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meals are always the same. A hard-boiled egg, a slice of white bread, and coffee for breakfast. Two hard-boiled eggs and two slices of white bread with coffee for lunch. And a cup of stew with beans and a few bits of chicken and more white bread for dinner.
    My concrete house is cool, and I like it, even though I have to share it with hundreds, no thousands, of daddy-long-leg spiders—the breathing blob in the corner of the ceiling. They are very discreet. When they are a black blob, they are sleeping. When they wake up, they seem to have places to go. I know they live there, but they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them.
    Going to “the toilet” is just as I expected. I walk to the dry riverbed and take down my pants. Then I get into position facing uphill and leaning forward, feet wide apart, behind sticking up so that the squirt will go downhill and not onto my shoes or pants. I carry a little piece of toilet paper and bury it when I’m finished. I try not to think about the audience that I’m sure is out there. Fortunately, they are discreet enough not to laugh out loud.
    When I wander through the village, none of the women talks to me. After four days, the only woman I have had a conversation with is Margarita, and she treats me as though she’s my maid. I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. I keep reminding myself that I have vowed to spend a month here. But there’s another little voice that tells me I’m free to leave whenever I choose.
    Then, on day five, a young woman and her three-year-old child stop me on the top of a hill. She is wearing the traditional dress of the village: a full skirt of heavy woven fabric, a sash around her waist, and a handwoven blouse.
    “Hello, my name is Juanita. Where are you from?”
    I introduce myself and tell her I’m from Los Angeles.
    She doesn’t say anything for several seconds. During the silence, her eyes fill with tears. Then she can’t stop talking. Her Spanish is excellent, unlike Margarita’s.
    Juanita is a twenty-year-old widow, an elementary school teacher. Her husband, Roberto, went to the United States two years ago and got work washing dishes and busing in a Greek restaurant in Santa Monica, California. I have actually eaten in the restaurant. For one year he sent her money every month. Then, a few months ago, she got a telegram. There had been a fire in the kitchen and he was dead from smoke inhalation. They sent him home in a box. Shortly after that, the restaurant owner sent Juanita one hundred dollars. In the accompanying note, he promised to send more, but she never heard from him again.
    Now
my
eyes fill with tears and I tentatively put my arm around her and tell her how sorry I am. She snuggles into my shoulder and I hug her. (Two weeks later another young man from the village returns from Los Angeles in a pine box. He’d been shot on the street. I go to the funeral.)
    “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Juanita asks that first day as we stand on the hill. I can’t believe it. I’m actually being invited into someone’s home!
    She takes me into her two-room house. It is simple and clean and nicely furnished. She’d bought the furniture to surprise Roberto. He never saw it. As we are drinking our coffee, Juanita studies me, one of those head-to-toe perusals.
    “Would you do me a favor?” she asks.
    Uh oh, I think. She’s going to ask for money.
    But she surprises me. “Will you try on my clothes?”
    She opens a trunk and takes out a skirt that matches the ones all the women are wearing. It is woven with thick cotton threads into a heavy striped fabric. I step into it.
    “Hold this end,” she says as she starts to wind a five-inch-thick sash around my waist. I grow fatter and fatter as she winds.
    She goes around four or five times, then secures the end with a safety pin. I am already feeling like a hippopotamus when she takes a huge woven blouse out of the trunk and puts it over my head. My width has doubled. I am