Long Stories Short

I'm sorry!!  4 months and no blogging.  The shame!  There's only one explanation:  life is BUSY.  So at this point, I'll spare you the long introduction and just get straight to the point and try my best to explain the top stories of the past 4 months...in capsulized form.

July - The Month of Moving

I arrived in Guayaquil July 5 and from there managed to change where I was staying 14 different times not counting my own house here in Cuenca!  I really wished I would have had the forethought to take pictures of all the different places that I stayed but I honestly didn't know what I was in for.  From Cuenca I practically went straight to English Pioneer School for 2 week in Quito.  

After that I joined the Quito Chinese Group for the BEST jungle trip of my life!  I seriously felt like I was living a dream but let my explain why we went in the first place.  In an area called El Chaco, up near Quito, Ecuador has employed a Chinese company to do a major construction project building a giant dam.  There is currently a population of about 2,000 Chinese workers involved.  They live in camps, far from home, in the middle of nowhere, nothing to do with their free-time other than read our literature and study the Bible with us.  Cool.  One of the nights we spent out there we enlisted the help of a brother who has constructed his own large screen and owns a projector for the sole purpose of showing movies to those who live in the jungle.  He came to set up his stuff and we showed the Creation video in one of the Chinese camps.  It was AMAZING!  Over 20 Chinese people came and we placed a heaping table full of literature!  Some people were even fighting over the last Bible Teach Book.  It was an experience of a lifetime.

From the jungle I came back home for a night or 2 and then it was English Convention in Guayaquil.  What a wonderful convention!  We had 2 baptized and they were both from the territory (not just kids of those living where the need is great which is normally who get baptized in the foreign field of English in Ecuador).

August - Peru!

To make a SUPER long story short, the Chinese Group of Cuenca headed off for a week to a city of Peru called Trujillo to help a fledgling Chinese group there invite the Chinese people living in that city and a nearby city to the Chinese Convention which was to be held in Lima.  We had just about every disaster that we could have possibly had but we also had an awesome never-to-be-forgotten-group-bonding experience of a lifetime.  I would suggest checking out my photos on Picasa for more details.

At the end of August we said goodbye to Stephanie - Allison's cousin who got here in May (while I was still in the States) and had been staying with us.  She was a dynamo in service while she was here and started 10 or more Spanish Bible Studies!  I kind of thought that she'd pass me a couple since when I got back I was back to square one in the Spanish speaking world of my ministry but I was slightly shocked when I ended up with ALLL of them!!  Allison just has too much on her plate to take any of them, which is a good thing but still!  I nearly had a melt down when faced with such a daunting task of keeping up with such a looong list of people, especially since I hadn't used any Spanish while I was in the States for almost 4 months (I only went to English and Chinese meetings)!  I really wanted to cry a couple of times but I'm glad that I stuck with it because they are a joy to me now and really are rounding out my service along with my Spanish!  More on them later.

September - Start of the New Service Year

We started September off with a bang by making a day-trip to Loja, about 4.5 hours South of Cuenca, to do the Chinese territory that we have there.  Loja is not super close but it's not super far away either so a couple of us girls in the group (Allison, Amanda and I) have decided to make it a service year goal to get there once per month, mainly to visit those that are studying via the telephone and get the new magazines to those that like to read them more regularly.  Oh, by the way, there are 2 phone studies in Loja.  One is studying with Yan Xiao Mei our sweet little Chinese Publisher.  It's a REALLY long day (9 hours in a bus and 5 or 6 preaching...) but totally worth it and so far we have made our goal of once per month.  We plan on trying to get a ride with someone in November though.  The trip should be shorter in a car - maybe even less than 3 hours - and cheaper too!  It's $8 each way.  Spending $16 in one day in EC is almost unheard of for us unless it's grocery store day!

Allison also had a friend visit for 2 weeks in September - Laura.  She was SUPER fun!  I loved having her around and getting to know her.  Her trip went really well until the very last night.  We went to the beach for her last night in EC and had a great day but that night we were walking around the town looking for food and she slipped an fell on one of EC's famous sidewalk "irregularities" (or at least that's what the doc called it) and broke her foot!!  She went home in a cast but amazingly is ALREADY planning her next trip to EC.  That's how great it is here!  Funny thing.  The morning after Laura fell Allison and I went for one last swim at the beach before we headed off the to Guayaquil to take her to the hospital and while we were in there something cut the top of my foot...it was a strange looking cut and hurt really really really bad - much more than your average cut so since we were already making a trip to the ER I decided to go too...I was especially worried since I had no clue what cut me.  The doc fixed me up put me on an IV of an antibiotic and sent me home with some pills and that was that, or so I thought...

October - Infected Foot

About 10 days after my first ever EC ER experience, my foot started acting really really weird.  It got all red and swollen and hot - totally freaky - so it was off to another doctor here in Cuenca.  This time I went to an Infection Specialist.  He totally scared me when he said that I had 2 options: The first was I could spend 3 days in the hospital on an IV drip of an antibiotic every 8 hours.  UMMM...and the second please dr??  I could to the ER (AGAIN) to try another IV of a very strong antibiotic and then he would send me home with 2 different pills that I could be on for a week.  I'll take option 2 please!  I'm happy to say that option 2 worked just fine and after about a week I was almost completely back to normal.  Just in time for the last few crazy weeks of October.

The last couple weeks of October consisted of 3 different girl visitors and our 2 day Spanish Assembly.  It was a lot of fun getting to know Stephanie who was here visiting from Nevada for a whole month.  She's friends with a couple in our hall but in order to get a little bit of "girl hang-out" time she spent about a week of her month with us.  And for the last 5 days of October we had Yuca staying with us.  She's been living in Quito for a little over a year, supporting the Chinese group there and is going back to her home country of Japan soon but before that she really wanted to come and see Cuenca so we showed her around as best we could - in between studies of course!

Oh!  And the last day of October Allison and I ran the second ever Ruta Nocturna 10 K!  Lots of fun, very hard.  I was not super prepared like I should have been but at least we did it each in the time that we wanted and even made it to our Saturday night Chinese WT which starts at 8 p.m. when the race started at 6:15!!

Other News

I was surprised by the "new face" of our congregation when I got back to Cuenca from the States.  We are now super Gringo/Elder rich!  When I left we had 2 elders - it was Ivan our Chinese Group elder and another brother from the States, Carl.  But when I got back we had 2 more!  One from Switzerland and one from the Pittsburgh/Youngstown area - Cleveland's neighbor!  They are both married and the congregation is benefiting  immensely from these hard-working couples.  In fact, Joel and Maria (the couple from PA) are even learning a little bit of Chinese in order to support us on our Saturday night WT study night.  It's been great!

Also, I'm very happy to say that my very first Chinese student here (Zhang) has started to come to all the Sunday morning Spanish meetings.  I don't study with him anymore, being that he's a guy and it was just better to turn him over to a brother but I do get to help him at the Spanish meetings - translating main points of the talk into Chinese.  He doesn't come to the Chinese meetings on Saturday night because he has a Chinese restaurant and it's just too busy on Saturday night to leave but he has made some real effort lately and his study is going really really well so we'll have to wait to see what happens.

November - Updates to Come

Today is November 1 and I'm home sick...yuck.  There is a bad cold going around and with all the running around that I've been doing, I guess it was inevitable that I catch it but I'm doing my best to fight it since tomorrow we're going out of town to visit a semi-new Chinese Camp of workers (they're working on a hydroelectric plant) that is about 3 hours from Cuenca.  We're going for the first time and I'm really excited about it so I HAVE to feel better.  More updates to come - I promise.

First Ever English Pioneer School - Quito - 2011

Preaching in Chinese in Peru

Huge group on the streets of Peru

Putting up the big movie screen in El Chaco to show the movie in Chinese

More set-up for the movie

Getting ready to place tons of literature

I don't fit in too good to this tall family.  That's Allison's sister  Jen and her cousin Stephanie on either side of her.

Laura is sitting next to Allison - pre-foot breaking.  Marcelo in the back and our friends Jonny and Gaby from Guayaquil are next to me.

That's cute little Yuca from Japan with Allison.