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Mendozas, now ranging from their early thirties to late fifties, stuck around the area and spawned on average three kids each. So to say the Mendozas dominated the La Segua population is no exaggeration.
    A hundred yards to the right of the farm sat a wooden house belonging to Juan’s uncle Homero, one of the many Mendoza brothers. To the left, at the end of the long mud driveway, was my new residence—an imposing three-story cinder-block structure surrounded by trash and chickens. Because the gaggle of aunts who worked around the clock in the second-story kitchen constantly dumped dirty water out the open windows, the swampy stench of moist chicken shit cocooned the house.
    Juan walked me inside and began the not-so-easy task of introducing me to the Mendozas. It became clear that the answers he provided on my Peace Corps information sheet turned out to be half-truths that went well beyond just the town population. It said four other humans lived in the house I would sleep in. When I arrived, the actual figure hovered between a dozen and fifteen. I got the feeling there would be more, not fewer, as time went by.
    There was the Mendoza family matriarch who was still going strong after spending the equivalent of fifteen years of her life pregnant. There were two of her daughters, who each had four toddlers. One of them also had a teenage girl with breasts so painfully enormous it’d be impossible not to mention them. There was another toddler in the mix and to this day I’m not sure whom he belonged to. And of course, there was Juan, who had moved into this same house—against Peace Corps regulations and the wishes of his extended family. His parents had their own farm in a nearby town but he apparently preferred it here.
    Last but not least, there was a young mentally handicapped kid named Benicio. He wasn’t related to the Mendoza family and his origins only grew more mysterious to me over time. His main purpose around the house, it seemed, was to do chores. At first I found this endearing, until I realized that the family treated him more like an indentured servant. When I first met him, he seemed overly excited and stared at me—sometimes with intense curiosity, other times like he wanted to kill me. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out which room he slept in, a fact that was particularly disquieting because late at night, he took to hiding in dark corners of the house then popping out of the shadows as I passed by, scaring the living shit out of me. The first few times he did this, I nearly knocked him out cold out of reflex. Later my nerves calmed and it merely gave me the creeps.
    When Benicio wasn’t stalking me, he continued doing chores around the house while dozens of Mendozas screamed at him. One night, when the grandmother was descaling fish in the kitchen, he crouched down and hit her legs with a cloth to keep the mosquitoes away; it reminded me of how farm animals line up and whip their tails to keep flies off one another.
    Juan took me to the bottom floor to show me the room I’d be living in—a ten-by-fifteen-foot space enclosed by dungeon-like brick walls. The only window looked out to one of the puddles of chicken shit. The door was made from scrap plywood; it still had the spray-paint markings on it from the delivery crate it was pried from. I could have punched through it.
    Juan iterated that this was the room that Pilar, Peace Corps Ecuador’s head of Safety and Security, had approved when she’d made a site-inspection visit months earlier.
    “See,” Juan pointed, “we put netting over that window because she asked.”
    He was right—no mosquitoes flew through the net he’d glued over the window; instead, they visibly swarmed through the ceiling gap between floors just a few feet away.
    We turned around and Juan took me down the hall to the bathroom. It was a three-by-three-foot concrete basin with a bowl of water for pouring over yourself. There was no sink or running water.
    If I