Christmas Break

For Christmas break we all headed down south to Loja and Vilcabamba. These are two small towns nestled in the Andes Mountains not too far from Peru. We were only in Loja for one night and there is not much to say about it. It is a very business oriented town so there is not much to do there. However, just outside of Loja is Parque Nacional Podocarpus(that´s Podocarpus National Park for all you non Spanish speakers) We went out on a hike and climbed trough a trail that brought us up a mountain of cloud forests. The cloud forest is a narrow valley that is isolated and changes through about 4 eco systems in a distance of a mile or so. So we climbed through rainforests and mountains and saw plants and animals that only exist in this small valley. (Ileen, you would have been drooling over the bird watching)














































The Next day we went to Vilcabamba. Vilcabamba is a strange town that seems to have attracted tons of people from other countries. There are alot of retired people for the Us and Europe living there making a haven for some new form of neocolonialism. There was also a large population of hippie/flower children there that have left the Us in an attempt to run away from their problems and force their lifestyle on another culture and refuse to learn the native language(I dont think that I need to say too much more about my opinion of them, it´s not too high)

The first day we went for a hike up the side of a mountains where we played wit some cows and then went down to a waterfall that was 50 feet high and went for a small dip.




















The next day we rented some mountain bikes and went for a ride up to a small town named San Pedro where we biked along a river and had lunch sitting on the rocks.
On our final full day we went for a horseback ride up into the mountains. Our guide took us to his parents house where they live on the mountain and run a farm where grow everything that they eat. They brewed us some home home grown coffee and gave us some bananas and showed us around the farm.


Hugo looking over his farm on the mountain:



















That night we went out to eat at a restaraunt that served us Cui , which is Quechua for Guinea Pig. It tasted like a combination of pork, fish, and corned beef.

This is me eating the head:















New years was tons of fun. It is tradition in Ecuador to make a paper maché effigy, soak it in gasoline, stuff it with fireworks, and light it on fire. So, my house made a 5 foot long mouse. Here are a few pictures of the before and after:



















We also got a new dog! He is 8 months old and we named him Wookie!(we are big Star Wars fans in our house)

Starfish and Santa, Wise Men and Italian

The last few weeks here have been really busy. First Allison cme to visit for a week and we went to Puerto Lopez, a small beach/fishing town that it a couple hour bus ride away from Guayaquil. We stayed at a place that was run by an extremely eccentric Italian/Swill couple. Our room was ´´beautifully nestled in private botanical gardens´´(insert crazy man with Italian accent) and was right on the beach. We went out into the water one afternoon and we kept stepping on rocks everywhere. So, I decided to pick one up and to my suprise it wasn´t a rock at all. We had been walking on a bed of star fish! It was a wonderful get away and I suggest going if you ever get a chance.
When we got back, our after school programs had our christmas party. We invited kids from all three progams to the retreat house in Arbolito. My personal favorite activity was out decorating of Christmas cookies. Jair, a 5 year old, dumped handfull after handfull of sprinkles all over his cookie and had no idea how to eat it because the pile on top of it was so big. Then we cut out snowflakes and played soccer and gave out small presents to all of the kids. It was really fun!
On Christmas eve me and my housemates were in the Christmas play during the mass at our church. I was one of the three wise men. Everyone that was to be playing a boy in the play had to have beards drawn on to their faces with permanant markers (for some reason Ecuadorians love chin straps) meaning that all the girls from my house were walking around with beards on. On Christmas day we had a relaxing morning and then we all went to Damien house, a hospital for people with Hansen´s disease(aka Leaporsy) and we sang song. Afterwards, Sr. Annie invited us over for dinner where we had a much needed break from Ecuadorian foods. She cooked us a big Italian dinner and we sang songs all night long.

The next morning we left for our Christmas break vacation...

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.