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.
