Dead Mouse Count: 20

Okay so it has been a while since ive written on this and i apologize. Life is busy here and when i actually do sit down to write here I can never think of what to write. Last week I got my parasite testing and cleaning. When i got my results from my test I had giardia, roundworm, and amoebas. Dont worry, I wasnt sick I just wanted to get myself cleaned out before this Thursday when I get the pleasure of having a visit from Allison. I do not want to be sick while I have a visitor at all.

On Friday we had Rostro´s employee christmas party which was tons of fun. Everyone was invited with their families. Each house had to put on a skit for entertainmen. When we were dancing at the end of the party it started to rain. I havn´t seen rain in months; so, naturally, I got everyone to go outside and dance in the rain for the rest of the night. It was tons of fun.

With that rain marks the beginning of the rainy season here. Starting today it has been warmer and more humid than ever before and I am told it won´t start to cool down until May. Also, with the first rain comes grillo season. A grillo is a bug that looks kindof like a cricket, except bigger. They are very stupid and very fragile creatures. When the first rain falls, all of the grillo eggs that are in the ground hatch at the same time. So they have come in swarms of thousands and reminds me of locusts except that these bugs are harmless and more just annoying than anything. I think that I am going to run away from them for the weekend and go to Montañita. :)

A Few Pictures

Christina and Ricardo walking kids home to sector 4. I like this picture. :)

















Ricardo helping Nicco with his homework. Ricardo is an employee with Rostro and helps alot with reatreat groups. Nicco is five and has no clue that he is an absolute ladies man.





















Veronica has the ability to make me smile no matter what is going on.















This is Josue, 5, and Miguel, 4. Josue is an absolute terror, but he is so adorable that he can get away with anything. The other day he lost half of his toe and still insisted on playing soccer then he bit me and ran off screaming. Miguel has a 3 year old brother, David. The two of them have no idea what is going on during Semillas and half the time one of them ends up falling asleep during activity. Every day conversation at our dinner table somehow results in sharing stories of something crazy that one of the three of these kids had done over the day. I can assure you that there are countless




















This is Clubber, my puppy. He is ferocious and adorable. He was named after Mr T´s character in RockyIII, Clubber Lang. He is half rotweiller and half doberman and has no idea that he is not a puppy. Yesterday he fell asleep with me reading in the hammok. His mother, Condessa, just got moved to the other side of town to be in the Monte Sinai house after 6 years of being unseperated.

My first day on the job...

For those of you that aren´t aware, Thursday was a crazy day. In the morning, Megan(my boss) left for a long awaited vacation to California. Now, because of my job as logistics coordinator, I was left as ´el jefe´ of the other volunteers. That day, as you may have heard, there was an attempt at a coup. The whole country´s police force decided to go on strike because of an issue of how they were going to be recieving bonuses. This escalated into the police trying to take the president out of power and having him being trapped inside of a hospital surrounded by thousands of angry police officers. That morning i had taken Christina to the doctors office beause she was really sick(we just found out that it is typhoid(am I secretly on Oregon Trail?)) Christina had been sent home with an IV and I was also in charge of helping her and making sure tht she got her meds(they taught me how to give her meds with a serynge through her IV).So, it was about 1030 in the morning when I decided that we needed to get everyone back home or at least know that they were safe and I had to call everyone to tell them that all afterschool programs were closed until further notice. The entire country was without police and because the military is currently undergoing a retooling, no one was in charge. There were people burning tires and edifaces of the president all over, people were looting, the bridges and highways are closed due to police blocking them with protesting and burning tires, the busses aren´t safe to go on and I have poor Christina hookednup to an IV.
So I called everyone to stay put at their work sites in Guayaquil until we figured out a plan. Wellington(one of the guards) and I drove over to the Chicos de la Calle shelter(a shelter and school for streeg kids ) and picked up Jessie and Beth. Along with them we had a truck bed full of 12 kids that needed a ride into central Duran because the busses were too dangerous. We got them back home and I called Jeff in Monte Sinai and asked him to pick up all of his housemates from work and take them home immediately. Then, after figuring out where everyone was and that everyone was safe at their worksites or at hiome it was time to find a way to get people home, which is hard when you are in the middle of a Coup and are frantically trying to pull every Spanish vocab word you can remember out of your head. I starded recieving phone calls from Helen at the Rostro de Cristo office in the US to get updates on the day. It took until 5pm until we had figured out how to get Tierney, Tasha, Brendan, and Jon home. They all worked in the middle of Guayaquil and were pretty much trapped by protests and closed bridges. We sent Wellington and another guard to go get them. They took the long way around the bridges, which took about two and a half hours both ways. Eventually we got everyone home, made grilled cheese sandwiches, watched Good Will Hunting, and passed out.

The attempted coup is now over. Police are back on duty, but it still isnt safe to go out by myself. The hospital just opened up a couple of hours ago. Christina is still really sick, but is off here IV(which I had to remove without any instruction on how to do so). Things are slowly getting back to normal and we should all be resuming work on Monday. Megan is returning on Thursday and our next retreat group just cancelled(I think that parents were all freaking out). I´m sorry I still havn´t gotten pictures up. I felt like this was a little more interesting to write about.

Animal Sacrifices

Over the last two weeks we have started venuring out into sector four of Arbolito, which is down the road aways. We have been picking up these kids named Leonardo and Elena to go to Semillas. The other day we went to their house and started talking to their mom. She proceeded to tell us that she was going to kill her duck for us. We were all confused and decided that we had heard he wrong and that something was lost in translation. The next day, when we picked up her kids she gave us this pot and said that she had made us secco de pato, which ended up being delicious. I looked around and the family´s only duck was missing. Then she told us that she was going to kill her pig for us and she pointed to two pigs. One was a pretty normal looking pig and the other couldn´t stand on account her giant pregnant belly. Jon and I looked at each other and I think that we were both hoping that she wasnt going to kill the pregnant one(dont worry, she didnt). So, we went over to their house yesterday and they gave us a pig sausage soup, which was hard to stomach. The sausage texture was very soft and strange. I did my best to be polite. After soup, they gave us each a giant plate full of pork products in various shapes, sizes, and from different locations on the animal. This was delicious, even though our guard had warned us that if we ate pork we would get parasites that ate our brains. After this she brought out a cake. It was the most confusing cake I have eaten in a while. It was really dense with fruit in it and it was covered with whipped cream, orange marmalade, chocolate, and dulce de leche. Don´t get me wrong, it was delicious, I just kept thinking about how I just wanted the cake to decide what kind of cake it was.

I will try to bring some pictures in for my next post if possible. :)

a little more flaco

It is a beautiful Thursday in Duran. I am sitting at ´Cyber Emanuel´ and Emanuel is dancing to Shania Twain´s ¨I feel like a woman.¨ I am pretty sure if he knew the words to the song he would neither be dancing nor listening to the song at all. :) So, Last week was my first retreat group, from Santa Clara. I was glad that it was a small group of nine. They were pretty easy going for the majority of the week. In the beginning they were very much uneasy and unsure of what they could do or say. This awkwardness slowly transitioned into a comfort that I have been familiar with for some time. During the middle of this week I got really sick. I think I ate some bad(but delicious) food at one of my neighbors houses. I was sick for a about 2 days and I lost over 10 pounds, which pretty much makes me antimatter by about now. I imagine that there us much more of this to come in the rest of the year ahead.
Working at Semillas de Mostaza, one of Rostro´s afterschool programs, has been wonderful, but frustrating. Every day we get from 30 to 60 kids ranging from 4-15 years old. right now I am working on activity for the little kids that uses maps. When we started introducing them to other countries of the world they were very confused and asked which country was Barcelona or Emelec(the two futbol teams in Guayaquil). I dont think that they have any kind of concept of how big a city, country, or the world is. So I am printing up a map of their neighborhood(thank you google earth) and having them trace their walking route to Semillas. Then I will show them a series of maps to help them understand how Arbolito (our neighborhood) fits into the city, the country and the world. Hopefully it won´t be too much for them.

work, casa, earthquake

There was an earthquake! But no worries it was pretty far away and everyone here is a-okay
So today was my first day of work (kindof) after two weeks of in country orientation and two weeks of orientation in the states(thas right, an entire month) I will be working two jobs this year. First I have been selected to be the logistics coordinator for Rostro. This means that I am in charge of retreat groups that come down from the US. I get to do alot of driving down here which scares the crap out of me because nobody follows traffic laws. Aside from that, I am really excited to work with college and high school groups and to better learn how a non profit works. Also, I am co running an after school program called Semillas de Mostaza (Mustard Seeds). Here we do homework help, activities to supliment Ecuador´s crappy school system, play futbol, and more. We try to give the kids a safe place to play, learn, and just be for at least two hours every day.
Also, we got to go into our house. However, we cannot move in to it for probably another week because we decided that we wanted to paint most of the interior as it it pretty scratched up and peeling in most rooms. I wish I could just move in now! I´m tired of living in the retreat house. Our bedrooms are way bigger than I would ever need.

¿Week 1?

Okay, so i have been in Ecuador for a week now. Most of the last week ahs been orientation related. There has been aot of visiting work sites and getting to know the bus routes. This whole process of orientation is really overwhelming. I feel like i want to do everything jb related, but i have to choose just one.
Yesterday we all went to a beach town that is a few hours away called Las Playas. We spent the whole afternoon playing in the sand and in the ocean until I got blisters on the bottoms of my feet. I got stung by a jelly fish on my shoulder and most of my group got sun burned. In all, it was an amazing afternoon away from being drained bye Duran and all of the decisions and responsabilities that we will soon be facing.
Wghen we got back home we were doing an arts and crafts project and reality suddenly stepped in to remind us of the environment that we were living in. Our neixt door neighbors were in a domestic dispute which involved alot of screaming by children. In the middle of this, our community gathered together and prayed for our neighbors. Then, as soon as the shouting stopped, we got a call from Megan, our director, telling us that the father of one of our good friends, Diana, had died. It was a rather humbling night for everyone. We all prayed and went to bed. I think we all realized that the reality of Ecuador had hit us and that we have a difficult, yet amazing year ahead of us.

Today had clam chowder in New England!

Sorry for not updating this in a while. Life have has been hectic. My week trip to Ecuador with Seattle U was amazing. It was great to see all of the friends that I had made last year and to meet new people. I went in with a lot of fears and anxiety, but they have been mostly put to rest. One evening in Duran, I was sitting outside with a few of the volunteers and they were just venting, complaining about everything. (I won't ge too specific) It put me at ease knowing that the volunteers were people and struggled through things like real people do. It can be easy to look up to them and all that they do and think that I could never amount to that. Also, seeing excitement on people's faces when they find out that i am coming back makes me feel very welcome and excited to come back
It has been very emotional to spend the last three weeks in Tacoma/Seattle, saying goodbye to everyone. Last week, I went to the Humane Society to get Allison a kitten. Her name is Nina and she is four months old. She is blonde and grey(her fur looks like a blonde cat got into a fireplace and covered with ash). She is supa cute and likes snuggling, exploring, and playing with empty boxes. I also got to go canoeing and hiking with Francisco, which was a great getaway for me. I said goodbye to almost everyone that I wanted to, but I will always wish that I had just a little more time.
Right now I am at Boston College for orientation. We are doing our orientation with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and there are lots of amazing people here. It is difficult to be present to everything here with my head still in Seattle. I have leave a place that is filled with with so much love and to step out into the unkown with people that I have never met.(except Shea!) I am out of time, but I will be back to write more soon.

First trip is tomorrow~~

This last week has been an interesting adventure. I took all of my finals, graduated from college, said goodbye to everyone in Seattle, and moved back to Tacoma. tomorrow I leave for Ecuador. I am leading Campus Ministry's week long trip to Ecuador with Rostro de Cristo. After this week in Ecuador I will be be back in Washington for three weeks, followed by two weeks in Boston for training, and then I move to Ecuador for a year!

Last night I said goodbye to Patrick and Katie and went back to my stale empty room. I remember looking up at the ceiling and having a sudden wave of emotion pour over me. I feel like it is just when I find myself within a place I have to leave it. I will miss this place. I will miss the community that I have found here.

I don't know quite what to expect going in to this next week. All I know is that I am in for one hell of a reality check. I don't know whether to be excited or scared, so I think that I'll take a little of both. :)


Also, I just got my mailing address for next year. If you would like to send me a letter send it to:

Kipp Gallagher o Megan Radek
Rostro de Cristo
Casilla 09-01-1024
Guayaquil, Ecuador


Thank you.

I love you all!

Two months till orientation

"It's a dangerous business, stepping out your front door. You never know where' ll you'll be swept off to" -Bilbo

I have three weeks left in this place called college and soon i will be moving to Ecuador for an entire year. I thought that it would be appropriate to start a blog to record my adventures. As it stands right now, I am excited and scared to death for the upcoming year. I feel like Jake Wild once captured how I feel about moving to Ecuador in a photograph. I am ready to leave this place that I have called hope for nearly 23 years; It is time to step out of my front door and be swept off into God only knows what.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support.

I love you all. :)

-Kipp

P.S. Thanks to Mr. Salad Bar for the name.