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and 120 pounds. In addition to the initial shock that my boss was younger—and indeed looked so much younger—than I, his appearance startled me. Everything about him was grossly out of proportion.
    His nose was enormous, and this is something I can say without feeling bad, because my own isn’t exactly petite. His, though, was crooked, leaning to one side just enough to make me wonder if it caused him respiratory problems. His nostrils, however, had a permanent flare to them that must have made up for any inhalation deficiencies caused by the crookedness. His neck was too big for his head—like a wrestler’s, but worse, since it wasn’t balanced out by large muscles elsewhere on his body.
    He had easily the largest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen on a human being. It bobbed up and down enthusiastically, as if doing calisthenics, every time he spoke. And, because the picture just wouldn’t have been complete without them, he had a set of pointy elfin ears shooting out from his head.
    When he removed his Fidel hat, he revealed a glistening helmet of hair slicked back with ungodly amounts of gel into an aggressive faux hawk. His hair and ears formed three towering, sinister peaks that all seemed to point directly at me no matter where I stood—like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.
    When he spoke, every vein in his neck bulged out, causing a disturbance that made it seem as though talking even at an indoor volume caused him pain. He would tilt his head at an angle and the rope-like veins and hyperactive Adam’s apple caused a commotion. As for his voice, there may be an actual medical term for it, but the best I can do is say he sounded like Kermit the Frog. Along with the neck’s peculiar components, it all combined for a perfect storm of verbal and physical cacophony.
    His feet were also large—noticeably larger than mine—particularly the toes, which is not insignificant since I was about half a foot taller. But it was his hands that got me the most. They were fit for a man twice his size. They were absolutely massive. Really—I can’t stress enough how truly gigantic and out of place his hands were. They were so disproportionately large for his body that, after a while, they were all I could look at. On top of their excessive size, he used them—in conjunction with his permanently puckered lips—in a manner that can only be described as effeminate. They were giant ogres of hands that moved daintily through the air and into pockets and across cell phone keypads as if they were scared of injuring the air around them.
    The combination of all this would horrify me for weeks to come.
    This was my boss. His name was Juan Mendoza.

    JUAN AND I MET IN the city of Chone, a place that—true to description—could have been one of those dusty old Western towns where the music stops when a stranger walks into the saloon. To get to where I was going to live, we hopped on a bus that took us about twenty-five minutes outside the city.
    We got off and walked down a long driveway with rice fields on either side. It belonged to Juan’s family—a family that I would soon discover was this town. The Peace Corps information sheet I received for La Segua listed the population at a few hundred. It was actually quite a bit less than that where I lived because the documented figure included several surrounding communities. A more conservative estimate, according to the president of the community (a man who walked around barefoot and shirtless, even at town meetings) was 150. But still, it never felt like it, since everyone lived in small houses separated by acres of farmland.
    The Mendoza family owned the majority of this land, which began as one giant farm that got divided up as the offspring multiplied. The farm I would live on was the original property settled by the now-deceased patriarch of the family who guaranteed future Mendoza dominance of the area by siring about twenty children with the same woman. About a dozen of these