"This isn't good, is it?" I asked her in Spanish.
"No," she replied. She opened her mouth to say more, and then looked away.
Down the ridge, exposed, lay a broken PVC pipe. Running from near what looked like a building of latrines inside the perimeter, it leaked a black liquid toward the river. It stunk from several feet away. Farther down the ridge, Guatemalan military police took a sample of the waste, put it in a jar, and sealed it with a sky-blue lid. Then they brushed past us and left.
The Nepalese soldiers were staring through the base's chain-link fence. One leaned over and took a concrete lid off an underground tank, releasing an overwhelmingly pungent blast of odor.
"WHOA! KAKA!" one of the villagers shouted. They started laughing.
Another villager tapped Evens on the shoulder. He was slightly older than the others, in a polo shirt, blue shorts, and galoshes speckled with what I hoped was mud.
"You and the blan should come with me across the road," he said.
The farmer led us past the concrete house he shared with his wife and five children; his wife held the youngest in her hands on the porch. Up a small hill, past a bony mule and some pigs, the smell returned. Ahead were two shining pools of feces, filling pits dug directly into the ground. "This is where MINUSTAH leaves their kaka," the farmer said.
A truck would come every few weeks from a Haitian company called SANCO, the farmer said -- the contractor Pugliese had referred to. The truck would go into the base, suck out the septics, then drive across the street and dump the waste into the pools by his house. When it rained, the pools overflowed. Sometimes they ran down the hill into the river. Sometimes they flowed the other way, toward his house, and the smell would get so bad the family couldn't sleep.
Then he led us down the hill to what looked like another pit full of human waste. This one had pigs and ducks swimming in it. A few weeks before, a new SANCO driver had shown up and dumped the excrement from the base in the wrong spot. Some of it had run down here. The farmer said he wasn't sure exactly when -- the days tend to run together in the countryside.
It did not take long for a key piece of his story to check out: Soon after, a green tanker truck marked SANCO Enterprises S.A. appeared at the base. The company vice president from Port-au-Prince followed in a white luxury pickup. I watched the truck hose up the contents of the U.N.'s underground tanks, drive across the street and up the hill, and stop at the pits. A worker jumped out of the truck, opened a valve in the rear, and took a big step back as a stream of black liquid surged into the open pit. Then, using an orange canister outfitted with a spray nozzle, he doused the surface of the new pool with bleach.
SANCO is one of the main waste disposal contractors in Port-au-Prince -- the U.S. Department of Defense also contracted the company to handle some of its post-quake detritus. I learned later that SANCO had acquired the contract at the Nepalese base several months before by underbidding the preceding contractor. The truck driver told us that MINUSTAH had not called him to come in a month.
Could the septic tanks at the base have overflowed because they weren't emptied on schedule? I tried to talk to the SANCO executive in the pickup, but she wouldn't get out, rolling down the window only long enough to say: "It's a very difficult client."
I asked the farmer if people had gotten sick drinking from the river. Some had, he said, days before. Many in Meille had stopped using the river's water altogether. "You can't even wash in it," he explained. Millions downstream hadn't known that.
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