Chapter 18, "The Ugly American and the Ugly Sarkhanese" Summary

Two weeks after Atkins met with MacWhite, he and his wife, Emma, move into a cottage in the suburbs of Haidho. Their only servant is a boy named Ong who appears every morning at six and spends the day following Emma. Emma learns the language slowly and tends to her own chickens and garden. Homer Atkins designs his pump to use local bamboo for pipes. He adapts an abandoned jeep motor to serve as the pump mechanism, but he is stumped by what to use as a power source to run the pump. He and Emma discuss bringing in a railroad hand pump from the States, but Atkins says, "Whenever you give a man something for nothing the first person he comes to dislike is you. If...