Daule was founded by Juan Clemente Estrada, who owned much of the land the town now occupies and built its economy around shrimp farming and alfalfa. The inheritance passed to his son Rubén Estrada García, then to his grandson Tomás Estrada Mendoza. When the Ecuadorian agricultural sector collapsed in the late twentieth century, Tomás was forced to sell most of his roughly 500 square kilometers of shrimp farms to the national government and international investors. The outcome is unusual. Residents own their houses, but almost nobody owns the land beneath them, and no one in Daule pays property taxes. The arrangement says as much about rural Ecuador as any statistic could.

In 2000, Ecuador abandoned its own currency, the sucre, and adopted the U.S. dollar outright - a response to the financial collapse of the late 1990s. For places like Daule, the change meant overnight inflation that hit the agricultural economy particularly hard. Today the village has two small markets and one bar. Residents sell crops, fish, and crafts out of their homes. A single paid worker tends the shrimp farms; every two weeks, the farms hire five or more villagers for day-labor shifts to collect and export the harvest. Most families rely on individual fishing for their actual income. The town survives, but the margin is thin.

The school goes from first grade through seventh. After that, students who want to continue have to leave for a larger town, and most don't. One teacher told researchers that of every forty children who start first grade, roughly six finish seventh. The school fee is five dollars per year, which includes books and supplies, and the canton of Muisne pays the teachers. The building has three classrooms divided into cubicles by hanging curtains, with two teachers per room working on opposite sides. Adult literacy classes are offered, but the canton as a whole has a 58 percent illiteracy rate, and only two percent of the population has any college education at all.

Daule sits on soil that is mostly sand, with no controls on cutting trees or shrubs, and erosion is a constant process. The village is also vulnerable to sea-level rise during tropical storms - water enters from the north, where the cemetery is, floods the streets, and has nowhere to go. The surrounding shrimp farms and sandy terrain prevent the water from draining or being absorbed. The local water supply is a problem of its own: four possible sources, of which only the distant river is reasonably clean, and the free well by the church runs too salty to drink. Malaria and yellow fever remain present because of the mosquitoes. There is no hospital, no clinic, no retirement program.

In August 2006, a team from Bucknell University's Engineers Without Borders chapter came to Daule for an initial assessment, traveling with a Peace Corps volunteer. In March 2007, Penn State's Engineers for a Sustainable World chapter followed with a topographical survey aimed at the flooding problem. Both groups mapped the town, measured elevations, and advised residents on how to submit formal project requests. The work illustrated something important: the solutions are technically known, but the resources to build them are not local, and the partnerships need time. Daule's political committee - coordinator Simón Ferrín and the rest - does what it can with what it has. The Pacific is still right there, still rising, still deciding the town's future one storm at a time.