A Beautiful Day

It´s a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon here in Ecuador! The first
draft of this note was composed from the hammock on my front porch,
where the shade hid me at least from a bit of the heat. Right now we
are in the coolest part of the year for Ecuadorians and lots of
mornings it is cloudy and cool, but when the clouds burn off it gets
really warm. This morning there were no clouds and the heat started
early, promising a hot, muggy day. I think I probably sweat my body
weight in water every day here and so I am trying hard not to imagine
what its going to feel like January through April, when the rainy
season hits, promising muggyness and mid90s to mid100 highs every day
(I am praying that I can become accustomed to the climate!)... The
heat makes me feel lazy, and I am taking a day off after a long week.
Some of my community-mates are off visiting a neighbor, and others are
planning to go watch a soccer game later today, but I think for me the
plan for today is to get a big of breathing time in, to catch up on
the notes to family and friends, to do some laundry and to relax so
that I can start the next week running!

Perhaps I should begn my update by sharing my worksites with you all.
To be honest, they came as a surprise even to me! As we started the
discernment process, I felly expected to feel drawn towards one of the
two medical placements, an AIDS clinic and Padre Damien´s, a hospital
for people with Hansen´s disease (leprosy). I did like both of those
sites, and could imagine myself working at either one of them, but
ultimately I felt called in a different direction. In the afternoons,
I am going to be teaching English (the last thing I expected - or
wanted - to do coming down here!) in a school called Nuevo Mundo (new
world). In the mornings, I am our new ¨community outreach worker,¨and
I will also be spending a day a weeek at Padre Damien´s, letting me
fulfill my medical interests too, and affording me a possibility to
participate and translate durng the times that medical teams from the
states come down to work.

Let me tell you a bit more about my two placements, though, and about
why I am so excited. Nuevol Mundo was founded 30 years ago by Pat, and
ex-nun from the States, and Sonia, her Ecuadorian partner. In the
morning, it provides a high-quality, bilingual education to wealthy
students of Guayaquil. From the money they made with the morning
school, 25 years ago the two women were able to found the afternoon
school, where I will be working. This afternoon school provides the
same quality education to intelligent, highly-motivated studenbts from
areas such as the neighborhood in which I live - students who
othervise would have no access to a quality education. The afternoon
school will open doors to them which would never have been possible
otherwise. I will be partnering with an Ecuadorian teacher to teach
fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, and we will split the classes and
teach the same material. I truly feel called to this position but at
the same time I´m feeling pretty nervous about my teaching abilities
(or lack thereof!). Keep me in your prayers...

The main emphasis of my morning site is to further Rostro´s
relationship with the communities in which we live, as well as doing
some extra housekeeping stuff for Rostro. The exact form this position
will take is still a work in progress, but it may end up looking
something like spending Monday visiting neighbors in the AJS community
and Wednesday in Arbolito, doing some accounting and errands for
Rostro on Tuesday, Nuevo mundo planning on Thursday, and going to
Padre Damien on Friday, as well as working at our local soup kitchen a
few days a week, visiting the sites at which my community-mates are
working to familiarize myself with their services and to be able to
refer people in the community to those places, etc. The variety and
the room for creativity in this placement really appeal to me, and
most of all I am excited about the conversations with my neighbors,
about the opportunity to share and to accompany and to learn.

I feel like this note is running long but I´d like to share one more
thing with you all before closing, a moment that I fould to be
particularly powerful and meaningful to me. On Wednesday I went to
Mass with two of my community mates at their worksite, el Proyecto
Salesiano chicos de la calle. This program, or ¨Chicos,¨as we call it,
is a home and school for boys that were formerly living and working on
the streets of Guayaquil and surrounding areas. The gospel for mass on
Wednesday morning was the one about how ïts harder for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.¨I´d
heard the passage a million times over back in the States, generally
sitting in an air-conditioned church, surrounded by other
estadounidense churchgoers, many of whom, like me, led a very
comfortable life. What a change, then, what a contrast, to listen to
this gospel passage surrounded by those we in the states would easily
define as the poor - boys that had left their homes to live and work
in the streets! You don´t get much poorer than that. And then came the
homily, in which the priest, the man who runs Chicos, proceeded to
tell these boys just how rich they were - rich in abilities, rich in
opportunities. Here, he told them, you are rich, because you have the
opportunity to get an education. Here, he said, you are rich because
you get three meals a day. Here, you are rich because you have your
own bed to sleep in, while many sleep 3 or 4 to a bed, or have to bed
at all. Once he had firmly established how very rich these boys were,
he proceeded to chastise them for the times they didn´t do their
homework, for the times they didn´t bathe or present themselves in the
best manner, for the times they weren´t grateful for that which they
had been given. More emphatically than I had heard in any homily in
the states, he told these boys that from those to whom much had been
given, much was expected........... It certainly put a few things in
perspective for me. I feel as though I have been given the world.

I want you to know that I am thinking of you all, and that I hope that
everything is going well for you! I can´t believe that summer is
already drawing to a close. I hope those of you who are heading back
to school, whether in the form of student or teacher!, are feeling up
to the task... I´m sure you are all going to do great :) I am
incredibly thankful for the notes I received in response to my last
email - keep them coming, por favor! I am missing you all, and it
makes me feel just a bit more connected to you all at home.

Sending you an incredible amount of love, straight from this tiny
internet cafe in the middle of Ecuador to you, wherever you might be
in the States. I am grateful for you all!

Touching Down

So after two weeks of orientation in Cleveland, I'm a week and a half
into my incountry orientation in ecuador... a few more days and that
should all be finished and i will be, i hope, VERY well orientated by
that point!

We spent our first week here living in the retreat house, where high
school and college kids stay during their immersion trips here.
Saturday night we got split into two different houses, as Rostro has
two separate houses where volunteers live in two different
neighborhoods. We will still, hopefully, be seeing a lot of one
another but the split determined who we would be living with and
spending time with on a daily basis.

I'm now living in the Arbolito community with 5 volunteers, an there
are 5 other volunteers in the Antonio Jose de Sucre neighborhood.
Arbolito is the newer, less developed and visibly poorer of the two
neighborhoods. I live on a dirt road in a very urban area. Many of my
neighbors live in cane houses. In the AJS comunity, the roads are all
paved, and the houses, for the most part, constructed of cement. And
yet they all face the systemic issues. Lack of running water, poor
education, children going to work to provide for their families. And
the list continues, always multiplying, kind of like the holes dotting
the tin roof of the home of one of my neighbors. I can only imagine
what the rainy season must be like.

And yet.... dont want this note to be full of shocking descriptions
of the poverty around me. I do want to give you a bit of a picture, a
bit of a context in which to place this year for me. To complete this
context, though, I might have to introduce you to the friendly faces
of Wellington, Eduardo, Omar, Isidro, and Elvis, our guards. To
Ricardo, Diana, and Aide, the Ecuadorian staff of Rostros after school
programs. To Joseph, Daniel, Elvis, Junior, the funny, welcoming
teenage boys who serve as "ayudantes" in the afterschool program in
Arbolito. To Kiki, the party crazy but wholly warm and welcoming woman
who is active in the local church, to Nanci and Patricia, who welcomed
us into their homes, to Sister Annie, who runs Padre Damiens home for
people with Hansens disease, to all of the beautiful, beautiful
children who come to our afterschool programs.

Its funny, this past week has been very different for me than if Id
come here as a retreatant, one of the high school and college kids we
host for a week or two. For example, weve been visiting different job
sites and discerning where we might fit for the next year. The home
for street children, the AIDS clinic... these arent just passing
visits, something to see and soak in about Ecuador... these are
possible job placements for me. Visiting peoples homes, I am not so
much marveling at their poverty as seeing them as my neighbors, as
potential friends. Meeting people on the streets, I smile and say
"buenas" and think "wow. this is my community for the next year." In
sum, I suppose this week has felt a lot less emotional and a lot more
pragmatic than one of those whirlwind tours. I like it. Every day, I
feel incredibly thankful to be here.

I promised myself, and you all, that Id keep this short. I have to
apologize already...

Please keep me in your prayers, as we will be discussing job sites and
deciding where we will be working over the next year within the next
day or two. You all, of course, are continually in my prayers.