I sadly would like to inform everyone that I am no longer in Ecuador. It was not my choice to leave. I wanted to stay and my heart is still in Ecuador. I am so sad, depressed, hurt, confused and upset about all this, but there was nothing I could do to prevent my departure. The details of my situation are complicated and rather personal so I am not going to post them on the blog. For those of you who were on my email list about the blog you should have received an email from me explaining the situation. If you did not receive this email or you would like to know the rest of the story about this feel free to email me.
I am very grateful for the time I had in Ecuador – it was so life-giving and I loved the people and my experiences. Although the last month has been very hard, it has also included a lot of joyous moments and great experiences. I had a lot of great neighbor visits, mornings with Hansen Disease patients, fun times with the kids at Valdivia (we recently had a 10th year anniversary party with lots of fun games and prizes for the kids), two different Quinceañera parties (a 15th birthday party for girls that seems more like a wedding), interesting spirituality nights, fun community nights with my housemates, and lots of small joys on a daily basis. I also started my English classes which were going really well. I was teaching English to adults so all of my students wanted to be there and they were eager to learn. I had become friends with all of them too. All these great experiences are why it’s so hard for me to not be there right now. I had so many hopes for the year. I had been looking forward to doing a year of service for so long. It’s really hard to let go, and I still don’t understand why it had to happen like this, but I’m trusting God that it happened for a reason and it is apart of His plan for me.
For those of you who donated to Rostro de Cristo I want to thank you again for making donations. Although I am no longer in Ecuador, your money is still going towards a good cause and it is helping all the people I fell in love with during my two months in Ecuador. The need in Arbolito is significant and your donations are helping to lessen their suffering. If the news of my departure has caused you for some reason to no longer want to support RdC, please let me know so I can try to contact the US office to figure something out about your donation.
I will hopefully send out some other updates in the next couple of months to let you know how I am doing and to let you know when I figure out what my next endeavor will be. I want to thank you all for following my blog and for supporting me through the last several months. I appreciate it.
Also, I posted a lot more photos on my blog so check those out.
The last couple of weeks have been a little rough. I had a pretty upsetting experience a couple weeks ago that I´m still trying to process. Also, one of my housemates needed to go back home so we´ve been trying to transition as best we can, but it´s hard since we were all so close to her. Even though I have been struggling with a lot of things, after hearing the stories from some of my neighbors, I realize that my struggles are nothing compared to the hardships that they have had to overcome in their lives. I am beginning to realize how hard – but also important – it is to not focus on ¨doing,¨ but on ¨being with.¨ Listening to neighbors´ life stories and not being able to take away the pain and sorrow of their past and present is really hard. I feel helpless just sitting and listening. I hope, though, that having someone to listen will provide them with at least some comfort and healing.
Besides enjoying spending time visiting neighbors, I also have really enjoyed my work placements. Since my English classes haven´t started yet I am able to go to Damien House two days a week. I really like working there. I spend my mornings visiting the patients/residents and getting to know them. The last couple of weeks I´ve been trying to remember everyone´s names (there´s a lot of them) and have started forming relationships. There are a couple residents who I can´t understand very well because they have very few teeth and mumble when they talk. It´s frustrating when a resident is so eager to tell me something and I can´t understand. I feel so bad! For the most part, I can understand people and I am becoming more and more comfortable speaking. Another hard thing is that a lot of the patients are in pain or have lots of wounds that need tending to. Eventually I might have the courage to observe wound care. I don´t know how long I will last though since it might make me squeamish.
Some of the women spend time doing sewing and art projects so hopefully I can learn a thing or two from them. A lot of the men at Damien like to play dominoes. I had never really played before so they ¨taught¨ me i.e. several guys were looking over my shoulder and playing for me or demanding I play a certain piece. When I ask ¨why this piece and not that one¨ they just ignore me and tell me to ¨play it!¨It was a little frustrating. I have managed to win quite a few games though, so poco a poco I´m learning the strategy. I´m trying to convince them to spice up their game schedule and throw in some cards, instead of two hours of dominoes. I´m also planning on teaching them how to play Bananagrams. (Side note: I spent a long time deciding whether to bring Taboo or Banagrams to Ecuador and I finally decided the volunteer house would probably have Taboo since Banagrams is a relatively new game. So I brought Banagrams and came to Ecuador to find that my house already had three sets of it, two more in the other houses and not one house has Taboo! Very upsetting! )
The other great thing about Damien is that they serve us lunch with meat! So basically I will be eating meat once a week. All my housemates get lunch every day at their worksites, but I have a different schedule so I usually have to cook for myself – usually scrambled eggs with the famous veggie trio – tomatoes, onions and peppers. Having lunch at Damien is definitely a treat for me!
I have included on the left of my blog a link to the Damien House website. I highly encourage you to read more about the organization and Hansen´s Disease. I am still learning more about it myself. It´s so interesting!
In the mornings once a week I have been helping out at a daycare in Arbolito. The first day I showed up dozens of 3-6 year olds came rushing over to me to give me hugs. They had no idea who I was, but they were so full of love anyway. We need to be more like children – full of love, no judging, energetic, excited to learn, curious, in awe about everything, and eager to find/experience the big and little joys of life.
When I went into the kindergarten class within the first five minutes the teacher had me singing in front of the class in English. Some of you might not know (others definitely do) that I am very self-conscious about singing so I wasn´t too keen about this task even if it was only a simple song about washing hands. = ) Today I taught them how to say different colors, animals and fruit in English. They are good at repeating the words, but it was hard for them to remember what each one meant. The kids are adorable and I enjoy my time with them, but I don´t know if I could do it year long especially when I´m also working with kids in the afternoon. Props to all those who work with kids all day! I don´t know how you do it!
Overall, my after school program is going really well. The last couple of days the kids weren´t behaving well at all so it was pretty chaotic. It´s hard to discipline kids when I´m not fluent in their language. Hopefully, by the end of the year this won´t be a problem at all. Usually the kids are really well-behaved which makes things easier. I´ve already gotten pretty attached to a lot of the kids, and I look forward to going to Valdivia each day. Every day when we arrive to open the gates the kids run up to us and give us big hugs and Ecua greeting kisses. It´s so great!
The kids are all at different learning levels so doing activities for them is a little challenging. Some of my activities have been very successful and others not so much. It´s also surprising some of the things they haven´t been taught yet.
Below is our schedule:
2:30-3:15pm: Homework or silent reading
3:15pm: The kids line up, say the Our Father and we make announcements
3:20 – 4:00pm: Activity for kids who have finished their homework
4:00pm: Recreo = recess
4:45pm: We give out necklaces to kids who have been well-behaved and have done something extra to help. Then each kid says thank you to another kid for helping them with homework, playing with them, etc. It´s such an awesome way to end the day. Then we give a ¨charla¨or talk about the value of the week. Next we say a prayer, and then we pass out bread, bananas and vitamins.
Community is going well. It has definitely been hard after our housemate left. I planned our first spirituality night. I just had people share what their faith journeys have been so far so we could better understand where everyone was coming from. We have all had very different faith journeys and are in very different places spiritually so it will be interesting to see how we challenge and/or strengthen each other´s beliefs and help each other grow.
I cooked my first dinner without any help from a housemate. I was very proud of myself since we usually have cooking partners. I didn´t make the most healthy or complicated dish, but it was still good. What did I cook? One of my favorite ¨comfort¨ foods – French Toast! We don´t have syrup here so I made banana ¨goop¨- boiled bananas with brown sugar and cinnamon. It was so good! And of course being a fruit-lover I had to make fruit salad too. I think I´m going to run out of ideas for dinners so if anyone has any simple vegetarian (gutting a chicken doesn´t sound too fun) recipes please let me know. Hopefully we have the ingredients here.
I also suggested that we start a ¨quote wall in our house. So far it has been quite the success. We´ve said some hilarious things. Unfortunately, out of context they sound pretty inappropriate so I´ll pass on sharing them. Haha.
Last Saturday, all 15 of us went to Guayaquil for a benefit concert against child labor. One of my fellow volunteers accidently agreed to perform in the concert. How was it an accident? Well, she´s still learning Spanish so she thought she was agreeing to teach them how to sing a song in English for the group to perform, but really she agreed to perform herself and be the lead singer. Another volunteer agreed to play the drums. It was great! The group opened for one Ecuador´s well-known Reggaeton artists. We had a gringo dance party in the middle of staring and pointing Ecuadorians. Los gringos locos! It was so much fun! The singer also sang a song about Facebook ¨romances¨ which was pretty entertaining. The venue was great too. It was right on the boardwalk overlooking the river. It was a fun day, but after the concert ended a bunch of kids who were only about six years old came over to us trying to sell us candy. The irony of this at a No Child Labor concert was heartbreaking. It just makes me think of all the children – not just in Ecuador, but all over the world – who work instead of go to school, who have to worry about making money to eat instead of having fun with friends. They have such great potential, but they may never reach it because of their lack of basic necessities and lack of opportunities. It pains me to think about it.
On a different note, our first retreat group of the year arrived last night. They will be on a ten-day mission trip here. My housemate is leading the group and the students are living in the retreat house right next to ours. We will be having 27 retreat groups this year and I will be leading at least two of them. It´s going to be interesting to be on the other side of a mission trip. I hope the students will be affected as much as I was after the trips I went on. Several of my fellow volunteers came to Duran in high school or college which is how they decided they wanted to come back to do a year of service.
Random Things: The weather hasn´t been too hot which is nice during the day, but it definitely has made our cold showers a lot harder to take. I have come to realize that I have to get used to seeing dozens and dozens of ants in our kitchen every day. We are very good about not leaving food out and cleaning all of our surfaces with bleach, but the ants still come. They are tiny and harmless, but just really annoying.
Recommended Books (both are excellent!):
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Color of Water by James McBride
Thank you to all of you have written comments for my blog, have emailed me, written letters, and have kept me in your prayers. Much appreciated!
So it has only been a couple days since my last blog entry when everything was going great. Things are not going so great now and I am really struggling. I may share more details later, but right now if you could just keep me in your prayers as well as my house community and the rest of the RdC volunteers. I really appreciate it. Thanks.
I don´t even know where to begin! We are just now wrapping up our two week in-country orientation. We´ve been very busy visiting worksites, attending info sessions and workshops (about the community, how to teach, behavior management, etc), learning bus routes, learning which stores give fair prices to gringos and which ones rip us off, and visiting neighbors. It has all been very helpful but also a little overwhelming.
Here´s a little bit (actually it´s pretty long so brace yourself) about my life here…
Living Conditions:
The neighborhood I live in is called Arbolito (Little Tree) and it is in the¨canton¨ of Duran, outside Guayaquil (biggest city in Ecuador). Arbolito started as an invasion community 20-25 years ago. An invasion community is when groups of families move to a large area of vacant land (usually owned by a private landlord or a governmental body. A basic cane house can be built in a couple hours so invasion communities can show up literally over night. Since the people on the land do not have any legal rights to the land, there are often conflicts that erupt. Eventually the landowner or government may decide to sell the land to the invaders. This was the case with Arbolito. The government did not recognize the community until 4 years ago. The area has developed quite a bit since it started, but it is still lacking considerably in infrastructure and social services.
The living conditions here are pretty bad. Most houses are very simple and the people have very few possessions. A lot of the houses are made from cane. They use pieces of cane that kind of look like planks of wood. (Hopefully I will be able to take a photo at some point, but it´s not safe to walk with your camera so I haven´t taken any photos outside of my house. This has been hard since I usually take lots of photos and I know it would help you guys better visualize the area where I am living). Some houses also use pieces of scrap metal as walls and/or roofs.
None of our neighbors have running water. They have big barrels of water outside their houses that they have to use for everything.They have to wait for the water truck to come by and fill them up. (Luckily, my house has running water and we buy jugs of purified water for drinking, cooking, and brushing our teeth). Most people in my neighborhood have electricity. In my neighborhood there are a couple main roads that are paved but most of the ones closest to my house are dirt roads.
For the first ten days in Ecuador we were living in the retreat house (high school and college groups come down for mission trips) while the old volunteers were still living in the volunteer house. The houses are right next to each other. We were so excited to finally move into our house last Friday night. It had almost been a full month of living out of a suitcase which was pretty frustrating. Our volunteer house is really nice – very spacious. We each have our own bedroom (they are very simple but a good size) and two extra bedrooms (for visitors!) The hardest adjustment I think to living here is that we have a lot of critters .Our first day in the house we had to kill a mouse. (I hate mice!) Arbolito was built on a swamp and our house is close to a stream so we have a lot of mosquitoes. We sleep with mosquito nets over our beds. The bugs are going to get really bad during the rainy season (Dec-April). We also have tiny little ants al the time in the kitchen which is really annoying. We have to put everything in the fridge so the ants don´t get it – including sugar, gum, bread and lots of other things you usually don´t have to refrigerate. We also have geckos occasionally and then frogs outside.
Food:
I went from a college dining plan and my mom cooking all my meals (yes I was spoiled!) to having to cook for 6 people. Since I have very limited cooking experience I told my community mates that I was going to need to have a cooking partner for the first couple of weeks we´re here. During orientation we frequently had to cook for 33 people (the old and new volunteers).
When we were living in the retreat house we had oatmeal or eggs for breakfast. For lunch we had bread, dry tuna and a mixture of chopped up tomatoes, onions and peppers. So far those are basically the only veggies I´ve really eaten except for once someone made a quiche with broccoli and carrots. Dinners usually are rice and beans/lentils with the signature tomato-onion-pepper mix, or we have pasta. We don´t have too many types of fruit at our local tienda at night so hopefully we can maybe start buying our groceries for dinner in the mornings. It has been hard not having a variety of veggies and fruit available whenever I want. There is a huge market with lots of produce, but we haven´t had time to go since it´s a little distance from our house. I almost forgot…plantains is another staple here – they usually eat them fried in various different forms. Fried food reminds me…we´ve been told that all the guys lose a ton of weight here while all the girls gain weight. I don´t really get why the guys lose, but anyway my house is determined to not let either of these things happen to us this year. We are going to try to eat healthy and Ali has already set up a workout schedule for us. I just hope we have time to do it!
Two more points about food – it takes a long time to prep and cook because you can´t buy certain things such as tomato sauce – you have to make from scratch. Another thing about food is that it is incredibly cheap. I cooked for 17 people and it only cost $10.80!!! Oh a third thing...for meat I have only had one slice of processed ham. They have meat here but it´s more expensive and we have to gut the chickens ourselves…doesn´t sound fun!
Worksite Placement:
Last week, after a very long individual and then community discernment process we figured out our work placements. Here´s my morning schedule:
Monday: Damien House – a home for people who have Hansen´s Disease (leprosy)
Tuesday: Teaching adult English classes (this will be challenging since I´ve never taught before)
Wednesday: Neighborhood time – meet neighbors
Thursday: English classes
Friday: Meeting for after school program
Compared to other volunteers my mornings are relatively easy, but this allows me to spend more time in the neighborhood forming relationships with neighbors which I´m really excited about. I´ve gotten to meet a handful of our neighbors and I have fallen in love with all of them. They are so friendly, welcoming and hospitable. I can´t wait to get to know them better.
In the afternoons I will be running an after school program called Valdivia in the AJS neighborhood. The program allows kids to have a safe place to do their homework. Many kids come from difficult home situation so this is a great place for them. We plan educational and just-for-fun activities for the kids. All the kids also receive bread, bananas and vitamins each day.
Yesterday was our (I´m working with 2 other volunteers) first day on our own. We got there 15 minutes early and we spent all that time trying to open the gate door while kids were watching us and probably wondering who these new incompetent gringas were – where were the old volunteers?! We finally got the gate open after working up a sweat and then went to open the homework room and found out that just our luck we couldn´t open that one either! The lock and keys were so rusty. Not a good start to the first day of work. After some praying, our Ecuadorian helper came to save the day and opened it.
I had to plan the day´s activity which I was really nervous about. Earlier in the day I had practiced saying the script I had written out in Spanish for myself. We made hand-shaped name signs with each finger representing a different fun fact about them (age, favorite color, number of siblings, etc). It went relatively well. I think the kids liked it, but it was hard to discipline them in Spanish. Hopefully these things get easier as the year goes along.
Transportation: We have vans but we aren´t allowed to use them unless it´s for retreat s or occasionally for other reasons. People drive crazy here! We mostly use buses or walk. I´ll be busing to Damien House, the English classes are only a couple blocks away and then Valdivia is a 30min walk. It will be nice to have exercise though!
Weather: We have been very lucky that it hasn’t been unbearably hot like I was imagining. It´s still hot during the day but it usually cools off at night and the mornings.I´m not looking forward to when it gets really hot.
Housemates: I have a great community. They are all very friendly and really fun. So far we have had no community problems (knock on wood)so it has been really nice. I can´t wait to get to know them better.
Whew!!! That was long! Hopefully future ones won´t be this long. I just wanted to explain everything since hopefully it will help you better understand my life down here.Please let me know if you have any specific questions or things you want me to discuss in another blog entry. Thanks to all of you who wrote comments on my previous blogs. Those are much appreciated especially with how long it takes me to write these things. It´s nice to get feedback. Also please don´t forget to update me on your lives as well. Emails or letters are welcomed! = ) I´m probably not going to be on Facebook much so please send me an emailinstead of sending me FB messages.
I only have 5min so this is going to be quick...just wanted to let everyone know I´m doing well. Everything is very overwhelming but good. I have to decide my worksite in a couple days and as you all know this will be a challenge for me to figure out so keep me in your prayers. Thanks for all the support. Got to go!
I just got back from our two-day silent retreat. I had mixed feelings going into it since I wanted to be able to talk and hang out with all the JVC volunteers before having to say good bye to them. The retreat ended up being exactly what I needed though. I was able to stop worrying about everything and just live in the moment. By the end of the retreat I felt a greater sense of inner peace which was much needed after the intense last two weeks.
The retreat center was in the woods in Medway, MA. It was great to be in such beautiful surroundings since I always feel God’s presence in nature. I spent a lot of time outside writing, reading, praying and reflecting. We also had a couple workshops and meetings with spiritual directors and we could talk during those so it wasn’t completely silent. The rest of the time when it was silent was quite something. It’s a very powerful experience to be sitting with people for hours in silence. You feel a deep sense of solidarity and community.
One of the highlights of the weekend was when a bunch of us went outside at night and just danced barefoot in the rain. We were out there for about an hour and weren’t saying anything, just laughing and dancing. It was a moment of pure joy! The next night a couple of us got a blanket and laid down to stargaze. Most of you know I absolutely love stargazing so this was quite the treat for me. The sky was cloudless and the stars were so clear. I wish I had my star chart to figure out the constellations (and yes I did pack it for Ecuador if any of you were wondering!) I ended up seeing three shooting stars! It was unbelievable! While I was lying there I was thinking of all the times I have gone stargazing with family (Sunriver’s observatory, at Gabriel Park, on our deck) and with friends (Bucknell’s golf course, tennis courts, random parks in Portland) and all the adventures that have included stargazing. It was a bittersweet moment. = )
The bus ride home was quite the joyous celebration. After being silent for two days we decided to all belt out songs the entire 45min ride back. It was great!
Well, now that I’m back at BC I feel like I could use another buffer day before we leave. I feel pretty pressed for time to finish packing and prepare myself. I can’t believe tomorrow I leave for Ecuador! I do feel more ready than I did two weeks ago so that’s good. I’m still on my high from the silent retreat so I’m not allowing any anxiety in yet. It will probably return in a couple of hours. Haha.
I just posted some photos. There's a slideshow on the left column. You can click it to enlarge the photos. I'll hopefully be adding photos to it throughout the year.
