It’s for you.

JUST ABOUT EVERY DAY, someone will knock on the door of Judith Rios Duarte’s house in Northwest Zamora and ask to use the phone. But upon entering the house, they don’t use the normal phone. Instead, they use a pay phone.

Why is a pay phone in somebody’s house, complete with an official-looking sign out front? For that, we can thank Duarte’s entreprenurial aunt. Four years ago, she bought this phone and hooked it up to the regular family phone line.

In exchange for having a small collection of elderly neighbors (younger Mexicans are less likely to be without phones, and like young people everywhere, prefer cell phones) stop by every week, the aunt gets to keep the few pesos the are deposited into the machine.

There’s gossip potential as well, Duarte reports.

“When a person is talking, or sometimes screaming, on the phone,” you can listen, she said.

Not that the neighborhood is lacking for gossip. The house nextdoor is a brothel, and has been for as long as the 23-year-old Duarte can remember.

But sharing a phone with a family is bad enough. A traditionally big Mexican family, even less convenient. And add a few random neighbors into the mix?

“Sometimes when I want to make an urgent call I can’t because they’re using the phone,” Duarte said.

The phone fills a very small niche, as Zamora is practically crawling over with phone booths. But you need a phone card for those, and they start at 50 pesos. The home phone, however, takes only a few coins.

Something similar happens in rural areas, where phone lines are less common and people make informal arrangements with neighbors to use theirs. But neither Duarte nor a few other friends I asked have every heard of a payphone in a house, so the concept is probably exceedingly rare.

“Almost nobody has these phones,” Duarte said.