Saturday, June 26, 2010

Today I wore a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee. Lorena noticed the hole and told me that I should patch it and that she had the perfect fabric to match. So told me to wait while she went to her apartment to get it. Five minutes later she came back, with the pocket to the pair of pants she was wearing!





Nuestra Casa

The entrance to our apartment from the main floor

The view once you enter the apartment. To the left is the kitchen, a bathroom and a small bedroom. To the right is the living room and our room. Straight ahead our table/desk and access to the third bedroom located down the stairs.

The Living Room

How Lee watches the world cup. Why two T.V.s?! In case one shuts off (this happends every 15 minutes)

Our Bedroom

Inside Our Room

View of the kitchen and bathroom from the living room

View from our desk, down the stairs to the third bedroom (this bedroom has 5 beds)

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Tadeo is an orphanage our volunteers serve in daily.The morning shift is from 7am-12:30 and the afternoon shift is from 2pm-6:30pm. Last Tuesday I served at Tadeo in the afternoon while Lee stayed home to do office work and watch Uruguay play in the World Cup.

Those whom with I spoke (Mom and Dad) already know my first day at Tadeo was a VERY rough day and I was very discouraged. The children were mean to each other. A child smashed my head into the wall because he asked me to push him on the swing and I asked him to wait until I was done reading a book. I found children drinking out of a dirty gutter and received no help in stop them. I found 3 children playing in the laundry room -which is off limits- and one of them had climbed to the top of a ladder and was crying, not knowing how to get down.

Dinner was the worst. An older boy made another child give him all his food and I heard that this happens often. So I took his plate and put all the younger boy's food back on his plate. BIG mistake. The rest of the 3 older boys (including the boy I was trying to help get his food back) hit me with their butter knifes. When I grabbed their arms to stop them I was asked by a nun to not touch them, but to simply ask them not to hit me. I saw this same nun get hit and she just ignored it. The hard thing was that the other volunteers described the children's behavior as normal and seemed to just ignore it when they were treated badly.

As you can imagine I came home in tears, but committed with Lee to go back the next day.

I am so glad that I went back on Wednesday with Lee. These children rarely ever see men so thy were all drawn to Lee calling him "Papi". The three boys gave me stink eye all day, but never touched me. They played with Lee on the swings and had a great time. Although the children still misbehaved we enjoyed our time. We have been counseling with the Roseros about how to protect our volunteers and train them to stand up for themselves and earn/demand respect from the children.

Here is a picture of us outside the laundry room area on Wednesday. The children saw a cat run past and wanted to find it. As you can see we did not let them pass the gate in an attempt to begin establishing that the laundry area was off limits. This simple activity of watching the cat from a distance was so fun!



Slowly we encouraged the cat to come out to the playground. Here we are lined watching the cat.



The boy from dinner (whose food was taken Tuesday night) came to me at the end of the night and asked to if he could ride on my back. Healing began to take place.


Remar is an orphanage our volunteers visit once a week on Saturdays. One volunteer raised money to buy new shoes for all 55 children and this Saturday we went to help deliver them. Lee and I were asked to accompany the volunteers so that Lee could speak to the directors and help distribute the shoes in an orderly manner.
We were greeting with big hugs and requests to “amarcame” (pick me up). We would hold a child for a while and then put them down and pick up another one.
Eventually holding the child turned into swining the child.

While Lee and I were waiting to talk to the director, we stood holding hands when a little girl approached us and asked, "Son hermanos (are you siblings)?" When we told her we were married she became very excited and then asked, “tienen ninos(do you have children)?" We answered no and she smiled. That was when it dawned on me, what she was really asking was “have you come here to adopt one of us?” We were asked this same sequences of questions by another girl and hour later.




(we are having a hard time loading videos so we will edit this post later and update with video)



Video

The rest of the afternoon we jumped rope in the courtyard.

Video

pictures

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Candy?

Every taxi I have been in drives really fast and crazy do not have seat belts. Something I will just have to get used to because we take taxis daily. The taxi we took into town tonight was no exception. We went to eat in Calderon park at a resturant called Raymipamba. The resturant was beautiful and for dinner we ordered a shrimp dish to slit it. The meal was good, however, my favorite part of our date was the "candy" the waiter brought us after we paid for the meal. Lee asked me if i would like one and I said yes and then he offered me mint or cherry and I chose mint. I put it in my mouth gave lee a perplexed look and said, " they gave us cough drops?!" to which lee smerked and said,"Guess its considered candy here." We had a good laugh,simple but so funny!

Saturday, June 12, 2010

reaching the falls after a long beautiful hike

a distant view of the waterfalls in Giron

¡Ecuador or Bust!

It would have been nice to document the beginning of our journey with photos, but when we were running through airports to catch our flights, I'll be the first to admit that I did not think about pulling my camera out.
We started off early Tuesday morning saying good bye to Danika's family and flying out of LAX at 6:45 am. Everything, including the getting by with an extra couple of pounds in each of our checked bags with no charge, had gone smoothly until we were somewhere over New Mexico. We were told that due to weather buildup (thunderstorms) around our destination in Houston, we would be diverted to another airport until the weather cleared. Fortunately we had a three hour buffer before our flight would be leaving for Panama, so we weren't too worried. We landed in San Antonio and due to our delay, all passengers were given free access to the satellite TV. Bonus. But as time went on and even though the weather had cleared, there was a back up of flights in the airspace and we weren't high on the list. To make it short, our plane touched down 2 minutes before our flight to Panama was scheduled to leave, we lucky to have had that flight delayed because its pilots had been somewhere in that backed up line. But we made it.
When we arrived in Panama, unfortunately we didn't get to see the land because it was already night. This time all those who were going to fly to Quito (there were about 12 of us) were greeted at the gate by an airport employee who briskly lead us to the other end of the airport where our Quito flight had been held for us. Jokingly I said to the gate attendant that we had just made it, and she responded, half under her breath: "Good thing because we would have left in two minutes, with or without you." Wow.
So we took out last jot into Quito. Looking out the window at the city, it was like seeing a flowing river of lights defined by the unseen mountains and all their features, ever being fed by smaller streams of lights descending from higher up in the mountains.
Once in the airport, we collected all but one of our bags, which must have lagged in the quick transitions between planes, went through La Aduana (customs) and were met by our Quito counterpart and taken to the Quito house to rest.
Phew, a long day of travel came to an end. We were exhausted, which is funny how hours of sitting can literally exhaust all your reserves, but happy to have made it.

Friday, June 11, 2010

2nd Day in Cuenca

Our first day in Cuenca was the same as anybody's first day in their new home after a big move, it was filled with unpacking, introductions and rest for us.
Our second day however was different. Thursday are field trip days for the volunteers, so we went with them to some beautiful waterfalls and on the way we stopped to take pictures at the Continental Divide (pictured above). All the water east of this point empties into the Atlantic ocean and all the water west of this point empties into the Pacific ocean.
As you can see, we are in a beautiful country and our pictures do not do it justice.