To end the hiatus

(note, this was began on tuesday, finally had a chance to finish it this morning...)

Wow. I wish i had a good excuse for having taken so long to update again, but I am just too excited about my reason for doing so now to make up a good one.


I just got back last night from a three day trek though Cajas National Park, where Frank and I seriously left civilazation at 11 saturday morning, and returned about 4 monday afternoon. What did we do for the three days in between? Got completely and beautifully lost in the middle of the most breathtaking scenary, hiked 6-7 hours a day through every type of terrain imaginable (except snow, although hail was definitely involved), froze our butts off huddled and shivering in a tent for two nights, woke up to awe-inspiring landscapes that reminded us why we put ourselves through the night, and took off to meet the next incredible day of mountains, forests, waterfalls, walking through clouds, rainstorms, rocks to climb on, streams to walk over, and life to meditate on. Basically, i was in heaven. A tiny person lost amidst this paradise that is the world God has given us.


I could never do justice to this excursion in words, though I hope the pictures that are coming soon will help out some. It was just a needed escape. A reminder of the simplicity and basic presence that is God and love in this world, that is just as present in Cajas as in Duran as in Kirkland as in anywhere, but sometimes just harder to remember when it is being shouted over by so many distractions.


It came at a perfect time. But I guess in order to explain why the timing was so perfect I should back up a bit and fill you in on some of the events of the last month.... (feel free to return to this at a later date, this could take a while)



I guess I´ll pick up where I left off, after the surgical team. Life at Damian since then has gotten pretty much back to normal. The first couple weeks after were still a little crazy, getting everything taken care of and put away and ready for the next group in May (the december group cancelled and won´t come till June, huge blow for patients eagerly awaiting surgery), but since then I have spent most of the time at the foundation getting my butt kicked in Dominoes, laughing with patients and the kitchen staff (who i love!) and painting. Three massive walls are offically under my control now, and I am just about finished with the first. An exciting underwater scene began by the children of Nuevo Mundo and left horribly just barely begun. And I have to admit, it doesn´t look all that bad! Quite fun too! If anyone is in need of a wall mural when I get home, i will surely be a pro by then! In other fun Damian news, today was Scott´s birthday (one of the Rostro volunteers with me at Damian) so they threw this beautiful birthday party with all the patients in the patio, sang happy birthday, the kitchen staff made cakes and jello, and then patients got up and said kind words. Somehow though, i got suprised and thrown into this, so they decided to celibrate my birthday too since mine fell on a weekend and we didn´t have a party, and I too got a cake the whole shebang. It almost brought me to tears (or maybe that was from the belt beating my ass got in traditional Ecua style). All in all, it was a great way to return to work today, and so unexpected! Happy Birthday Scott!


My work at Valdivia has been a little less calm and collected. It´s really gone through quite a few ups and downs these past through weeks, really at the heart of my struggle of finding purpose and usefulness here. I won´t bore you with the currently distant frustrations, which were mostly centered around a few difficult children and an even more difficult sense of a lack of purpose and impact. It has since changed SO MUCH! Our numbers have doubled, the new kids that are coming are absolutely wonderful and adorible, and I seriously just look forward to seeing their faces everyday. The difficult older ones are still around, but we have since sat down with them and worked out our differences (still trying to make those understandings a reality, but definitely on the way at least). I have found a huge joy in continuing to recall games and activities I played or made up when I was little, and even more joy in figuring out to adapt those games to some good old value learning and critical thinking skills also. I still wish I had more time to spend planning for Valdivia alone, like to put together a good databank of math worksheets and start making a program notebook full of games and activities to leave for future volunteers, and even just to get to spend more time with the kids and get to know their families, but alas, there simply aren´t enough hours in the day. But I am content for now looking forward to the smiling faces and huge embraces that await me each afternoon, and only hope that the smiles and embraces I give them back make obvious even just an ounce of the insane amount of the love I have for those kids.

My time in the neighborhood has been another aspect I have been struggling with- mostly becuase I just don´t have any. I am pretty much working from 8 in the morning to 6 in the evening, dinner is at 730 and each night is followed by some sort of Rostro event, whether it is a house meeting, spirituality night, community night, or cleaning night. You may imagine that when a free night does come along, it is hard to pass up the lure of just resting and catching up on journaling (which has become almost as poor as my blogging). There is often an hour here or there to just go out and chat on the way to the store or something, but its just never enough and also leaves me feeling like I have to rush off somewhere and I hate it. I don´t understand how a program based around BEING with people can leave you so little time to actually do just that. there is just seriously no way to fit everything in with two full time jobs and a community to answer too. I hate feeling like I don´t know what is going on in my neighbors lives, and how the more time I spend away the less authentic and natural each conversation becomes. I feel like I am left to talk about the same surface level things instead of getting at the heart of life and how it is that we share in it together. It´s just a balance I need to work at, I know, I am just realizing the curses that accompany the blessings of community. I have been baking a lot of bread though late at night, and the joy of getting to share that with neighbors is a simple and beautiful thing.

Speaking of the blessings though, I must take a moment here to comment on just how amazing my community is. I realized the other night, as the five of us were getting dinner finished together and getting ready to sit down and eat together, that I am seriously living a dream. The community I´ve idealized for so long is now a reality, and as much as it has its ups and downs and difficult times and relations, I am just so blessed to live with four other people that in a nutshell really just want to be here. We love this work. We strive on pushing ourselves and trying to solve problems. We look forward to praying together and to lifting each other up. We serve each other daily. We hold each other accountable. We share stories together. We laugh together. We nap together. We just really love each other, and love that we have each other here to love. This makes it sound like a utopian dream rather than a reality, and is much more natural than that, I guess that at this moment I´m just on fire with it. And I realize that although it frustrates me a lot of times, I truly am living in a vision I have always wanted, and just took me 4 months to realize that it has become a reality. Kind of blows my mind still really.

Along with these daily toils, challenges, and moments of joy, there have been quite a few daylong or weekendlong escapes as well. Mostly unplanned and absolutely incredible.



Probably the most exciting was the weekend in Montañita, this peaceful little hippy beach town about 3 hours away, with Fercho, Dan, Conner, and Vicki. Dan and Vicki being my roommates, Conner being this wonderful 18 year old kid from California taking a year off before college and working down here for a few months, and Fercho my wonderful medical school friend i met when the surgery team was here. (Quick background, Fercho is basically my Sergio of Ecuador, and so wonderful). Despite Vicki being sick in bed all weekend, it was a dream. We basically just spent time laying on the beach, reading, surfing, eating amazing local food, taking walks along the beach, doing a little dancing at night, and really just resting and taking in the peace of this little town.


I spent one day at Padre Damien´s farm picking ciruelas (an Ecua fruit I don´t really know how to explain...) which reminded me oddly of washington though i have never picked apples... I am supposed to go back soon actually becuase mango season is just beginning, and they need help picking. I informed them I would probably eat just as many as I pick, and I´m pretty stoked about it!

I finally went out dancing for the first time about a month ago now, with Eric, Frank, and two of our medical student friends Susana and Valeria. It was SO much fun! Really didn´t feel all that different from college, going to a bar in Guayaquil, having a couple drinks (or at least I would have if it wasn´t for my parasite medication) and dancing all night. It was definitely weird being in that culture though, a completely different world going out with our medical student friends than with our friends from the neighborhood in Duran, and in all honestly I couldn´t help but feel a bit out of place. It really is odd how we bounce between Duran and Guayaquil daily, becuase they are absolutely different worlds. It was great to go out dancing though, and i am looking forward to getting some more stress out like that again soon.

I visited the huge cemetary in Duran for day of the dead (Nov. 2, after halloween), and that was quite an experience. I wanted to visit Olmedo´s grave, the first patient at Damien that I really fell in love with (who died during the week with the surgery group at the hospital). It was really special taking part in that celebration though, as all the families use that day to go and clean the gravesites and spent time with lost loved ones. It wass quite a shock at first, in terms of the amount of people that cram into the cemetary, but by the end I felt a unique sense of solidarity I hadn´t quite experienced before, and definitely a new insight into ecuadorian culture.

One weekend we went with the Christian-based community of our church on this all-day trip to the equivalent of an ecuadorian spa to help raise money for the community. Basically it is a mini waterpark, with four or five huge pools, diving boards, and water slides. One of the families that is part of this community, Nancy, Javier and their three little girls Marta Maria and Rosita we are really close to, and we pretty much spent the entire day with them, teaching the girls to swim, splashing around, playing cards, and just laughing a lot. It was really so fun getting to share this experience with them, especially since it is one that they seriously look forward to every year and is a very special day (when else would they save up money to go have a fun day at a waterpark). I just love this family. Nancy helped Vicki and I sew a blanket for one of our neighbors that just had her daughter too. They are all just wonderful.

So now transitioning back finally into why it was that the trip to Cajas was so needed and came at the perfect time. Two weeks ago, Father Jim Ronan (the founder of Rostro and one of the coolest priests ever) was down here for a quick three day trip just checking up on everything and saying say to some friends of his. It was a very short visit, but in those three days we had three masses, two of which were in English - you have no idea how much I missed he simply comfort of hearing mass in English, and one of which was at the Dominican monastary of this wonderful order of cloistered nuns, who then invited us all to breakfast (though it was more like a prison scene, us eating on one side and them sitting behind bars on the other side of the room just smiling and chatting with us). We also got to each sit down individually with Fr. Jim for 45 min or so and just check in, let him know how we are doing, ask any questions or if we needed any help with anything, just whatever was one our minds. And I must say, i didn´t realize I was in such need to talk with him. Verbalizing my struggles to Fr. Jim was just so comforting, he is such a calm presence and just knows how to listen and respond with exactly what you need to hear. It wasn´t anything revolutionary, just simple and right on. And I realized that part of the reason I was really struggling was becuase I had let a lot of the spiritual side drop. We were still doing our daily prayer, and enjoying sharing our sprituality in the house, but however it happened I was just forgetting that the spirituality is central to the work too, and that that is the purpose I was missing and the faith that I was forgetting. I guess I can´t really explain it very well, but the gist of it is that I just really needed some good prayer and reflection time to get back to that center.

Luckily, the following weekend was our first all RdC retreat, and the 12 of us spent the weekend at the beach, staying at the beach/retreat house of Pat and Sonya, the directors of the Nuevo Mundo school. It was a great time, but just felt more like an experience in community building and bonding time with the 12 of us (who don´t really see the other house all that often) than a time for needed personal prayer and reflection. I got some good meditative walks along the beach, played in waves, slept in a hammock on the roof, and just laughed and hugged alot. But it just left me wanting more. So the following weekend at Cajas (this past weekend) was just perfect.

So yeah...that´s pretty much a brief (believe it or not) update. Some fun stuff coming up. Kevin (our in country director) gets married next weekend, and weddings are always a good time. The next retreat group is mine to lead and will be here in a little over a week. And my brothers are coming down in less than a month!! I can´t wait!!!

Apart from that it is just life as usaul in AJS. Continual struggles to figure out how we can best help our neighbors. Waking up early to the sounds of machines digging holes in the streets to put in water pipes (which by the way is a HUGE deal! Almost everywhere water is brought in by truck and held in large tanks at each home, but is very unreliable and families are often out of water for days. While the roads are getting ready to be paved though, the community rallied to get pipes put in also. It costs each of them an arm and a leg to get the pipes put in, and water will probably take years to actually get flowing in them, but in the long run it is going to be great). And yeah, just living life I guess.

Oh, and you should check out a video my roommate Vicki made with the help of our friend Conner. It´s got some wonderful pictures and just kind of follows her life here, jobs, neighbors, etc. It´s pretty well done. I make a few cameos. Go to youtube.com and search for ¨snapshots of my life in ecuador¨