Dowbrigade

This morning it was still dark outside when I awoke to the sound of a downpour on a tin roof next door, and the smell of a fresh rain rinsing off the dry dust that habitually covers this sunny resort on the Pacific coast of South America. My surprise was mingled with disappointment – no tennis today!

It almost never rains in Manta. Honestly; in what must now be a cumulative year in this bustling port city, this is only the second time I can remember it really raining. Some fortuitous combination of coastline and wind patterns insures that, even in the rainy season, even when farmers in nearby towns like Portoviejo, Jipijapa (pronounced “Hippy-hoppa” to my continuing delight) or Chone are dancing with delight under a tropical deluge, Manta normally remains dry and sunny.

Actually, it was rather nice to see a real rain for a change, in part to contrast it with the repeated blunt blows from a vengeful Mother Nature currently flaying New England. Rain is romantic, and as I could clearly see on an early morning drive to get the papers, the trees and plants were happy. But I had a date to play doubles at the tennis club with the usual suspects plus a US Navy SeaBee stationed on a cruiser, the USNRV “Swift”, anchored in Manta Bay while its engineering battalion assists in the construction of an elementary school in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

So stuck at home for a while (local experts predict a cessation of the showers by 10 am) let me describe a couple of moral and karmic dilemmas we had to face yesterday, as an example of the magical thinking which makes the Southern half of America different from the North, and may help explain why we feel so at home here.

Yesterday, Thursday, I was on my own, as Norma was off to Portoviejo to visit Mariana, the eldest of her 8 brothers and sisters, leaving shortly after I returned from the tennis club around 9. Although she said she might be back by lunchtime I knew it would be closer to dinnertime; when these siblings get together it’s a non-stop gabfest for days at a time.  Unfortunately, Norma is the only one of her sibs who is currently on speaking terms with absolutely everyone else in the family, and since our arrival last week the apartment has been the site of a series of family summits as the sisters, cousins, aunts and more distant connections stop by singly or in groups, for Latin-style family schmoozing.  At least for one day, the coffee klatch would be held in Portoviejo rather than in our living room.

So, unencumbered by social or familial responsibilities, I decided to take a walk, maybe check out this new Chinese restaurant people were talking about, since Norma didn’t like Chifa, which is what South Americans call Chinese food. First stop – our “wall safe”, which consists of a slim linen document bag hanging from a nail in the wall underneath a mounted poster of Albert Einstein and containing our passports and cash stash.  Hopefully, the local “pillos” (thieves) don’t read my blog

But, surprise, surprise, the cupboard was bare.  The stash of fresh US ATM twenties was exhausted after about two weeks in country, more or less as expected, and so the next stop had to be the local Banco Pacifico ATM, conveniently located on the way to the Chifa.

Keys, wallet, cellphone, battered Elmore Lenard paperback (I love my new Nook so much I have determined to read it only in the comfort and safety of the apartment, never risking it out on the Latin street), check, check, check. Out the door and left at the corner, heading uphill towards the local “Strip” of bars, restaurants, clubs and trendy shops, rather than downhill to the beach.

I had walked less than two blocks when I heard and saw a singular thing. As a well-dressed young man walking in the opposite direction, down the hill, passed me by I heard  a distinct ‘thok’ sound of something falling to the ground.  I turned, and there in the street, perched on the rim of a pothole, maybe ten feet from where I stood, was a dull bronzed dollar coin.

Ecuador, as you may or may not realize, after repeated devaluations and hyperinflation, caused by a chronic inability to lay off the inorganic generation of boatloads of banknotes, had abandoned its national currency, the Sucre, and adopted good ole American greenbacks as their only money.  The big bronze dollar coins which people in the States seem so reluctant to adopt, have become ubiquitous in Ecuador, leading me to suspect that as one of the reasons they are so hard to find up North.

Anyway, it was obvious that the teenager had dropped the dollar, and I started doing the mental gymnastics necessary to determine my best course of action.  How much did he need the money? He looked well dressed, but maybe he was on his way to a low-paying job.  I had zero cash myself, but I was on my way to extract dinero from the international financial web. Did finders, keepers apply in a situation like this?

My mental acuity must be slowing down, because before I could run down the ramifications the kid was around a corner and out of sight. So I picked up the dollar and continued my ruminations as I walked. Upon reflection, I decided that a dollar found was not a dollar earned, and that the potential negative karmic effect of appropriating the funds far outweighed the brief feeling of “lucky me” one experiences on finding loose money on the street.

So, I decided, on my way back to the apartment, after my Chinese luncheon, I would carefully place the dollar back where I found it. Although the chances it would return to the teenager who dropped it were miniscule, someone else who hadn’t had the chance to identify it rightful owner would find it and potentially benefit from the “found money” juju.

By this time (I think slowly these days) I was nearly at the bank.  The equatorial sun was beating down like a photonic bludgeon as I slipped into the tiny, air-conditioned ATM vestibule. Fed my card into the machine. The screen announced “Su tarjeta no puede ser leido” (Can’t read this card).  Three times, same result. No money, no chance, no recourse.  Except, of course, to walk across the plaza to the Banco de Producto ATM inside the Super-Maxi supermarket.

This time the machine managed to read my card, and accepted my PIN, but when I asked it for $200 it reported “No se puede efectuar este transacion” (Can’t complete the transaction). Tried it again, same result.

By now, I was freaking out. What if the card has gotten demagnetized somehow, how will I get a replacement, and what will I live on in the meantime? What if somebody at one of the other places down here I’ve used the card, had stolen the password and cleaned out my account? We began rifling through the nefarious possibilities.

Almost instantly, I figured out what was going on, and what I needed to do about it.  It was the bad mojo negative karma o  the illicit dollar, burning a hole in my pocket! I touched it nervously with my figures, moved it from my right front pocket (positive energy) to my left (negative) and made a beeline for the street where I had collected it.

On the way I held the offending coin tightly in my left hand and tried to focus all of the negative energy in my body into it.  Arriving back on the corner in question I located the pothole and, after glancing around to insure I was not in anyone’s sights, lay the dollar back where I had picked it up, near as I could figure.

Straightening up, I didn’t feet anything special, but headed to the last remaining ATM in the neighborhood, between the Velboni market on the corner of the Strip and “Velvet Gourmet”, a cake and sweets shop next door.  Normally we eschew this machine, as it is outdoors and frequently out of order, but at that point I was desperate and broke.  Any port in a storm.

Of course, our karmic conscience cleansed, it worked like a charm, first time, read the card and spit out the cash, just like an ATM is supposed to do. Heaving a sigh of relief we reset our sights for the restaurant, which proved to be decent but unspectacular.  South American Chinese seemingly haven’t gotten the hang of Hot’n Sour Soup yet. The Won Tons were decent, though.

On the way home we were confronted with another confusing set of circumstances. At the supermarket where we stopped for flowers, cheese and fresh-squeezed orange juice, we made two discoveries. We still aren’t sure which was the good news, good luck, and which was the bad.

The first was the discovery that Supermaxi now stocked Hagen Das ice cream, specifically “Dulce de Leche” flavor, to which we had become seriously addicted back in Watertown where it was available cheap at the local Target within walking distance of our place. Actually, we had been rather glad that distance had reduced that craving to a fond memory, but now here it was, staring us in the face, and at an inflated price almost twice what it cost back home.  Good news or bad? We’ll figure that out later, we thought as we tossed one in the shopping chart.

The second discovery, upon returning home, eating a third of the pint and sticking the rest in the tiny freezer area of our glorified dorm-room refrigerator, was that the poor machine didn’t generate enough coldness to keep ice cream in a solid state.  I discovered this through a sticky coating of sweet liquid caramel which had flowed down from the erstwhile “feezer” to cover everything in the front half of the refrigerator and the floor below.  Good luck or bad? We’re still trying to figure that one out.

Such are the trials and travails of life on the beach in Manta, Ecuador. Moral conundrums, karmic puzzles, idle speculation. Stay tuned.