Eviction Notice, or ¨Aviso del Desahucio¨

So, well, uh- I suppose the plus side of today is that I can now safetly say that I have kicked a Catholic priest out of his own house.

Some background, before my dear sainted Grandmother returns from pastures heavenly to kick my sacriligious butt: the house in question is the Casa Communal, a kind of massive dormitory located in Cangahua, a town which I fancy in beer-soaked madness is less a town and more a state of mind.

Unfortunately, the local padre…lives in this house. It´s like…his home. And while Catholic school was a long time ago and I can´t actually remember the last time I was in a church, there is something about the simple idea of hustling my way into the abode of a Servant of the Lord and booting his ass to the curb that makes me glance apprehensively over my shoulder, certain that the vengeance of the Lord is coming, either in the form of a lightning bolt or possibly a runaway banana truck.

So me, Scotti, Cat and S. and I (S is a lovely girl with a lovely name I cannot possibly hope to pronounce, much less spell) go to the Padre´s house early in the morning to give him the bad news: the day of reckoning has arrived, in the form of four gringos nearly dead from oxygen deprivation. Don´t let our blue faces and gasping, feeble breaths fool you, Father: we mean business.

Thankfully he was dressed in a bomber jacket and jeans, which made it slightly less trying for me. The notion of a collared priest watching with compassionate, tearful eyes as I shoved his crap into a box and threw it to the curb made me squirm more than a little.

Thankfully, the transition of residence went rather smoothly. Of course, our project leader had promised that he had until the twenty-sixth to move out -a promise that he, our project leader, had humorously neglected to tell us- but when we went upstairs and started moving beds, that´s when the trouble started.

See, the Padre and his household were perfectly happy to move out. Unfortunately, they seemed to have been simultaneously struck down by some kind of wasting illness; thus every object in the house heavier than a religious icon depicting a host of frolicking lambs and a benevolently beaming Christ or one of the six plaster statues of the Holy Virgin absolutely had to be carried by gringos. We carried his fridge. We carried his sofas. We carried his drum set.

This was, of course, a cheap excuse to provide the finest spectator sport Cangahua has to offer: Hah Hah, Look at the Funny Foreigners.

Never again, I swear, never again will I snigger behind the back of the very well-meaning man asking the teller the location of his ¨girl rollerfates¨. Never again will I frown with consternation at the broken English of a customer, and watch with jaded eyes as they carefully count out change that is wrong, wrong, wrong. Never again, I say! I have learned what it is to be foreign and hopelessly out of place; children gape at me in the streets as I loom over them and boom out ¨buenos dias!¨ in my terrible California Spanish. The village dogs, who are numerous and disgusting in various degrees, pause in their eternal quest of mayhem and destruction to stare at me with lidded predator eyes for a long moment. Then they decide, en masse, that I am something large and indefinably threatening, like a Yeti wandering down the street wearing a silly hat and sunglasses.

But yes. We moved every heavy object into the padre´s other house (being remodeled; hence his current residence, any comments I might have made about turning a village priest out to the cruel and dog-infested streets should be considered in the service of emotional immediacy) to the general hilarity of the People of Ecuador. I will admit that I had a few, cherised moments imagining torching the village and all it´s smug, fully oxygenated inhabitants to the ground, but I practiced restraint. Oh, such restraint.

Subsequently, we have a place to live, because we are awesome.

I still can´t shake the feeling that I´m almost certainly, if for nothing else, going to Hell for this.