Entry Uno!

Hey friends, how are you? I hope all is well...check it out, I will try to make this as visually pleasing as possible so that you might read it.

Duran, Ecuador is on the equator, hence the name. Being on the equator, the temperature is constantly hot. Were talking 90-97 degrees during the day usually. However, this is the cool season, and so the mornings are overcast and actually many days are too. The nights are cool, around 70 degrees and there is usually a breeze. Quite nice in fact.

But lets dive in with a little about the program. Rostro de Cristo has 12 volunteers this year, with my self included. Five live in a town called Antonio Jose de Sucre and myself and six others live in a town called Arbolito. The two houses are about a mile and a half away from each other. The kids in my house are Scott (St. Louis), Patrick (Birmingham), Nate (Cincinnati), Marie (Portsmith, VA), Christine (North of Chicago) and Andrea (Houston). The other house has Frank from Cali, Dan from Penn, Erik from Jacksonville, Vicki from Kansas (she went to highschool with Becky Comacho) and Jessie from Washington the state. Each house does a lot on their own, but we meet up as a big community atleast once if not twice a week.

In my house, we clean on Sundays, have a house meeting on Monday nights, have a community night on Tuesday night and have a spirituality night on Thursday nights. We go to mass here in Arbolito at 830 each Sunday morning and have morning prayer together every morning at 7am during the work week. ( we are on central time). During the day I work with Christine at Hogar de Cristo in the micro-lending divions. So far from, 830-1230 we walk around Duran and find out why women haven´t paid their weekly debts for the loans they take out. We don´t do much yet, but we are still learning. The program itself is interesting because they only lend to women who make groups of 10-12 of themselves. They thought is, women are the head of the household and group lending helps with accountability. They loans start at $60 and over time can reach $450 per four months which the women pay back weekly, without interest, although there is a processing fee per amount that is lent.

I come home in the afternoons and go to Semillas de Mostaza which is an afterschool program Patrick, Christine and I work at from 3-5 everyday. We use the space of a school two blocks away from our house which has a SWEET concrete soccer field, complete with roof and stair-stadium-esque seats. Everyday we average between 30-60 kids aged from 3-14. The first hour they do homework or an activity that we have planned. At four, they get a half hour of recess, which usually means soccer for me and many kids. Then at 430 we bring the kids together and talk to them briefly about one of seven weekly pillars which act as themes for our program and the other two programs Rostro volunteers work on in the afternoons. This week we are talking about trust. Then we all pray and give the kids a piece of bread, a banana and a cup of water. The food is not a crutch for the childrend but still good.

The nights are free, minus the meetings and we take turns cooking in pairs. I´ve already made a paella, cut a part most of a full chicken and am very good at making lentels. I also have made these amazing french fries my grandmother used to make me while I watched the Simpsons. I still haven´t seen the movie, but I´m looking forward to it. We shower navy style, turning on the water to soak, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water to rinse. Water is hard to come by here, and we are lucky because we have a huge cistern whereas our neighbors have barrels filled every four days or so, so we try and conserve. We also dont flugh unless it really needs it, or if its brown...but we keep the house smelling nice. What else....

Prices! Beer here is about 60 cents a bottle, potates are 15 cents a pound. I bought seven bananas today for 20 cents, bread is a nickel a piece....a three liter of coca cola is 1.30, bootleg movies are a dollar, toothpaste is .50-1.00, chicken is about 1.20 a pound, eggs are a dime each and the internet is like 70 cents an hour. We each get $60 a month for our personal needs, including bus fare which ranges from .18-.25 and our house gets $70 a week for food. A pretty healhty amount. We eat a log of vegetables, rice, beans, and fruit. Tuna and chicken are the principle meats but we eat a lot of eggs.

Soccer: They play differently here, it is small concrete fields and a small ball, like a size 2 and its called futbolito.You play five plus a goalie, and it leads to a lot of one on one interaction. I think I am improving. I still have desires to play professionally and am training with Patrick and Scott. Also, a friend of mine here in Duran just made one of the two top teams in Guayaquil (the largest city in Ecuador, which borders Duran) so there will be conversations with him.

Ok, just about done, but a little bit about the poverty here. Arbolito, and really all of Duran is poor. Very poor. There is garbage just about everywher, and i´m pretty sure the number of stray dogs I see each day nears 45. I will speak though, mostly of Arbolito. Most of the roads are dirt and the vast majority of houses are made of cane. Average land a family has is about 10 by 20 meters, and so houses are smaller than that. Usually fitting 4-6 people, but of course some houses are bigger. Many cane houses are built on cane stilts. Arbolito is about seven years old and was built on a swamp, so during the rainy season, from January to April, most things flood. They say it is dangerous here, but not so much in our sector. In any event, we have a gate around our concrete mansion (compared to the neighbors) an armed guard and two dobiermen rotwillers. The dogs are mostly playful though. It is hard to go a day withot seeing trash burn or noticing the dire conditions most people live in. I know that is not too much in detail, but if you can, just imagine dirt, rock, bamboo cane houses and garbaged everywhere. There is very little green vegetation in this area, but a lot of chickens picking through the rocks for food.

When I got here, a friend of mine who studied in El Salvador the semester before me explained how the two countries are different in terms of their poverty. He told me, poverty in El Salvador is sexy, because there was a huge war that impacted everyone and there are visible reasons as to why the country is suffereing and in parts deteriorating. Here however, there is no sexiness. Poverty has always existed to a great degree and the culprit is simple corruption, a little more difficult for the poor to rally around and create a change. But the people in Arbolito still get things done and are hopeful. People in this country don´t typicaly make money to move away from where they are, but rather they invest in where they live so that it may grow in to something better for their children. For example, some of the cane houses here have turned to cement and some even have a second story being built on them, so it is interesting to say the least. I will learn more as the days go.

Ok, so that is it, sorry if some of it didn´t make sense, I just wanted to give you a base so that when I refere to something here you know what I am talking about. I hope all is well and I am sending my love and peace! Chau!