 March

I started writing about our visit to the Chiquita banana plantation today, but we're going down a really bad road and consequently my writing looks like I'm having a stroke. Tyler is laughing at me. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.

Wednesday, 19 March

Tell you what, it is hot as fuck up in here.

Oh, novelas, love of my life. So far there's been a sugar daddy, a secret pregnancy, and an affair. (EDIT: Two affairs! Man, these bitches are slaggin' it up all over town.) How did I ever live without these?

I am digging this host family already. I finally have a cool dad! Seriously, I have had burning Cool Dad Envy ever since I started doing AMIGOS. My host dad in Paraguay was a shadow of his insane wife, and the only word my Nicaraguan dad ever spoke to me was adios on the day I left.

Plus, I mean, shit - this is easy. Families who accepted you in advance and actively want to house and feed you? That's patty-cake, man. Easy. Your Mom easy.

Auuuuugh. I came home from our seminar meeting at the albergue (lodge) to find a fat cockroach on my bed. Not as big as the ones in Nicaragua or Mexico, but still, you know...substantial. And right smack-dab in the middle of my bed. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I was barefoot, sweating like no human being has ever sweat before, tired and dirty and weirdly paranoid. I adjusted my balls, batted the cockroach onto the floor, and crushed it with a shoe. I'd like to think of this as some kind of personal growth.

Having said that, there's nothing quite like a roach in your bed to make you nervous in your own skin. It's my bed! I sleep there! I'm helpless! What if I wake up and it's on my face?

Thursday, 20 March

As always, things look better in the morning. There's something about the combination of restfulness, early sunshine, and hey, no enormous cockroaches on my face! that really brightens the mood.

I've been told a few times already that my Spanish is good. The thing is that at this point in my life, my Spanish is not, in fact, good. I can only conclude that people are fooled by my accent, which is still pretty decent. I've lost a lot of vocabulary that's taking its sweet time coming back, and I make amateur mistakes with verb conjugation if I haven't thought it out ahead of time. I find myself talking around missing words more than I used to.

!DIGRESSION ALERT!

Reminds me of the time in La Piedad that I forgot the word for "envelopes." (In keeping with the spirit of this story, I will not mention the word here. Also, I have forgotten it again.) I was in the only open papelería I'd been able to find in the whole city, and anyway I like a challenge as much as the next idiot gringa with no survival instinct, so I just admitted to the woman behind the counter that I'd forgotten the word. I proceeded to describe in detail what I was looking for: yea big, rectangular, made of paper, you put on a stamp and the address and you send letters in it. The woman offered up the word, then gave me a patronizing smile and said, in Spanish, "So you don't speak Spanish, huh?" I was thisclose to snarling, "BITCH, I AM SPEAKING SPANISH RIGHT NOW." I mean, geez, is it a crime to forget a word now and then? (Sobres! That's the one.) Especially considering how much variation in vocabulary there is across Latin America. I'm lucky I remember my own name sometimes.

END OF DIGRESSION

I am thirsty all the time. [Our professor] bought enough garrafones of purified water to give us each one liter per day. Ha ha ha...ha. According to the wealth of experiential wisdom that is AMIGOS, you need at least two liters a day in good conditions. Meanwhile, we're hiking hither and yon and I personally am sweating out at least a liter per hour. (Conservative estimate.)

Saturday, 21 March

I've been working at the coop's wildlife rescue center. The center is home to eight scarlet macaws, eight spider monkeys, three white-faced monkeys, a wild pig, and five assorted parrots.

To get to the rescue center, I walk down the road a ways, climb the big fucking hill to the albergue, then descend into the forest. The "steps" constructed for this purpose were clearly designed by someone with an eye for human suffering. Probably Eli Roth. Every step requires serious consideration of the laws of physics, especially when the rain has left the way muddy and strewn with wet leaves. I only fell on my ass once today, so I'm doing better than expected.

Once I make it to the center, shaken but alive, I have a whole host of wonderful things to do. To start with, I get to scrape out the rotting fruit from the stands, doing my best to ignore the deeply unpleasant sensation of grubs between my fingers. (Fruit, it turns out, rots really damn fast in the tropical forest.) I also attempt to give the baby white-faced monkey his bottle. (He's a little...skittish. I can handle skittish cats, but skittish monkeys are a whole other story.) Then, after cleaning the cages, I cut up more fruit so I can have more grubs to scrape out the next day.

The worst part of all, even worse then the bare-handed grub-scraping, is cutting up the papaya. I stand by my opinion that papaya is a demon fruit, full of lies and malice. Sounds delicious, looks delicious - smells and tastes exactly like human vomit.

On the bright side, I do get to cut up the fruit with a machete. Shit, y'all, I gotta get me one of those.

Alejando the spider monkey likes to take showers. Really! We spray him through the cage, and he scrubs away with all due diligence. It's a bit spooky, actually. He looks exactly like a small, somewhat hairy person who for whatever reason has decided to live in a cage and shit on the floor.

Monday, 24 March

Macaws, it turns out, are mean fuckers. One attacked my coworker Johan today, and not for the first time. I did the only thing you can do in that situation: turned the hose on it. Macaws fear neither god nor devil, but they are scared as shit of water. Once he recovered, Johan cornered the little fucker and sprayed it until it was drenched. As it clawed its soggy way up the side of the cage, I couldn't stop myself from thinking, "IT EATS THE VOMIT-FRUIT IN PEACE OR ELSE IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN."

Besides being bastards, the macaws are seriously unnerving. They move with eerie symmetry, like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. When I clean the smaller cage, the two macaws in there will gradually edge closer and closer to me until they're perched right over my head, staring at me with identically tilted heads and sinister birdy expressions that suggest imminent homicide.

One of the white-faced monkeys has a nasty habit of leaping onto your head, biting your ear, and attempting to have relations with the nape of your neck. It's pretty funny. Also weird as fuck. But mostly funny.

Jesus fuck, it's hot. I come back from the rescue center and my host mom is like, "Hot lunch? :D?" I can barely work up the motivation to toy with it. All I want to do is drink every drop of water that has ever fallen from the skies.

Tuesday, 25 March

I had an extremely awkward interaction this morning with Juan Carlos, the guy who runs the rescue center. He was saying how some women apparently think one of the other volunteers is really handsome, and said volunteer made an obviously fake pass at him. This quickly devolved into a discussion of The Gays, complete with exaggerated mincing. JC turned to me at one point and said, "I don't understand it, M. With so many beautiful women like you, how can a man want another man?"

Reader, please picture this: I am literally dripping with sweat, bright red from heat and exertion, face smeared with rotten papaya and monkey excrement, plain (but feisty!) at the best of times - which this is appreciably not - and also, you know...queer.

"Uh," I opined, helplessly. WELL SAID, M OLD CHAP.

In other news, we have these Canadian volunteers working at the rescue center who are here as part of a rehabilitation program. None of them speak Spanish, and only a couple speak any English. (Fucking Quebec.) JC seems to have taken it upon himself to teach them about the sanctity of their lives and why they shouldn't smoke cigarettes. Yes, that's right. He is telling RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICTS in REHAB not to smoke. This will end well.

Wednesday, 26 March

Today JC left me in charge of the center for a couple hours. He told me to have the Canadian volunteers rake the paths that go up to the albergue (including the one with the unfortunate stairs). When I communicated this to the Canadians, they said they'd done it the day before. The sad part was, we still had plenty to rake - being in the middle of the tropical forest, and all. Super, JC. Demonstrate to the recovering druggies that they can do the same thing over and over and things will never get any better, no matter how hard they try. That'll learn 'em.

Thursday, 27 March

Our driver, Miguel, gave me a ride to Quepos, where I bought my ticket to San José and sat down to wait for a couple hours. There were a couple guys calling, "Taxi! Taxi pa' San José!" I seriously considered it for about 2.7 seconds, like so: I wonder how much that would - shit, to get axe-murdered? No, ta. I don't scare easy when it comes to foreign transportation, but I maintain a healthy fear of unregistered taxis.

Apparently Miguel really liked me. God only knows why. ...well. To be fair, it turns out that I am capable of being extremely charming for limited periods of time. For this reason, the people who like me best are often those who know me least. But the truth will out, unfortunately, and given time, the content of my character begins to shine through, like radiation seeping from Mme. Curie's pores. (Too soon?)