The Jungle

Well our trip to the jungle got off to an exciting start. This what we found we arrived at our hostal...the holes got bigger and bigger every day. Just walking out our front door was an adventure.  The first evening we were in Shell we got a special “welcome to the jungle” dinner from...my cousin! She lives here in Ecuador with her family as missionaries.  It actually wasn’t until several months after I had already decided to come to Ecuador that I realized she had gone through the exact same program that I’m in now and is currently living here. It was one of the many connections to Ecuador I discovered while planning my trip here.  This visit was a great reminder of just how good God is. 

Sunday night there was a wicked thunderstorm, which I loved…well, that is until lightning struck a near by tree, knocking out the power and blowing out one of the outlets in our room (and by that I mean I saw a bright flash of light burst from the wall right over the head of my sleeping friend in the bed next to me…)

The next morning we picked up our tour guide and jungle boots and headed out for our first real adventure.  At the first place we stopped we watched some of the largest freshwater fish in the world chow down on breakfast…we were all very careful not to fall in. The goal for the day was to hike through the jungle to waterfall where we got swim and then hike back out. Before we headed in we all had got our faces painted like the indigenous people, using a local fruit (which we later discovered is really hard to get off). 


We spent the morning trekking across several streams (I never been so thankful for rubber boots). A ways into our hike our guide asked if we were hungry…thinking he may have magically stashed some food for all of us in his tiny little backpack…I yelled...yes! …he started passing out leaves…he told us to open the small bulb located at the base of the leaf.  When I broke mine open, tons of tiny ants started pouring out…and then of course our guide yelled…Lunch! They were surprisingly good…tasted like lemons, who knew? We finally made it to the waterfall and the water was freezing! But of course we all went for a swim. 

            

That night the power went out in the restaurant we were eating at for dinner, so we almost ended up having a candle light dinner on Valentine’s Day. The next day we went shopping in Baños (yes, that’s ‘bathrooms’ in English). Baños is located near Tungurahua is an active volcano which had its last major eruption in 1999 and several mini eruptions since. Before we left the van we were told, “If you hear the volcano alarm...sprint back to the van!” That's a new one. I can’t say that I’ve ever done a volcano drill…apparently they do them here.

            

That afternoon we went White Water Rafting! When they handed us the life jackets and helmets…I knew this was going to be a lot of fun. It had been raining a lot so the water was really high and fast. It was definitely intense, we lost one for a minute and I almost flew out a couple of times…I totally loved it!

            

The next morning we went to a monkey reserve and played with monkeys.  We brought sugar cane with us to feed to them…we discovered that sugar makes monkeys hyper too…they were jumping all over us. I never thought that I’d have a monkey on my head.

           

That afternoon was the coolest part of the whole trip.  If you haven’t heard the Nate Saint Story, you need to watch “End of the Spear”. It’s an incredible true story about missionaries that flew into the jungle in Ecuador to find the Waorani tribe…if you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t ruin it for you.  The Waorani tribe still leaves in remote parts of the jungle in Ecuador. On Wednesday, we flew into the jungle to meet the Waorani!  We took a couple of tiny 6-passenger planes and landed right in the middle of their village (the “landing strip” was a long stretch of grass with a river on both ends).  When we got there they did a welcome dance for us. Then they let us try throwing a spear and using a blow gun. The whole experience was incredible! This was a trip I will never forget.   

Week Four: Making Mom Proud

Mom this blog is for you…I just wanted to let you that I’m probably going to eat more veggies in the next three months than I did all four years of college. In fact, I’ve been eating all sorts of new things, so I thought I’d share some of the typical foods we eat for each meal and some of the new things I’ve tried.

Typical Breakfast Foods: Boiled bananas, ham & cheese sandwiches, toast (which I burnt to a crisp the second week I was here…and of course everyone thought it was hilarious) mixed fruit, yogurt (you don’t eat it with a spoon, you drink it out of a cup)…oh and I almost forgot ‘fruity loops’ 

Typical Lunch Foods: (the biggest meal of the day) There are two essential staples for lunch here: soup and rice. We also usually have some type of chicken, veggie salad and juice (which is always made fresh, Yum!)

Typical Dinner Foods: more often than not, we have fried rice with ketchup, mayo and hot dogs mixed in…As you can see, the theme here is rice. I’m a fan of rice, so all is well.

I’ve decided that everything tastes better in Spanish…the Spanish names for things are so much more fun. For instance, one night when I asked what we were eating and they said “hígado” I thought “mmm…that sounds good”. That night I discovered that liver isn’t half bad.  Some other foods I’ve eaten for the first time here are beets, chicken feet, all kinds of fun fruits, and a bunch of other stuff that I have no idea what it was.

They call me “llena” here (which means ‘full’ in Spanish) It’s one of the closests words to my name.   During the first week I was here, one of the seminary student (who had just learned my name) tried to explain to me that I was like the moon…(he meant like a “full moon”) yeah…that one took me a little while to figure out.  

I wrote my first paper in Spanish…I had to look up a lot of words and I may have made up some stuff…but hey. The paper was supposed to be about our time in college and we had to present it in class. I decided to try to explain why I camped out in the parking lot of ‘Chick-fil-A’ my freshman year of college... My professor thought I was talking about “Chifles” which are fried banana chips- a popular snack here in Ecuador. But once she figured out that I got 52 free chicken sandwiches out of the deal, she decided that one night in a parking lot was more than reasonable. 

Last Saturday I went with my roommate to children’s event at her church. It's a fairly small church but they had about 150 kids from the neighborhood show up!  It would have been utter chaos in the States, but even though most of the kids came without their parents, they were really well-behaved.  It was a lot of fun, although I didn’t totally understand what was going on…Well, tomorrow we’re headed to the jungle…I’ve heard rumors about some of the fun things we get to try in the jungle, but I won’t ruin the surprise…;) 

Week Three: Acquiring new skills...

Okay, so its official, learning Spanish is way more difficult and way more rewarding than I thought it would be. I've just started having very basic conversations with my roommate (with my dictionary close at hand--its pretty much my best friend here). 

This past week the NILIs (as we're called) decided to try to wash our clothes by hand...of course, every time we told the seminary students this, they laughed. Apparently for good reason, its a lot harder than it looks...my clothes are a little stiff.  We also went to Otavalo, which is one of the largest and most famous open air markets in Latin America. We literally shopped till we dropped. It's huge! Even though the market was incredible, I think my favorite part of the whole weekend was on Friday evening. We decided to play games around the campfire with some of the seminary students. A lady from Holland saw us playing and asked to join us. It was so much fun and super funny to try to play games in
Spanish with people from three different countries.  

When I decided to come to Ecuador to study Spanish, it was because I saw an open door, not because I had been planning on doing this all my life. In fact, this hadn't been in my plans at all, but God seemed to continue to confirm the decision over and over and over again, so I kept heading in this direction. Now that I'm here, I'm realizing that this experience is impacting me in a much more profound way than I had ever anticipated.  His ways are truly higher than my ways. I'm reminded time and time again, that this experience isn't really about my performance; it's about His purpose.