Adventures In Ecuador: "You're already home where you feel loved."

Once again, slacking on the blog frontier. If you're still with me, happy to have you here! A lot has happened in the past two months so to spare you three hours of reading, I'll share some highlights.

David and Amber, gym buddies from back home, came to visit! I could kick myself for not taking pictures with my phone because David had a nice camera but it got wet so...fingers crossed some of those pictures are saved! Until then, here's a nice picture I found on the internet, don't we look happy?!

A few weeks later, Mark and Matt, two of my friends from college came to visit and we were able to do some traveling! We went rafting, hiking, exploring, and just had a great time.

This was my fourth time rafting and possibly the craziest!

Casa Del Arbol

Mitad Del Mundo

Pichincha

Just two men and their manly hiking sticks.

We made it to the refuge on Cotopaxi!

The volunteers have been invited into the homes of some of our Center families and friends. We visited Maria's family to celebrate her grandson's baptism. There were a few babies and children being baptized that day. Everyone was dressed in beautiful white clothes and there were two young women being presented into society for their quinceanera. Maria is one of the women that cooks for us in the volunteer house. Her family was equally warm, welcoming, and loving as she is! We enjoyed dinner, drinks, dancing, and games. One of her grandsons, Sebastian, became my buddy for the night and I am currently planning ways to take him home with me.

Sebastian enjoying some ice cream in his clean white clothes.

The next home we visited was Marcia's. You may remember Marcia from the blog post about my parents coming to visit. Marcia lives about 2 hours away from the Center, not including a long walk to the bus station. She is an angel for commuting that far every day. I loved seeing Marcia's home, she lives on top of a hill and her house reminds me of a cabin in the north woods. She made us breakfast and lunch and we enjoyed looking through the many photo albums she has with pictures of the Center "back in the old days."

Most recently we went to another party hosted by the Garcia family celebrating the baptism of their son. I have Dennis Garcia in my second grade class, his cousin Jairo in my ninth grade class, and a few of the other volunteers teach his siblings and parents. After mass we walked with the family up a hill to their house. We approached what looked like a storage locker but when they opened the garage door we saw a table filled with snacks, a beautiful cake, and a room decorated with balloons and streamers. We didn't see much of the rest of the house but the room we were in was nothing but cement and folding chairs. We sat and talked for about an hour while the kids passed around plates of snacks and then the real food started to arrive...oh the food! SO. MUCH. FOOD. We started with an enormous bowl of soup, mine had a whole potato, three chicken wings, and a chicken foot. It was delicious but I wasn't brave enough to try the foot. Next, we were each served an enormous plate of food with two more whole potatoes, lettuce, sauce, and half of a cui. For those of you don't know, cui is guinea pig. Thank god I got the bottom half of a cui because the half with the head was a little more adventurous than I was willing to get, it still had teeth!!! I'm glad I tried it but it wouldn't be my first choice of entree in the future. The family was so gracious and kind, I knew this was a special treat for them to buy cui and to host this many people in their home. They always insisted we eat first and they repeatedly thanked us for joining them. We talked and danced, I held their baby, and it was one of the most memorable experiences I've had in Ecuador. Towards the end of the evening we went outside with the kids and played a "game" that was an extreme version of an egg toss. The kids had scrounged up enough change to buy two eggs and were excited to throw them high into the air in anticipation of someone catching it (hopefully not with their face). After one too many tosses, an egg was headed straight for a parked car but Michael intercepted and got covered in egg. Didn't see THAT coming. We broke the first two eggs rather quickly so Michael ran to the store to buy more. It was beautiful watching the kids have so much fun with simply an egg. I can't count how many times I think how different life is here compared to back home where we have things like PlayStation and Chuck E Cheese. It started to rain so we went back inside for some cake and then we headed home. The families we have visited are all so kind, warm, and welcoming. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by so much love and generosity!