“I didn’t live in a Dak Bungalow. I had a host family. I lived in a stone building in a field. The family was considered a very progressive farmer. He and the division government were drilling a deep water tube well. That was entirely a happenstance but it fascinated me. In addition to helping harvest the sugar cane–then crunch it squeeze it and get the juice, and then boil it and let it harden and all that–I would go out and work on this well site.

Later on, when we did papers, mine was about water resource development. Gaudino would ask me about this. “What does the block development officer think?” “Have you been in the district office?” “How will this impact the crops?” He would always bring me back to a point of reflection, not only how many feet we went down. He thought I should understand how they got the well machinery there and who was paying for it.

We were essentially like freaks in this circumstance. Most people had never seen blue eyes. I was at a well site one time with an American Peace Corps guy and we were on a bus, it must’ve been 120 degrees. In the bus Indians would come up, they’d touch you, they’d touch your hair and they’d look into your eyes as though you were in the San Diego Zoo. This Peace Corps guy said, “If one more Indian touches my hair, I’m getting off this bus and I’m goin’ home. “And of course it happened within minutes and he stopped and got off the bus. The irony is he had to wait for the same bus to come the other way. But he did he went back to the States. He just couldn’t take the invasion of privacy any longer.

In the village I didn’t do anything anonymously. I remember being violently ill and having a gallery of witnesses. I remember coming into my room and having them going through my possessions and reading my mail. Just holding them up like, “What’s this?’ You’d think ‘That’s mine” and they had no concept. Steve and I lived in this place in the village and we would get on the top of it and in the evening we would watch couples meet in wheat fields and copulate very quickly. And then zip off. The women would be carrying the jars on their heads and they’d have a rendezvous and they’d kind of continue to the well.

–James Mathieu '72