Ecua Thanksgiving

Obviously, I´m in Ecuador for Thanksgiving.  This was the first Thanksgiving that I haven´t been in Macon with the fam, so it was kind of an entirely new experience for me. 

It didn´t really feel like Thanksgiving, since I wasn´t in Macon I hadn´t done all the prep work that goes into the day, cleaning the house, getting chairs out of grandma´s basement, etc.  I did make a simple fried rice on Wednesday night, in keeping with the chinese food tradition.  my community appreciated it.  Also, Thanksgiving in Missouri is usually at least a little bit brisk, and Thanksgiving here is hot…much like the rest of the year.  Thursday I called my parents house and talked to a slew of people which was very nice though hopefully they can get this stella being able to use the phone thing figured out because she couldn´t hear me and both of us were sad and frustrated I think.  but talking to everyone else and hearing all the craziness was fun. 

In the evening, Pat and Sonya, the founders of Nuevo Mundo, had us over for dinner.  The Rostro de Cristo founder, Fr Jim, was in town and staying at their house, and Sonya´s family and some of the Mundo staff were there to celebrate.  They have a pool, so we went swimming for a while and then had dinner on their terrace on top of their house (they are amazing people, and their house is incredible.  Pat and Sonya have the best Guayasamin prints I´ve ever seen and whenever I go over I make sure to pass through their dining room to look at them at least twice).  There were tents and candles and twinkle lights and little tables with cute table cloths and craptons of food.  To start there were snacks, chips and dip and nuts and Combos, which were odd and estadosunidense and very tasty in a holy crap junk food from the US kind of way.  Also wine and soda and juice and water and beer; Ecuadorian beer is not very good, in my opinion, but south american wines are of course very enjoyable.  For dinner we had turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes (I actually got confused by these for a second because I was so not in Ecuador at the moment that I forgot that sweet potatoes are purple here), stuffing, gravy, whole wheat croissants, cranberry sauce (the canned kind), and lettuce salad.  Lettuce is always exciting here, because we can´t eat it in our neighborhood due to it being unsafe, so I was pumped for that.  safe lettuce!  wooo!  For dessert, Carolyn, one of the Arbo girls, made pumpkin pies so we had pie and ice cream and cake. 

The food was obviously not as good as Dunham family thanksgiving because better food than that is close on impossible, but for being in Ecuador I had no complaints.  I did unfortunately forget my camera, but I took pictures of my food with Carolyn´s camera so they exist somewhere and I´ll get them someday.

girls in white dresses

yesterday Melissa and I went to first communion at our church.  and it was awesome. 

we went at 8am to help at the comedor make the food for the party afterwards.  all the catechism students come to the comedor so we know all of them and the soup kitchen ladies were making the food so since we help out there we went to help out with the big party.  we decorated with toilet paper and white balloons and moved the tables so it was like an ecua party. 

We snuck out to the mass when we heard the alleluia so we could see the action.  we got there just in time for the baptisms, and we saw one of our favorite Valdivia kids get baptised.  he saw us when he was waiting in line and started doing the ecua snap and it was totally exciting and cool!  We had 4 Valdivia kids getting first communion yesterday and I took pictures and it was so fun to share that with them.  Especially because we had a huge paseo this friday to Semillas de Mostaza where we had a big all afterschool program soccer tournament and the first communion kids couldn´t come because they had to go to their first reconciliation at three that afternoon so they missed out. 

Melissa and I were so excited we were more excited than many of the parents.  not all, however, as I failed to get good pictures of the boys taking communion as mothers began to push me out of the way so that they could get pictures of their daughters praying after communion.  I´ll be uploading the pics at some point.  I have many more pics to upload.  bit by bit, they´re coming.

oh, Amanda, you´re funny

seriously.  water heaters!  hahahaha!  if only.  we´d take a water heater even if it was right in our shower. 

our showers are cold, but we take military showers so we´re fortunately not under the spout for too long.  it really wakes you up in the morning!  our showers are fairly tall and they both come far out of the wall and point straight down so if you want to wash your hair without getting your face all covered in gross cistern water you have to bend over backwards.  they´re tiled with a big drain in the middle of a flat floor so the water doesn´t all drain out properly and they´re kind of difficult to clean but hey, we have showers which is more than what our neighbors have.  and I´m told that in the rainy season the water gets really warm during the day and never really cools off as much as it does this time of year, so we´ll no longer wish we had a water heater because it´ll be so hot. 

our toilets are normal toilets but they are old and stained so they look dirty even when they´re not.  we do go by the only flushing if it´s necessary rule because we try to conserve water.  and of course, we can´t flush toilet paper so that goes in the trash can or else sewage will start coming up the shower drain (this happened to a community mate when she was here on retreat during college, so we know it´s true and not just a story told to scare us).  I got really nervous one day when I dropped a fork down the sink that it would clog up our septic system but Elyse fished it out with a hanger.  She´s uber resourceful (seriously, someday I may do character profiles of my housemates and her´s will have fabulous pictures).

I need to get to the cyber more than once a week

seriously.  so much goes on. 

Election night, the consulate had a big party and we all got individual invitations and partied with Guayquil´s best and brightest (pelocones and peace corps volunteers).  you could tell who were the rich ecuadorians and who were the poor estadosunidense because we were all camped out by the free food and drink with eyes on the CNN en Español screens and they were sitting at tables talking and not paying attention to anything.  it was a totally fun and great evening, though totally weird because it was clean and you could flush the toilets and people spoke english. 

Did I post about halloween?  I don´t think I did.  I was a ghost (mosquito nets make fabulous ghost costumes) and we did a haunted house at Valdivia and were so scary that we made kids cry and it was maybe the best day we´ve had the whole year with the kids there. 

This past weekend we cleaned our cistern and it was gross and full of sand and we´ll do it again in two months.  we also did a full house clean that took 11 hours but was necessary because it hadn´t been deep cleaned in three months and Ecuador has a ridiculous amount of dust that accumulates everywhere.  we also went to a birthday party for a 4 year old and it was fun, we played games and there was food and cake and new cultural experiences.  pretty chevre.