El Cabo is still there! The site, and the village. More importantly the village – it’s good to see old friends again. Nicolas, still bonkers – he cut all his fingers off in a mortorbike accident (but still climbs trees with his machete to hack at coconuts), and Belto and Margot are still running the only shop (colmado) in the entire area – we delivered them a load of ice, soap, salt fish, beer, rum and tobacco in our truck to replenish the stores and since then Belto has been lying in his hammock complaining of kidney problems…..the pile of empty rum bottles by the chicken shed may point to the origin.

The village has given the school a new lick of paint – it’s transformed from blue to green (do we have to change the colour key on all the maps we made?). It looks fantastic…apart from the fact the door is off its hinges and there is no teacher, and no children to attend, even if there were a teacher. El Cabo is on it’s last legs. The school is empty and the bright pink paint has faded on the church, doors of once inhabited houses are bolted and used as weekend fishing lodges, the mayor and his family have moved to Higuey. Inevitable given its position between private land and the rest of the country.

Other than that we’ve been counting shells and weighing pottery in a processing frenzy. Vital to this work is music, and patience with each other’s tastes. Fortunately for me (not for anyone else), I am able to impose my tunes on the whole group by dint of the fact that I have a laptop and speakers….perhaps that’s why everyone migrated to the other lab this afternoon.

We visited Higuey on our day off excursion. I had forgotten about the shoe-shine mobs which follow you from street to street – small boys carrying wooden boxes with bottles of shoe polish (black paint and spit I think), insisting on cleaning your shoes even if you have bare feet in flip flops. Local bars employ men with sticks to chase them away from clients, and the tourist police at the cathedral set dogs on them.

It’s fantastic to be here again.