Clear Kidneys and Crazy Kids

According to my fifth visit to the urologist this month, I have GREAT kidneys! Mind you, this is 2 urograms, a kidney stone, a treatment with ESWL, and too many x rays to count later. But none the less, my kidneys are clear, and I am WAY too excited! It´s just nice to not have to worry about it and countdown to the next trip to the doctor - because as much as I would like to pretend that it wasn´t affecting my work here, the exhaustion was taking its toll.

This past week though I´ve found myself with a newfound energy. Things are going really well at work, and I am heading into these last 6 months with maybe even more energy and excitement than I started with 6 months ago (though I wouldn´t have thought that was possible). I think that is partially becuase I am in denial of the fact that my time here is half over. It has gone way too quickly.

And it´s weird, becuase I find myself looking back to the reasons I came, and the challenges I set for myself and ways I was going to push myself this year, and I find myself disappointed. That I haven´t made the progress I would have liked to by now, and that the reality of getting to the place I envisioned by the time I leave in just another short 6 months is very unlikely. I realize that I have explored so many other aspects that I could never expected, and have really allowed myself to get lost in my reality and my work here (which above all else was something I wanted to do), but it is humbling to see the places I have failed as well. So maybe it is this realization and my stubborn nature that takes those failures and just sets myself up to hit these next six months even harder, I don´t know. Whatever it is, I am enjoying this newfound energy, and just pray I can let it all out and don´t keep coasting as I feel I have done at times here.

Valdivia is going really well. Dan and I have really changed the way the program runs, trying to really push the educational side and give the kids a service that would at least be more aggressive in reenforcing the material they learn at school. It is currently vacation for them (summer break as we would call it), so our numbers have more than doubled and we have close to 40 kids daily. We´ve divided the kids into 3 age groups, of which I am in charge of the middle group (8-11 yr olds), and have each day of the week dedicated to a different subject, allowing ourselves to focus more on each kid and what level they should be working at.

One of the biggest challenges we´ve had all year is figuring out how to really provide a needed service to the kids with the after school programs. They serve the purpose of giving the kids a safe place to go and reinforcing positive values with the different themes we have each week, but in the academic area they just haven´t been set up to really give the kids the skills they need. We´ve still got a ways too go, and we´re working with our director Kevin and the other programs to adopt a critical thinking curriculum, but we´re on the way at least. And what is great, is that the kids seem to really enjoy it too. It´s beautiful to see how excited they get about learning, and even come a half hour early just to get a quick english lesson or practice their math. The reality that these kids just aren´t getting those desires fed at school or at home just kills me. Whether it is resources, individual attention, or patience in an overcrowded public school system that is lacking, I hate to see so much excitement be little by little beaten down. We aren´t foolish enough to think we are changing that, or making any permanent solutions, but to see the faces of the kids light up when they can explain the different between a verb and an adjective is enough to make me excited to come back to work the next day, with some new activity or some new strategy to get them to think for themselves and be creative.

Apart from Valdivia, Padre Damien has been especially exciting recently also. I´ve kind of fallen into this role as the liason between the medical groups getting ready to come down from the states and the foundation down here. Mostly, this means I spend quite a bit of time emailing back and forth and getting lists of patients and schedules of surguries organized, but I also get to communicate quite a bit with the hospitals here - going and meeting with the main doctors we work with here and making sure everything is ready for the medical team. Its a lot of grunt work, but I must say that I love it. Just going to the hospital every week or two, looking over lists of patients from the last surguries and seeing which ones need to come in for followups, and talking to Germania about how we can make the week run as smoothly as possible is way more exciting than it should be. Maybe I really am destined for medicine, I don´t know, but I am definitely enjoying the little exposure that I get to it down here.

Community wise, I´ve decided that living in Duran is not so different from college. At least in so far as living in the Logan neighborhood. The same feeling I´d get walking around Logan on the weekends, just randomly stopping in friends houses when the door is open and they are out hanging out on the porch, listening to music, or playing frisbee in the street, where I´d end up stopping to say hi and end up spending the majority of the afternoon there, is really not so different from here. Granted, the houses are tiny and made of cane or cement and much closer together, but the general feeling of knowing everyone and not being able to walk by withut stopping to say hello and just getting into friendly conversation for what turns into the better part of the afternoon is just the same. It will be weird going home to a place where I don´t know each of my neighbors, or can just walk into thier house uninvited at any time (or actually - where it is rude if i just walk by and don´t come in), where the joy of not having a strict schedule or full day of *stuff* to do allows me to just live with my neighbors and enjoy just that. And in a round about way it makes me miss college too, and realize that I am not going back to Gonzaga - a reality that I don´t think has fully set in yet.

A few fun updates -
we had our second all volunteer retreat at the beginning of february, and it was great. We went to this cute little beach town and stayed in this great (but WAY too big for us) jesuit retreat center. I spent a good portion of the time just climbing along the rocks on the beach - which you could explore for what seemed like miles - mostly just in thought or enjoying the peace of the ocean. I really don´t think I can live more than a couple hours from the ocean for longer than a few months of my life at a time - I just love it too much.

I spent a day at the beach with my roommates and the beautiful family that lives below us also - Graciela and her two children Nicole and Miguel. It was nothing short of an Ecuadorian adventure, spending more time getting too and from the beach than actually on it, but it was great. Just getting to share the kids first time to the beach and how excited they were about it, and understanding more of the true life of a young ecuadorian mother, as she struggles with the reality of her children´s father in prison, his mother´s dependency on her, and her own persistance in not getting back with the father despite the utterly lonely life she leads. It was really special to get to spend that day with them, and I am really enjoying the relationship we are building with this family, which I know means the world to them also.

The craziness of retreat groups has officially started up. We have only a couple weeks in the entire time we have left in which there will be no retreat groups here. It´s kind of exciting, but also means we have less time to ourselves and to spend freely with our neighbors than we would like. But the energy the groups bring to both the kids and us is great, and a continual reminder to be giving our all while we are here.