Puerto 3

As I fluff up the blanket that separates my body from my wickered bed, a cockroach jumps out, surprised. I quickly reach for a cup and trap it, unsure whether I want to try and kill it or spare its life. I throw it out of the front of the house. Mercy.

Later on, I wait for the power to return to the town after an absence now several hours long. I go for a walk to smoke a cigarette, needing to use the internet at the Alcadia to download a Linux distribution for the computer workshop I'm doing tomorrow.

Earlier, I bump into the headteacher, and I explain how I'm was getting on with the computers, and my plan to get a bunch of kids involved. Virginia, my adoptive mother here, is a teacher at the school, and she said she'd find some kids for me that would be interested. So the headteacher gets all controlfreaked, and tells me she wants a written plan for what I want to do. Balking at this meaningless exercise in bureaucracy, I tell her if it's going to be complicated, I'd rather not actually bother involving the kids at all, for that would actually be easier for me. She backs off, and in the end wants me to explain to her afterwards what we got up to.

As I take a drag on my cigarette, I notice the sheep sat at the Western edge of the shade provided by the shelter of the baseball pitch. Clever, the coolest spot. A horse trots past, seeking pasture. Behind me pigs snuffle through the piles of smouldering leaves and rubbish in the street.

I walk back home, and past a tired looking dog. This is summer, although the coolest months of the year. It's 1pm, and 35ºC. Winter is hotter, but it rains. Dogs roam the streets, lean, wary of people. People walk slowly, in the shade, minimising beads of sweat which are soaking my clothing.

As I sit in the front patio reading, a grubby girl of no more than 5 clutching a coin comes up to the front gate. I know already what she's going to say. Posicle [poh-sikh-lay]. The sisters inside play an imaginary game of spoof that the youngest always loses, who emerges, with a small plastic bag, steaming and hard filled with something white and frozen. I have yet to decipher it's contents, but kids bite a corner of the bag and suck it. I think it's some kind of rice and milk and cinnamon concoction.

I scratch my leg, having resisted for at least 90 seconds now. The sancudos are a bitch, worst around dusk but fight around the clock. It's a war of attrition, and the combat gear is long trousers and a shirt. Not ideal in these conditions, but it's a case of survival.

The trackpad on my laptop is playing up. I guess it works by relative heat sensitivity, and so I suppose the ambient temperature must be approaching 37ºC now.

This morning I experience my second worst ever feeling, next to discovering I had worms for the first time in my life while tripping. I awoke to the sound of what seemed like water bubbling out of my ear, you know the feeling after emerging from being underwater. The strange thing was that I didn't sleep underwater. Focussing on the sensation, I remembered that seconds earlier in that pre-awake state I'd scratched an itch, inside my ear. It now turned into a sound, repeating regularly, matched by a ticklish feeling inside my ear, like one that prompts the instinctive "bug swat" reaction. So I swotted the side of my head, trying to get whatever was burrowing into my ear out, to no avail as it just burrowed further. I spent the next half an hour listening to this creature either dying, or laying its eggs, inside my ear.

Hmmm, maybe it's worse than tripping with worms. The jury's out.