Asi Es La Vida...

Up to this point

I leave tomorrow for a week-long visit of my new hometown. I have never been there and only have a hazy visual picture of what it may (or may not) be like.



In case you are a little bit confused about what my life has been like for the last month, let me do my best to give you a a little bit of background... including a few names and pictures.

This is a picture of me with my family the first week that I was in Ecuador. Not all of the people in that picture live in my house, but not all of the people who live in my house are in that picture either. I love my family... they are funny, interesting, intelligent, and take super good care of me... there is never a dull moment!


This is a picture of the view that I have every morning when I leave my house (the blue one on the left). Often times, I go jogging at 5:30 or 6:00 with a friend, and the sun is just rising over the mountain as I step outside. ¨Oh Lord my God, in awesome wonder, I see the...¨





Here are a couple more scenery picture of what I see when I look around the valley from my town of Tabucundo (pop. 6-7,000). The sunsets (and sunrises) are consistenly amazing... and most mornings the clouds clear and we can see Cayambe (the almost 17-18,000 ft. mountain) watching over us.

Here are a couple of pictures of friends.








This is my Ecuadorian brother Jose. He just graduated from college with a degree in Psychology. He is 25 and we have a good time hanging out and discussing language, philosophy, and culture... he´s much smarter than I am.

Sarah from D.C. standing in front of a beautiful valley where we went as a group to have leadership training. There is a waterfall on the other side of the valley... that you can´t see in this picture.

These are a couple of pictures taken from the 5 hour hike that my brother and I took with another PC friend and his little brother. We hiked up the mountain directly behind our little town to see the lakes that lie in the crater. Jose told me that we go up to around 4,000m, which is between 12,000 and 13,000 feet. Looking down into the valley on the way up was indescribably gorgeous... as you can tell from the pictures! Sorry... I know you are jealous right now. Here is a picture of the Lakes in the crater.



Hope that you enjoyed my pics. I didn´t update so much about what I have been doing... so here is the short version:

About half of the time I meet with 4 other volunteers and an Ecuadorian Spanish teacher (who is super cool). We meet from around 8:00am until 1:00pm and then have lunch together. In the afternoon we have things to do, like hang out at the local youth center with kids, investigate certain organizations or schools, plan activities, or hang out with our families to complete spanish/culture assignments. The other half of the time (Monday through Saturday... Sunday is our only day off). We travel about 45 minutes to a smaller town called Ayora, where the 25 Youth and Family volunteers meet together for ¨Technical Training.¨ This training is everything from small group facilitation to sex/HIV-AIDS education, from how to run parenting classes to how to build an organic garden, from self-esteem workshops to how to make recycled paper and shampoo. Additionally, we have taken a 5 day trip, we are leaving for an 8 day trip, and we will have two more short trips in August before we finish training the 23rd or 25th of August (not sure). All in all... it is a crazy schedule, and it is a necessary break once or twice a week for a few of us to go into the town of Cayambe (around 50,000 people) and hang out for a few hours.

Thanks for following along with me. I look forward to seeing a little more of the Ecuadorian reality this week.

posted by Steve @ 2:55 PM