A Fun Night In Quito

I just thought I would update another time before the team comes to tell you about last night in Quito. One of the girls that I am working with celebrated her 23rd birthday on Wednesday, so last night, Gustavo (one of the guys in charge of us at Casa Blanca through Inca Link) took us out to this amazing Mexican restaurant and then he took us downtown to a place where we could karaoke. It was so much fun and we just spent the whole night laughing and having a great time in each other's company. I sang a ton of songs, but some of the highlights were: "Never Gonna Give You Up," "Kokomo," "Pour Some Sugar On Me," "Sweet Child of Mine," "Barbie Girl," "As Long As You Love Me," and "Gangsta's Paradise." We just had a great time with one another and it was a great way to finally be all back together all 4 of us before we have a team coming tonight. I just wanted to share how awesome of a night I had last night just because I was hanging around the right people, but still being able to be the goofy person that I can be. Today we are just continuing to prepare for the team and prepare ourselves to go off to El Carmen for a couple of days. It has been real cold here, so going towards the coast by El Carmen will be quite a temperature change, but it will probably be nice to feel some heat for a change. I'm excited to get myself in some construction projects and work hard for this building of the church this next week.

Thanks again for all the support through all the great experiences I have been having!

Here's some picture highlights from last night :)

Cassidi and Me with an AMAZING chocolate shake!

Singing "Never Gonna Give You Up"

"Gangsta's Paradise" with Marissa :)

"Kokomo" with Gustavo!

"As Long As You Love Me" with Michelle

My time in Otavalo

Hi everyone!

I just made it back from Otavalo today and it was such a great experience! I was able to do so much and learn so much while I was there, it was definitely a blessing. The family that I was staying with was so sweet and did everything they could to make me comfortable and really worked with me, especially because of the language barriers. The father, Oswaldo, knew the most English out of all of them, and he enjoyed every time he could say a word in English to me. Lorena, my mother for 10 days, was the sweetest probably. She is a school teacher, and every morning before school she would get up and make breakfast (desayuna-- i know Spanish!) and she was just always taking care of everyone in the house. I would ask her questions of how to say things in Spanish and she would ask me how to say things in English; we definitely both learned a lot from each other. She made the best fruit juices in the morning and at night. She would take fresh fruit and in the morning add milk to make something like a shake, and at night she would add water to make the juice. Michelle, their daughter, is 14 years old and we were able to bond over music. She knew a couple songs in English and enjoyed going through my Ipod of over 5,000 songs. Even though she didn't recognize much, she enjoyed that I had The Lion King, High School Musical, Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and especially Enrique Iglesias :) I connected the most with the son, Christian, who is 10 years old. Him and I had a ton of fun playing games, dancing around in the kitchen, playing soccer, and just laughing a whole bunch. I taught him to fist pound and say the word "booyah," which I must say was quite funny. We joked around a lot, and it was really cool. The family was seriously so sweet and really enjoyed being around each other. One night, we all just sat around the TV and watched "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (in Spanish of course) but everyone was guessing the answers and laughing and having a great time together. The closeness of the family was truly a blessing, but it made me miss my family a lot more.

My mornings during the weekdays consisted of taking Spanish lessons for two hours with Rosa. She taught some of the missionaries that I am working with this summer when they first came to Ecuador 9 years ago, and they have been sending interns to her ever since. She was great and I really did learn a whole lot. We crash coursed verbs, in the present, future, and past, and we tried to get as many phrases and words written down so that I could take them with me and practice while I am back in Quito. It was a lot work trying to get Spanish down as quick as possible, because the more I learned, the more I was able to contribute to the conversation in the family. The most frustrating part of the experience probably was that I could understand most everything that they were saying to me, but it was real hard to try to say anything back to them. I couldn't find the right words, and when I thought I knew what I was saying, I would speak in French instead of Spanish and just confuse everything. I did get a lot better as the week went on, and I was able to write a short, but nice, thank you note to the family.

One of my favorite parts of my experience in Otavalo was working at Compassion in the afternoons. Every day at 1pm I went over to the Alliance church and got to hang out with kids until 5pm. The Compassion program, which was started by Lorena, is a place for kids to go after their school day and they can get a decent meal and not only play with other kids, but there was also education classes that they had to go to. I helped out in the classes by doing whatever was needed of me by the teacher, but I would say playing with the kids was the most fun. Whenever I tried to take pictures of them or with them, they just wanted to take pictures themselves. They kept grabbing my camera, and since I am kind of a sucker for kids, I would let them try to take some pics. All I kept saying was "cuidado" (be careful) over and over again, and thankfully no one dropped my camera, and a bunch of cute pictures came out of it. I met some great kids, and once again, a lot of them just wanted to play with me or show off some of their English skills. Most of them could count to 10 and say a couple of colors in English, and every day they would repeat them for me. I think it was their way of connecting with me, and that was really cute. The last day that I was at Compassion I spent a lot of time just goofing around with the kids. e were listening to music and dancing and, of course, taking more pictures. Then, the girl I was with and I taught some of the kids the YMCA and Macarana. They thought it was the funniest thing because we were just having fun and dancing and not worrying about who was watching, but they all got into it. We even got Christian and his friend Joel to dance with us, and that was quite an accomplishment! The kids at Compassion were just amazing and it was such a blessing to be able to meet them all.

Over the weekend, the family wanted to take me out to see some of the other sites around Otavalo. On Saturday, we went on a walk to la cascada (a waterfall). It was close by, even though we had to go through a bunch a little spaces and climb some high stairs, but it was worth it. It was so beautiful, and of course I took a lot of pictures. On Sunday we went to a lagoon in a town over where we were able to see Cuicocha, a volcano. It was really awesome to be so close to something that could erupt at any time. Ecuador has so many beautiful sites, and I just cannot stop being captivated by the beauty of everything. Even during the bus ride back from Otavalo today I found myself looking out the window the whole time at the mountains and the towns and the clouds. It's such a high elevation that half the time you basically feel like you are in a cloud.

What's in store next for me is that my first team is coming down on Saturday night and then on Sunday we are headed to El Carmen. I was in El Carmen for the Amazing Race and that is where I got to use the machete to clear a field for a church. Well, our project until Thursday is going to be working on construction for that church. I also will be helping with the Vacation Bible School while I am there with the team. Thursday night we will come back to Casa Blanca and then hang around this area and finding some ministries here until the team leaves early on Sunday morning.

I am still doing well and really enjoying the time that I have here. I'm trying to include some pictures of my time in Otavalo below, so hopefully it works!

View in Otavalo, so beautiful!

Me and the kids at Compassion

La Cascada

Michelle, Christian, Me, and Cassadi

Christian, Joel, and I at Compassion

What an Amazing Race!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a crazy, but fun, last week. The Amazing Race sent us all over Ecuador doing a bunch of stuff and not knowing anything about it until we opened our clues for the day. Tuesday morning we started off splitting into our teams and then taking a bus into Mindo. When we got there we had to take another car down into the city and then hike up this huge hill where we were told that we needed to complete a ropes course. When we got to Canopy Adventure, we realized that the ropes course meant a zip line course. Needless to say, I was completely freaked out, but excited at the same time. I got up enough courage to get on the zip line and go, and then got off, shaking like crazy, but thought it was good experience. We started walking up this hill, and I am realizing that we were not done with the zip lining yet. It wasn’t until then that I realized I had to do 13 different courses before we were done! After a minor panic attack to keep doing it, I was okay, and by the 4^th one, I loved it! It was so beautiful to basically be up in the clouds and zip lining from one mountain area to another. The last one that we had to do was real long and since we were up in the clouds, you could only see about half the line and then it disappeared into what looked like nothing. That one was probably the most beautiful site, though. After we got done zip lining, we took a 4 hour bus to St. Domingo, took another bus to El Carmen, and then got in this truck to go to a Missionary Alliance church. It was real late at night, but we still had to play soccer against 3 natives and score a goal before we had to send one of our teams members in to a dark room to catch a chicken. Finally, we got to eat dinner and we stayed in Bramadora at the church for the night.

Wednesday we woke up and had to take a chiva back into the town of El Carmen. A chiva is kind of like a bus, but you can sit on the top the whole way. We had to duck to not get hit by the banana trees that were passing by, and I was sitting next to a couple of chickens, but that was probably the coolest form of transportation that I got to take. After we got into El Carmen, I had to go to another site and use a machete to chop a section of the field away. They are using that land to build a church, hoping to get most of it done this summer. After we used the machete, we had to run up a hill, catch a taxi to a house, and meet our other team member that was helping cook lunch with a family. We ate chicken and rice and fried bananas. The family was so happy to have us there with them that they didn’t want to eat with us, but we made them sit down so we could have a conversation. After that, we took the bus back to St. Domingo in order to catch a 5 hour bus to Riobamba. Yes, a lot of this Amazing Race was on the bus, but it did help make me more comfortable to catch transportation around places. Once we got to Riobamba, we found out we were checking into a hotel, and we went out to a Texas BBQ place for dinner. It was nice to be able to sleep in a bed and grab a quick shower in the morning before the last two days of the race.

Thursday we woke up and took a bus to a place where we had to walk up hill for over an hour. Being that high of elevation and walking on only stones uphill, it was real challenging. A couple people had to stop because it was just too much, but we eventually all made it to the top where we found another small Missionary Alliance church. We got to rest a little bit and watch some kids play soccer, and then we went down to a potato field and had to harvest potatoes for 30 minutes. We were just picking potatoes up off the ground, and we probably were able to fill a couple of large bags. The discouraging factor was that we found out that a huge bag of potatoes can only sell for about 6 dollars, and we only worked for a half hour and were tired, so we couldn’t imagine how people do that all the time. To get back to the church for lunch, we were told that we had to ride a burro up the hill. I am not a big fan of horseback riding, but, it was just another task that I had to do. The burro was nice, but I was happy when I got to get off of it. We all ate lunch together that was prepared by some of the ladies of the church, and then we took a bus to Quitochu, a town that is only 10 miles away from the volcano that just erupted that caused me to be stuck in the airport for a long time. The people there were looking forward to seeing us so much and promised us we weren’t in danger, so we still went there anyways. When we got off the bus, we saw one of our leaders at a house, so we went there to meet him. The whole family came out and gave us tea and cookies and it wasn’t until about halfway through that Mark told us that we weren’t supposed to be at that house. The family knew Mark from before, and they invited him in for food, and once they saw all of us, they wanted us there too. We were still going to go to another house for coffee and bread, so he told us to save our appetites. The first family that wasn’t even expecting us asked us to stay for dinner and to sleep in their beds for the night. We already had plans for dinner, but we knew that they were just trying to serve God by offering up their beds, and we ended up accepting them. But, for dinner, we probably had the most challenging part of the Amazing Race. They told us that we needed to skin a guinea pig and prepare it to eat for dinner that night. That was not the best experience, but here, it is considered to be a delicacy to eat guinea pig. They usually go for 15 dollars, so for them to be willing to share with all of us was a big deal. We finally got through that, and then we got to go to a small church service for the night. They sang some of their songs, and then we went up to the front and sang some worship songs in English and in Spanish, and they enjoyed it a lot. The sermon was all about being united and being one in Christ, and it was a beautiful message considering we may have had some language barriers or cultural differences, but we are all still one in Christ. After that, we went back to the house that we were going to stay at and just talked to some of the girls that lived there. They were showing us pictures of some of their friends and just enjoying spending time with us. That night, however, we didn’t get much sleep because we could hear the volcano the whole time. It shook the house a couple of times, and we could see smoke coming out, but we knew that we were protected if anything were to happen. It was a crazy experience to hear all that noise and to be in a position where we were so close to a volcano, but it didn’t bother anyone in the community because they were so used to it.

On Friday we took a bus back to Quito in the morning and had to learn a song called “Chullo Quiteno” by asking people on the bus to sing it for us. Once we got back to Quito, we had to take some trolleys around town and go to a park. We then had to find a couple of buildings until we got back to the guest house of the Missionary Alliance. Once we got there, we had to count all the stairs in the building while we were singing the song that we were taught. They had 108 stairs in that house, and once we got that correct, we had to get our way back to Casa Blanca. After arriving back there, we were FINALLY able to take a good shower, and relax until dinner. We all ate dinner together and then just had some time of worship. Afterwards, they told us our placements for the Amazing Race, and since we switched teams every day, our scores were individual. I ended up coming in tied for 5^th place out of 12 people, which I didn’t think was too bad J

My internet is pretty spotty right now, so I will try to post pictures another day from the Amazing Race.

Because of all the hard work they put us through during those four days, they took all of us to the Hot Springs. It was a little over an hour drive, but it was amazing and completely relaxing. We went to Crepes and Waffles for dinner, a really great restaurant here where you can get any type of crepe or waffle that you want. On Sunday we did some worship as a group for the last time because the Peru people were going to leave that evening. We spent the rest of the afternoon together, and then we sadly said our goodbyes, and they left on their bus ride.

Tomorrow I am headed out to Otavalo (about an hour and a half away from Quito) so that I can live with a family for 10 days and study as much Spanish as possible. Pray that I learn some Spanish or I will have 10 pretty quiet days J I’ll let you know how my experience goes!