Bus Business:

A middle aged man stood up in front of the bus headed from Quito to Otavalo. Dressed in black denims, a black dress shirt, and a flattened ball cap, he addressed the passengers. "Hello ladies and gentlemen," WHAM, he bangs the roof of the bus with the back of his hand, heads turn to acknowledge the sound. "I know this is going to be a long bus ride..." Two and a half hours was not exceptionally long, but in a bus with no bathroom, it had the potential to be an eternity. "If everyone listens to me, then I´m sure everything will be all right." My heart froze, a day earlier pickpockets had absconded with my wallet, needless to say I was still on edge. My mind wandered over the possibilities of his next sentence. What was next? "Just do what I say and no one gets hurt, this is a robbery."

Hijackings are not unheard of in Ecuador. On my last trip I was fated to pick one of two buses that each ran a different road to the same city. The one I had almost boarded, if not for a differing opinion from my companions, had been stopped at a make shift road block of toppled trees and stones, and armed men boarded the bus and robbed everyone of all their belongings. Would this be a reenactment?

Then the man, dressed all in black, said, "if anyone gets sick..." I relaxed, perhaps he was just instructing us on the finer points of riding a bus along an Ecuadorian road. Was he going to tell us "please do not throw up in the isles," a practice I had also before witnessed by two drunk men in the back of the bus. He continued, and I listened attentively, wanting to know who he really was. "Okey-Dokey." Okey'What!? I was not expecting that. He then reaches into the canvas bad I had not noticed him carrying before, and procures a brown glass bottle, holding it high above us with one hand for the entirety of the bus to see. As he does this, the bus banks along a curve in the road, and with his free hand he braces himself against the seat back and the actual head of the person nearest him. The bus straightened out again and so did the man. He began again, WHAM! went his hand against the roof of the bus, this time only half the bus replied by giving him their attention. To engage the rest of the bus, and to inform those that had already turned from the windows to face him he told us, "I may be ugly, but don´t be frightened." And so began his sales pitch.

Throughout the course of his intermittent whamming of his hand against the ceiling to gain the attention of those that had drifted off the finer arguments of his sales pitch, I learned that he was a homeopathic-pharmaceutical sales man. The bottle that he had brandished was a "miracle" bottle. It purported to cure cancer and bad breath (I was unaware the two went together) all by taking one little pill in the morning and one at night. He managed to sell four to five bottles to the passengers. Perhaps it was the convincing stories of personal acquaintances who were cured of tumors, cancer, and their date-impeding bad breath as well. I will dispense with quoting him in entirety and instead paraphrase to bring to light the most interesting phenomenon he had witnessed.

A friend of his got cancer in her left kneecap, "I kid you not, in her kneecap," he assured us skeptics. The doctors gave her chemotherapy, and her hair began to fall out. Even with the most modern of treatments the cancer would not subside. Fearing a spread of the cancer, the doctors decided to lop off her left leg at the thigh. "Fffttt," he said as his hand made a slicing motion across his mid-thigh. Then WHAM again went his had against the ceiling. (Note: as he did this attention getting device randomly, or perhaps at planned intervals, throughout his speech I will let the reader from time to time add them themselves. Don´t forget now!). She had lost a leg, but at least she did not have cancer, or so she thought. Apparently her other leg was found to have a tumor in it. The doctors treated it to no avail, so off it came, "fffttt." Then they also found a tumor in her right arm, guess what they did. Now she only had one arm and no legs. Poor woman, at least she still has one good arm, tennis may be out, but she could still play chess. (I apologize for my lack of consideration, but I found it hard to believe that there was a cancerous affliction probably known as Limb Cancer, which apparently she was damned to suffer through). Unfortunately for the limb losing woman, who´s appendages were disappearing quicker than a lizard´s tail, her last and final arm, also had cancer, ¨fffttt,¨he said a bit more morosely. This would be the end of her, she apparently died soon after the loss of her final limb. The moral of this story? If his late friend had taken the medicines he was now selling, she might be fully limbed and be playing tennis with tennis star Venus Williams. What a shame she didn´t take what he was offering. Thanks to the story about elusive limb cancer, and another about himself when he got kicked in the balls while playing soccer, that eventually led to prostate cancer, cured not by the doctors, but by the pills he held, he was able to frighten some passengers into buying enough bottles to pay for his passage and have a few notes left over. In all honesty, he was a great salesman.