Conference, Olympics, and a Depressing USA loss

7.18.11

This past week was pretty laid back. Not much happened during the week. I just worked and that’s about it. “Work” is still considered going to the organization and sit on my computer all morning and most afternoons. Nothing is really poppin yet.

Friday I went to Loja, Ecuador with 3 coworkers for a conference. Doc had to speak at it so he took some of us with him. The drive is a little over 3 hours. We left at 6am in the morning. 6am is super early for me considering I sleep in until about 8 most mornings. Doc was the first one to speak at the conference. We got there a little late because there was some rain on the way down. To my surprise they were tapping their feet waiting for him. The conference actually started on time! Couldn’t believe it! The conference ended up being the same Organic Economic Law conference I went to a couple weeks ago in Cuenca, but on a smaller scale. It was only in the morning this time around. My coworkers talked and giggled through the whole thing. The conference ended with a perfomance by a mentally handicapped youth band. It was so amazing to see these kids sing, dance, and play instruments. Absolutely indredible!!

When the conference was over lunch was provided. It was delicious! Then everyone wanted to buy bocadillas, which is a traditional candy from Loja, so we walked to the market and bought some. On the way there Angie pointed out a sign hanging at a tienda that said chocobananas. Of course I couldn’t pass it up so we got all one! This time around they were 25₵ instead of 10₵, but were bigger AND had sprinkles on them, definitely worth it! As I was about halfway through my frozen chocolate covered banana I felt what was something similar to a hair on my tongue… I take a look at my chocobanana and there it was, a hair stuck in it under the frozen chocolate. G-R-O-S-S! But what did I do? Eat around it until I could pull the hair out and continue eating it. There was no way I was going to let a long, random, nasty, black hair get in the way of me and my chocolate covered frozen banana, folks. Not a chance. The ride back was fun; I snuck a quick 15 minute snoozer in and then chatted and laughed with everyone the whole way back.

Showing off my delicious (and hairy) chocobanana with sprinkles :)

One of the women with us brought her 10 month old son. He was the cutest thing ever! He loved blowing little bubbles. And for a while every time he did it, I did it back at him… With 95% less spit than him. Haha. He thought it was really funny. And then every time I would hold him as soon as he got in my arms he would blow bubbles. Or if he was in someone else’s arms and we made eye contact he would start to blow bubbles. It was so cute! And everyone got a charge out of it… and so did he. Oh, and his name is Tupac.

Tupac and I

 Isn't he adorable????

Here's the little munchkin with slobber all over his face

after blowing bubbles at me! Don't worry, I was

way less slobbery than he was! :)

Here are some pics from the conference:

Beautiful view on the way to Loja

Doc talking at the conference

Me at the conference. My coworkers love taking pics of me. 

Angie and I

Youth band. The girl that is kinda blurry was dancing her butt

off. She was having herself a grand ol time on stage. The other

2 girl dancers kept looking at her and following what

she was doing. It was so cute!

This was the commentator (sp?). His job was to

get the crowd pumped up. He was really funny. At one

point he said, "We are going to play ______ song. If you

don't like it, well, that sucks for you!" It was really funny!

Buying some bocadillas. They are delicious by the way!

Oh, and they snuck a pic of me while I was sleeping on the ride back.

Actually,more like 3 or 4, but I'm only going to share 1 with you.

When we got back to Cuenca some friends and I went to Angie’s house to make dinner and watch movies. We made grilled ham and cheese sandwichs, popcorn, and hot chocolate. Then we watched the movie/documentary called Earthlings… very appalling movie. Makes me never want to eat meat again.

Saturday was a big day. Some PCV friends and I were planning on having a Beer Olympics party. Cuenca vs. Santo Domingo cluster. To start it off we had a jaba (case) race. Here in Ecuador “cases” of beer are 12 beers in a crate so it wasn’t too bad considering there were 6 people to a team. After that we played team beer pong and then some flip cup. It was an all-around fun night full of delicious food and speaking English and meeting new PCVs from other omnibuses. At 1am I was ready to go home so I called a cab. In the cab I was dreaming of how comfy my bed was going to be and how excited I was to lay down and get a good night’s rest before the big game the next day. But when I got home there was a party at my house. WHAT??? Not once since I’ve been here has anyone in my family had people over. And the one night I’m exhausted and ready for bed there is a party at my house?? Of course I didn’t get to go to bed. Even if I wanted to my room is 2 steps away from the kitchen and it would have been impossible. So I stayed up chatting with my host brothers and their cousins that are in town. The party was a birthday party for a guy friend of my host mother. I finally got to bed around 4:15am.

Team Cuenca!

The enemies... grrr! ha

Sunday I got out of bed at Noon and met my PCV friends at a bar called Inca, which is owned by an American, to watch the Women’s World Cup finals. It was a good time, the whole bar was filled with nothing but Americans chatting and rooting on the good ol US of A!

At one point these two women and their dog sat behind the couch my friend and I were sitting on and started talking to us. The owner of the dog even found a seat for her tiny dog to sit on. It was really funny. We got to talking and this woman was completely in love with her dog. So much so that it was the only thing we talked about. Towards the end of our conversation she asked my friend and I if we liked dogs and then handed her dog over to sit with us. The dog ended up falling asleep on my lap and the woman thought it was the cutest thing. The dog’s name was ‘Khaki, like khaki pants.’ <-- that is what the woman said every time someone asked her the name of the dog. It got old really fast.

Anyhoo, after the depressing loss we went over to this guy’s house for a BBQ. We ate grilled veggies and some hamburgers. It was sooooo good!

And that was my weekend.

Finally, a little bit about work. Today at work Angie and David were telling me that in a couple minutes these two women were going to come to the office for a meeting and that we were going to start a program teaching English to the members of the 32 communities we work with. Basically, what Angie meant when she was telling me about it, was that I was going to be the one setting it all up and working with this woman from the States who teaches English here in Cuenca.

First of all, nothing like springing this on me 5 minutes before it happens. Second of all, I really do not have a desire to teach English, but whatever, it will give me something else to do besides sit on the computer all day. Nothing is planned yet, this all just came up today. We have to talk to community members and form classes first. Then figure out if we will be traveling to their communities to teach classes or if they will be coming to Cuenca. It will be a long process. There are lots of people from the communities that are interested, so hopefully this turns out to be successful J

Until next week,

Heather

WE WON, WE WON, WE WON!!!

7.12.11

Dang, was it a long weekend. All day Friday and Saturday I was at the FEPTCE community tourism(CT) conference of Ecuador. FEPTCE is the main community tourism org in Ecuador and all other CT organizations are part of FEPTCE. 200 people were confirmed to attend.  74 communities in total were to be present. The conference was here in Cuenca, and since La Red is the community tourism organization in Cuenca, we were in charge of organizing everything: projectors, agenda, hotels for the out-of-towners, food, entertainment, the whole works. So early in the week we were running all around getting everything together and finalizing the last few things.

Friday, the conference was supposed to start at 9am. That, of course, didn’t happen. People didn’t even start arriving until 9:30. Gotta love the punctuality of this culture J My coworkers didn’t even show up until 10 so I sat there reading and chatting to people I knew until they arrived. Friday morning was the most interesting part of the conference for me. A couple people got up and talked about the direction they wanted to go with community tourism, as well as things everyone needed to do better in order to be more successful. After that, the rest of the morning was basically about politics…. Borrrriiinngggg, mostly because I didn’t understand. Finally, it was lunch time around 2. My coworkers and I waited until everyone else went through the line before we ate. By the time everyone had went through the line it was 3:30 and I was starving. Well, they ran out of food…. But I did get a little bit to eat.  I shared a small plate of food with Angie around 4. We were all sooo hungry since we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Oh well, the food was enough to coat my stomach and last me until dinner time.

After lunch a handful of representatives from a few communities stood up and explained some community tourism activities they were doing in their towns. That part was definitely interesting, but hard to concentrate since I had been drilling my brain with Spanish since 10am that morning. It was finally time for dinner and some entertainment. No worries folks, I didn’t go hungry at dinner. There was plenty of food to go around. Woo hoo! When everyone was done eating the entertainment began. The people of the jungle sang and danced. It was soooo cool! I’ve been in the mountains since I arrived here, so I hadn’t seen these dances! It a great time. They did about 10 dances altogether. The young girls and boys, teenagers, and adults from the Amazon all danced. OH MY GOODNESS, the little girls were so adorable in their little beaded outfits!!!!  So adorable!!! The day was finally over at 10pm.

Pics of the Amazonian dances!

 Traditional head gear for the men in the Amazon

and the bead across their chests

In one of their dances they picked people out of the crowd

to dance. OF COURSE, they immediately picked out the

Gringa! I was someone in that crowd :)

Saturday, the conference was scheduled to start at 8am… do you think it started on time??? Absolutely not! It started at 10:30. Only 2 ½ hours late, not too shabby. Haha. Saturday, in all honesty I’m not really sure what they talked about. A bunch of different people got up to talk, but I didn’t understand much. It didn’t help that I was burning 100 CDs of information from the conference that we were going to hand out to everyone present. I finished right at lunch time.

***Side story: When I got home from the conference Friday evening I got to talking to my host mother because she was in the kitchen. I was telling her all about the day and then I told her how we ran out of food during lunch time so I didn’t eat much until dinner. So Saturday morning when she was dropping me off at the conference she stopped at a bakery and bought me 2 wheat rolls and a yogurt drink and told me that she didn’t want me to go hungry today. And if they ran out of food I would have something to eat. It was so cute***

Hannah helping me burn CDs

Celebrating that I'm done burning the CDs! haha

After lunch it was time to elect a new board of representatives for FEPTCE. Now this is a huge deal because FEPTCE is basically the “Department of Community Tourism” of Ecuador and a great honor to the people who are elected. First they selected four people who are not already part of the board to run the elections. Oh man, it was so unorganized. People were standing up giving their opinions on how the elections should be run. Some yelling and very unhappy with how things were being ran. Then they voted to see if everyone wanted to do a secret vote for all the positions or a communal vote where everyone just raises their hands and someone counts. Well, we must have voted for that like 3 times because people weren’t happy with the way they were being counted. Only one person from every community present was supposed to be voting, but everyone at the conference was raising their hands, and some people were getting mad. So someone finally had the bright idea to read the name of the communities one by one and have a representative of that community come sit in the middle where they had reorganized the chairs so the voters would be in the middle of the room and everyone else would be on the outskirts.

Then the voting began. They voted for president first, then vice president, and then for the five secretaries. Nominations were put out for president. One of the members of La Red (the organization I work for) from Saraguro, Loja, Ecuador was nominated. And HE WON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wow, what a day it was for La Red! We were all clapping, cheering, and whistling! It was SO COOL to be a part of it! He will be the President for the next 2 years. Then we nominated and voted in the rest of the new board members. The board members were sworn in to their new positions, the new president said a few words, then the conference was over and a group from Esmeraldas, Ecuador performed songs and dances to end the day!

Pics of the group from Esmeraldas. We went out

dancing with them later that night!

Most everyone left, but about 30 people stuck around to have dinner. After dinner we went out to celebrate La Red winning presidency with all my coworkers and the dancing group from Esmeraldas. The President had to get back to Saraguro, unfortunately, but we danced and had ourselves a great time celebrating! Viva La Red!!! J

Ximena, Diego, and Angie

Celebratory drink for winning Presidency!!!

So that was my weekend. Didn’t do much on Sunday besides sleep in, Skype my family for a couple hours, and relax. I got to talk to my mom AND dad on Skype, so that was nice! I hadn’t talked to my dad in almost a month because he has been working out of town during the week and I don’t normally use the internet on the weekends.

Ximena and Maxhyx (Magix) at the conference

 Diego being Diego

Angie and I taking a break from the conference

You can find this grub in the Amazon of Ecuador.

People in the Amazon eat these things.... shiver. Mom,

how would you like to find one of these in your garden?!?!

Angie worked up the nerve to hold the grub. Then she

freaked out because the pincher things on its head pinched her!

Now on to Monday… So Monday I’m sitting at work and Diego comes down and asks Angie and I if we wanted to go to dinner to celebrate with Miguel. I was like, “What? Why are we celebrating for Miguel?” and then Diego proceeds to tell me that Miguel was leaving Tuesday morning to go live and work with his aunt in Quito for a couple years. Nothing like dropping the ball on us less than 24 hours before he leaves! Anyways, we all went to dinner and had a celebratory toast for Miguel! It was a good time! Te vaya bien, Migue! Le vamos a extrañar! (Have a good trip, Migue (his nickname)! We are going to miss you!)

Miguel's farewell dinner!!

All of us in front of the restaurant

Today (Tuesday) I was walking to work at 9:20am like any other day. Every morning I get to walk along River Tomebamba, my favorite part of Cuenca, to get to work. But this morning it was different. As I was approaching the point where I normally cross the street to walk along the river I could see a sea of people on both sides of the river, a fire truck with its lights on, and tons of cars parked along the street illegally. I finally get to where the action was. Everyone is looking towards the river. I see firefighters with a volleyball net type thing tied to a pole on each side of the river and hanging just above the water. It was barely touching the water and bouncing up and down from the crazy current. I finally find a spot to stand and worked up the courage to ask the guy next to me what was going on. He told me that there was a car accident in Cajas National Park (about 30 minutes away from Cuenca by bus) at 8am this morning and people were ejected from the car and into the water/river in Cajas. And the firefighters were waiting for the bodies to come down river so they could catch them… I was like what??? Did I just hear that correctly? I had to ask him to tell me again just to confirm that, in fact, I did understand correctly.

It’s been raining for 3 days straight, so what normally is a calm, shallow, beautiful river with large, smooth boulders, has been a nasty, muddy one with a super strong current the past few days. All I could think were bad thoughts, obviously…. There is no way these people are alive… the current is way too strong… one boulder to the head going through this current and they will be knocked out or dead… how the hell are they going to have the strength to grab on to the net when they come through?

Even with all the terrible thoughts going through my head I couldn’t help but stand there like an curious Ecuadorian and look up river hoping to see some alive people come barreling through the current. After a couple minutes I remembered I had my camera so I took some pictures. I wasn’t the only one taking pictures so I didn’t feel bad. I HAD to capture this moment. After a while I had to get myself to work so I moved on. I told my coworkers about it and that I wanted to go back to watch the rescue. There was only 3 of us there and we couldn’t leave the office unattended so I never did go back to check it out. When I went home for lunch at 1pm everyone was gone and the net was taken down. I have no idea if they found the bodies or if the bodies never came. The curiosity is killing me.

Blue net in the water

Looking up river

Just some of the people that were crowded around the river

Nothing is ever boring around here, that’s for sure. Something is always going on!

For example…. Mom and Dad you are going to kill me for forgetting to tell you this, sorry! So last week sometime I was walking back to work in the afternoon... I was CAREFULLY crossing the street near a round-about. There were tons of cars in the round about so the cars were stopped waiting for the round-about to clear so they could go. Since they were stopped, I crossed behind the 2 front cars. Well, as I was crossing the second car put his foot on the gas to rev his engine and inch up a little bit… I guess because he was mad I was crossing in front of him, I don’t know. I immediately looked to it with a glare thinking ‘you idiot, you see me crossing and you have no where the go. What the heck are you doing?’ He then hits the gas a little harder, and HITS ME!!!!!!! (It was not hard and I’m totally fine) I took my fist and smashed it into the hood of his car out of sheer automatic reaction. I was sooooo pissed! What an, excuse my language, ASSHOLE!!!!! He then raised his hands like it was MY fault that he hit me. I could have punched the old man! And there was NO WHERE for this man to go as I was crossing because the 2 cars in front of him were stopped!

When I got to work my heart was still racing and I told all my coworkers what had just happened. They were all concerned for me and asking me a million questions. They told me to sit down and got me some water J They are so great. And like I said, I’m totally fine. He barely tapped me, but it’s the point. I wish my Spanish was up to par so I could have cussed him out!!!!!!! Haha.

Until next week, much love from Ecuador!

Heather

P.S.- My mom pointed out to me that in my last blog I wrote ‘flower’ when it was supposed to be ‘flour’ like the cooking ingredient. I even proofread that entry like twice. haha, oops. She asked my sister if she caught the mistake and my sister giggled and said yes. So I’m sure all of you caught it, as well. I hope you laughed just like they did. I guess that’s what happens when you have been speaking Spanish for 5 months straight… Your English starts going down the drain J

Only In Ecuador

7.5.11

WARNING: longest blog post yet......

I’ve had a million ‘only in Ecuador’ moments, this is just one of them.

I MUST start with Wednesday… this is a great story.  So every day we all come home for lunch around 1 or 1:15pm. Well, I was the first one home Wednesday so I sat in the kitchen talking to Mary, the girl who cooks for us, waiting for everyone to arrive. I hear the car doors outside; my host brother and mom are home. My host brother walks into the kitchen first, then my host mom. I look up to greet them and immediately get goose bumps and an eerie feeling throughout my body when I see my host mom… her head is all bandaged up and her face is swollen. She had an ace bandage from under her chin wrapped around to the top of her head. She had cotton balls taped below her ears, and a dried blood mark running from the left side of her head down to her chest. And not to mention she was totally out of it. I immediately look at my host brother and said “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?” But my host mom answered and said she had surgery on her cheeks. (And I recalled her vaguely telling me that she wanted to get it done a few weeks back, but she didn’t have a date set and was only talking about the procedure.) I said, “oh, you did?” She didn’t answer because she was on her phone, what’s new. But when she was on her phone she almost fell over and ran into the kitchen wall because she was woozy from the anesthesia still. She got out of surgery at 12:30 and was home at 1:10p. I then recommended she go lay down. My host brother agreed, but she started helping Mary finish preparing the food… MY HOST MOM IS CRAZY! The story gets better.

So we finally get my host mom to stop worrying about the food and her phone and get her to bed. 15 minutes later there is a knock on the door and in walks a family from the TV station where she does her advertising. Marcia invited them over for lunch the same day of her surgery!!!!!!!!! Not to mention like an hour after she is off the operating table. She is nuts! She comes back down seeming to be a little more with it and she managed to wipe the dried blood streak on her chest. The doc said she shouldn’t eat, yet she still ate. The family kept saying, “Marcia, I can’t believe you invited us over. You’re so crazy. You should be relaxing.” “Eh, it’s no big deal.” She responds. I couldn’t handle sitting there worrying about her so I changed my clothes and went to go lay out and soak up some rare sun on the patio.

Later that night after she had had a nap I asked her why she didn’t tell me she was getting the surgery and asked her how long she had known about it. She said she had known about it since Friday and had just forgotten to tell me. I also found out she never told anyone. Not even my host brother who took her. She called him at 10:30am the day of the surgery and said, let’s go I’m going to get surgery. Only in Ecuador would someone “forget” to tell everyone about a pretty significant surgery.

So by now I bet you are wondering why Marcia had surgery on her cheeks, aren’t you? Well, let me tell you. She had liposuction on her lower cheeks and under her chin because she thought her face looked to fat when she was on television!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you believeit??? Oh, and she has to wear that ace bandage thing on her face 24/7 for 2 weeks!

And by the way, she loves telling people about the surgery. She is so excited to have gotten it done. And she likes telling people that it was free because the doctor who did the surgery is a good friend of hers. She is a wonderful woman, but she is crazy. I could never in a million years imagine my real mom “forgetting” to tell me she is having surgery or having surgery because her face looks chubby on camera. Mom, don’t go throwing me curve balls now.

My coworkers and I went to get hamburgers the

other night, but we got french fries instead

Thursday was a normal day, except that my lingering cough was getting worse and a cold started kicking in. I had a headache, my nose was starting to get stuffy, my body ached, and I still had that nasty cough. Cool, no biggie, I’m going to go to bed early hoping to feel a little better in the morning since I have to get up early for a big work meeting all day. I crawled under the covers around 10pm with my alarm set for 6:30am. Well, my 14yr old host brother, his 2 friends, and my 27 year old host brother decided that they were going to play computer games against each other in the kitchen starting at 10pm. (Kitchen is literally 3 steps away from my room) You know the war games where you can all be on your own computer but playing against each other at the same time? Yeah, that’s what they were playing. Whatever, I shook it off and rolled over and started sucking on some cough lozenges so I wouldn’t be up the whole night coughing… little did I know that it wasn’t going to be the coughing that kept me up…  THEY kept me up until 4AM playing those stupid games!!!!!!!!!!!! I wanted to strangle them and at the same time cry! They knew I was sick, yet, clearly they didn’t give a rats ass because they were screaming and yelling and fighting the whole time. I wanted to ask them to quiet down, but my 14yr old host brother and his friends would have just laughed at me because that’s how little respect they have for anyone. I’m ready to get out of the house and live on my own… can you tell? Love my host mother, but my host brothers are getting on my last nerve.

So I groggily get out of bed Friday morning and go to our big meeting planned at work. A representative from all 32 communities that we work with were suppose to come to this meeting that started at 8am. We were going to talk about our current projects, especially the bus project we have going. We were also going to nominate some to run for President for the FEPTCE organization. Don’t ask me what it stands for bc I have no idea. But FEPTCE is the main tourism organization in Ecuador. La Red Pakariñan, my organization, is part of FEPTCE. I don’t really feel like explaining it, but this org is big and it would be HUGE for La Red to have one of our team members as president of FEPTCE.

So it’s now like 9am and only ONE person has showed up so far. 10am rolls around and about 7 people are there. We decided that at 10:15 we were going to go ahead and start. Within that 15 minute time period we found out that the president of La Red isn’t coming because he now has other plans, the vice president isn’t coming, but that’s not a surprise (was my old counterpart). The secretary of La Red isn’t coming because he has to give a talk at some school, and the secretary of the communities of Ecuador forgot about the meeting and made other plans…. SO, successful meeting, huh?

But people did manage to show up throughout the morning. All together like 15 communities members showed up. 15 of 30 isn’t bad, right?? Haha. We did talk about everything, everyone gave all their input on the bus project and we did manage to nominate someone to run for president of FEPTCE. A representative from the Saraguro community was finally nominated after much debate. The “last comments” started at 1:10pm and didn’t end until 3:30pm. I wanted to shoot myself. Everyone was standing up and saying the same thing over and over and over. And everyone wanted the last word… 2 ½ hours later all the ‘last words’ were over and we went to lunch.

After lunch the Secretary of the Communities came and gave his presentation. To be honest, I have no idea what he talked about because I was all Spanished out for the day. I was daydreaming by like 1:30. Oops. The meeting was finally over around 6. Everyone left, but my coworkers and I stayed and fiddled around on our computers for a bit. But that turned into having drinks and a dance party J Great end to a hectic morning.

 The guy second from the right is going to

run from President of FEPTCE

And the dance party begins!

Super blurry, but heres some of the group

Saturday Hannah and I had lunch then went to the English/Spanish school that lets Peace Corps Volunteers rent books for free. I finally have some books to read, woohoo!!! When we walked in I asked the guy, in Spanish of course, if I could take out some books. He then started describing to me which sections were English, but in the middle of his sentence I realized he had switched to speaking English. And very good non-Ecuadorian accented English. Well, come to find out he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 60s here in Cuenca for 3 ½ years, married an Ecuadorian woman, moved to Ecuador, and eventually started up this English/Spanish school. His PC story is pretty cool. He gives discounts to PCVs for Spanish tutoring, as well. I might take advantage of that offer. Great guy, can’t wait to get to know him throughout my 2 years!

I then had to get to work. We rent tents to tourists. Altogether we have 10 tents of different sizes, but we needed to go through them and make sure everything was in each bag and we were going to mark the bags so we weren’t guessing all the time which tent was which. So from 3-7:30 Diego and I assembled every tent while Angie sewed and took notes of what we needed… come to find out like none of the tents were perfect. Some of the tents didn’t have the correct poles, some didn’t have stakes (before I proofread this I put ‘steaks’, my English is getting sooo bad!), some were still wet (gross!), some poles were broken, almost all were dirty on the inside, the list goes on. And we have been renting these tents to tourists!!!! Can you imagine??  But not a single tourist said anything about them.

So finally by about 7:30 we had all the tents in order. We even sewed the number of the tent on the bag, how many persons the tent could fit and which type of tent it was. We also marked every tent piece so if it ever got unorganized again it would be easy to put it all back together. SOOOOOO much more organized now! J

After that 3 of us went to Angie’s house to make dinner, watch movies, and relax. We had a slumber party! It was really fun!

Sunday was pretty tranquilo. I rode the bus home from Angie’s house! That was a big deal. I had never ridden the bus before. I’ve lived here for 2 ½ months and had yet to ride the bus. I live so close to the center of town that I always just walk everywhere. Go me! I feel a little more integrated now! J When I got home my host mother and a friend were mutilating a cooked turkey that we were going to have for lunch. She had sent the turkey to a store for them to cook it. The turkey had a good flavor, but since they were just pulling and jabbing (I guess you could call it shredding, but it a less organized manner…. Does that even make sense?) all the turkey off the bones I was biting into gristle and bone while I was eating it. It was a huge let down. This was the moment that I wish my dad and Grandma Fern were here to cut it for them! J So we all ate and chatted with the family that was over. Then we went to get ice cream and but a movie to watch. They bought Eat Pray Love and we all watched it upstairs. Well actually I wasn’t in the mood so I showered instead.

After the movie another family came over and they made corn pancakes. No flower involved though. Just corn put in the blender mixed with some milk and cheese then plopped on the pan to back. The consistency was more like a big hash brown. They were pretty tasty. Once done eating Marcia suggested we play a board game, this is when I snuck off to my room because I didn’t want to play. I had basically been gone since work on Thursday morning while being sick with a cold and nasty cough so I was ready for some quiet, relaxing me time. I can just see it in my head right now… my mom is talking under her breath, “no wonder she isn’t getting better.” J Aren’t ya mom???? I know you too well.

Monday , the 4^th, was just a normal day. I went to work, came home for lunch, and went back to work. I did come home and cook some pasta for dinner though. I made a banging homemade pasta sauce. It was delicious. That was how I celebrated the 4^th. It definitely wasn’t the same as burgers, beer, and fireworks.

I was pretty down all day. I hate missing holidays. And to be honest, I’ve been pretty down for the past couple weeks. The intensity comes in waves, but I’ve definitely experienced my first bouts of homesickness these past couple of weeks. I miss home, my family, boyfriend, friends, holidays, not struggling on a daily basis with language, the food, etc. And on top of missing all that I’ve been sick, I always get down around the US holidays, my host brothers are getting on my nerves, and the weather has completely SUCKED! As crazy as this is going to sound, I think it’s the weather that’s bringing me down the most. I’ve been in the mountains of Ecuador for 5 months now and the whole time it’s been cloudy and rainy. It doesn’t rain every single day, but the clouds are out 90% of the time. We get sunny days, but they are far and few in between. It’s now summer in the States and I’m missing out on hot days and laying out in the pool with my sister and friends and listening to music, all the while the weather is staying the same here. I’ve asked a million Ecuadorians when it’s going to stop raining and become dry season… first the answer was May, then it was June, now they don’t know. They really don’t have a clue. I honestly think I have a little bit of seasonal depression. And it’s getting progressively worse as time goes on. I LOVE the sun and it’s never out, ever. Like once every 4 weeks, maybe. There are days when it’s nice and bright out, but the clouds still hide the sun. I MISS THE SUN!!! I think I should have been placed on the coast where it is sunny and extremely hot every single day.

My boyfriend is coming to visit in 44 days (not that I’m counting or anything… haha) and we are going to head to the beach for a few days. Hopefully the sun is shining nice and bright on those days so I can refuel and come back rejuvenated with great amounts of Vitamin D to last me for a while!!

Although I am down in the dumps, I still wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here. This journey wasn’t meant to be easy. And let me tell you, it’s been far from easy! Hopefully this bout of homesickness goes away sooner rather than later and I get back to my normal self. Don’t get me wrong, I miss you all on a daily basis more than you will ever know and it will never go away, but this feeling is so not cool. It needs simmer back down to its normal level. I’m thankful to have such great Ecuadorian friends/coworkers and host mother that make my days pass rather quickly J I’m positive it will go away soon.

It is impossible for me to write short blog entries… impossible. This one only took me 2 hours to write this one, no big deal. This might be a record for longest, most wordy blog post yet. Haha.

And FYI I put way more pictures up on Facebook than my blog, so check them out!

As always comments and updates from you all are always welcome!!! :)

Until next week!

Heather