At the age of forty-eight, Moritz Thomsen sold his pig farm and joined the Peace Corps. The next four years he lived in rural Ecuador - a middle-class American trying to find order and meaning in a foreign culture, in a world where almost every word (courage, poverty, love, pride, to pick a few at random) has a completely different meaning.' Living poor' as an agricultural expert Thomsen spent most of his time in a tiny, isolated coastal village, trying to start the people on their terrible tightrope-walk out of poverty.' To the people of Rio Verde six chickens represented wealth, and when cholera attacked their precious Peace Corps poultry, it only reinforced their conviction that God did not intend them to be wealthy. Thomsen tried to teach them to grow vegetables in a climate too dry in the dry season and too wet in the rainy season. When one garden did start producing, there was a further difficulty to overcome - most of the vegetables were strange to the people. Living and working in the village, trying to establish a cooperative in the face of deep-rooted apathy and distrust, Thomsen became involved in a complex network of friendships and jealousies, loyalties and rivalries. Like the others, he had to spend most of his time on the basic problem of finding enough to eat. In this world, even if there was money to buy, there was often no food to be bought, and the people subsisted largely on rice, fish, and bananas. Thomsen's description of his encounter with an alien culture is sometimes horrifying, often hilarious, and always moving. Though the experience was in many ways a devastating one, he was saved by his keen sense of the comic elements in the human situation, including his own. inventory