Red brake lights stretch endlessly before us. Traffic is practically at a standstill. Everyone is waiting to board the ferry. The road is red and hot and dusty. Vendors wipe the layer of silt off our windows to better show off their goods. They press barbequed beef sticks and newspaper cones filled with boiled peanuts up to our window and leave oily fingerprints on the glass. One vendor offers an English speaking newspaper wrapped in its original plastic announcing the upcoming Olympics as of three years ago. My mom says, “They’re an entrepreneurial bunch.” The roadside houses have wooden stakes in their front yards announcing bathroom use for a buck.

Toilet $1.00! A sign in purple magic marker smacks against my window. The bearer of the sign is a little girl with a perfectly round bowl haircut and two missing teeth. She swivels the sign so that the arrow now points toward a thatched roof shack which I assume is her house. She asks, “Do you want to go?” The little girl raises her eyebrows and widens her eyes, smiling as if it will be the most enticing thing in the world.

I can imagine her as a World Wrestling Federation girl who comes out between rounds holding a sign over her head. With the exception of her protruding belly, I can tell she will grow up to be a classic beauty. I see her on a calendar smiling from September with a caption in italics that speaks of her humble beginnings.

From the start she is gracious, reassuring, and a great hustler. “So pretty,” she says as she takes my hand and helps me down from the minivan. Her pointing finger caresses my wrist and traces the circumference on the face of my shiny silver watch. As my handler, she directs me through the riff-raff and shoos the others off like flies. “I have all you need,” she says in a perfectly practiced heartfelt voice.

With aching heart and clenched bowels, already I am missing America. The little girl leads me through her house and out to a shed in the back. A partition made of empty rice sacks stitched together separates the bathroom on one side from the pig pen on the other. The bathroom is a mere hole in the ground. A magazine rack is placed beside the hole. There is Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, a Vietnamese newspaper, a Japanese comic book, and an Italian porno mag to choose from: a true global village.