weekend update September 30, 2007

Well for starters, one thing I haven´t mentioned yet is that on thursday night my group of friends threw a HUGE suprise party for Nadia!  We all went out to one of the hippest restaurants in Quito, Boca del Lobo, and dressed up.  Then a few of the girls went back to nadia´s house for a bit while the rest of us ¨went home¨ to do whatever excuses we could come up with.  It took a lot of planning but it went so well!  We held it at Heather´s ecua-mom´s workplace, which probably sounds strange but it was a really sweet place to have it.  Nadia was so suprised and we had a great night – about 30 or so people came so that was awesome!

Friday and Saturday I went on a retreat with my church.  There´s a lot to say about it… it was really intense.  Let´s just say the format´s pretty different than like 3 messages and free time.  It only lasted for a little over a day and there was 20 ours of powerpoint presentations on different spiritual topics (i.e., armor of God, pride, generational curses, sexual purity…etc), mostly geared towards brand-new Christians.  It was really neat though to see about 100 teenage girls just going after God with everything they had.  They weren´t there to socialize…they were so attentive when I was feeling really ADD.  The weekend made me think about a lot of things.  Why does it seem sometimes like new christians can come to God so much more easily than someone like me who has been a Christian my whole life practically?  It also made me realize how blessed I am.  There is a lot more to tell….but I will have to talk a little later because i am on skype with aaron!!!!  my favorite!!!

supermaxi (the grocery store, not the other thing) September 27, 2007

You know it´s a small world when you run into somebody from your high school in a grocery store in Quito.

 Yesterday Arelis, me, and my host mom were doing some leisurely grocery shopping in supermaxi, ecua´s version of giant.  I saw this girl that looked really familiar from the back… like Autumn Hilsinger from my high school.  She was a couple of years ahead of me but I was good friends with her brother.  When I got a little closer, i knew it was her.  I walked up to her and was like… this is gonna sound really weird, but are you a Hilsinger?? She was like, oh my gosh you are Andrea Britton from Mechanicsburg!  I remember you from the musicals!

Apparently she is a nanny for a family in maryland, and the dad was born and raised here in ecuador.  the family decided to visit for a week and brought her along to watch the kids.  we were so suprised to see each other… what are the chances of seeing someone from my high school here that randomly?? 

I mean I normally run into people i know at the cumberland parkway giant, but this is just ridiculous!

Today is Nadia´s birthday – she´s turnin the big 20!  we´re all going out for dinner tonight to celebrate.

a retraction September 27, 2007

I wrote a blog entry a few days ago about an incident with a volcanology class.  Apparently the account that I heard was not completely accurate and I would like to set everybody´s mind at ease.  Everyone from BCA is fine, and please do not hold the program responsible for it.  It could have happened anywhere at anytime.  My intention was not to make people worried sick or scare Messiah College, and it seems that has happened.  I was simply reacting that day to something I had found out and processing it.  I should not have talked about it and I just want to set the record straight.  In that moment I was thinking of my blog as something between me, my family, and some friends, and not thinking of it as what it is … very public.  Sorry for all the confusion!

for those who are interested September 26, 2007

Let´s talk politics.

now i am by no means a very politically active person. it´s not really my cup of tea. but politics in ecuador really are fascinating.

for starters, democracy isn´t working so well here. in a recent poll, 50% of the population said they would rather have a dictatorship if it meant having a stable economy. wow. the government is getting more left every day, and the current president, Correa (you have to like majorly roll that r to pronounce it right) is pretty buddy buddy with Chavez. He has some support because he´s young and something new i guess, but people are worried about his decisions. he was reported recently to have called a female reporter a ¨horribly little fatty¨ for saying something he didnt like. Interestingly, he used to be a professer here at USFQ, and some people i know here have had him for class. They havent had good experiences with him.

Voting is not optional here in Ecuador. in order to have a bank account, get married, or do anything else practically, you have to have documented proof that you have voted. Mandatory voting doesn´t seem that democratic to me, but they almost have to do that because of the way they run elections… i´m getting to that.

You know how we have our constitution – basically it has only been revised a bit, right? Well Ecuador has completely redone its constitution 21 times, and they are about to kick it up to 22. Because of an economic crisis a while ago, ecuador changed its currency from sucres to the dollar because of inflation. this was actually going against its constitution which states they have to have their own currency. so they´re in a bit of a jam. In order to re-write their constitution, they have to elect an assembly just for that purpose. The elections are this weekend. And guess what? there are over 2,000 candidates.

I´m totally serious. These poor people have to choose from that circus of people to write something that could totally change everyone´s life here. Most people i´ve asked about it have no clue who to vote for. How can you properly look into the political platforms of that many people to make an educated decision?

The atmosphere around the city has been interesting. Every day I pass parades of chifas (these party buses that fit like 50 people and play loud music) with flags for their candidates, hooping and hollering. they get their campaign money from the government instead of paying for it themselves. they government does this to try to avoid people being supported by the banks and end up doing corrupt things later.

It is a law here that 50% of the people in the government have to be women. At first it seem like an awesome idea… something that we could learn from in the US. But sadly ecuadorians have told me most people just vote for the women with the prettiest faces and that´s that. So unfortunately, a lot of poorly qualified women get voted in because they´re a little more bonita. Oy vey.

We´ll see what happens to ecuador…

!!! September 25, 2007

oh yeah, i forgot to mention,

MY DAD IS COMING TO VISIT ME ON OCTOBER 17th!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i´m such a nerd i already have a whole itinerary planned out

not feelin the spanish thing today… September 24, 2007

It was an awesome weekend, one of my favorites so far this semester. Saturday´s dinner with the Hewes, the missionaries I know, was so awesome. Their home is gorgeous with a great view of the volcano, and Karen cooked us lasagna, salad, and hot fudge brownie sundaes. it may seem stupid but we never get food like that and being with an american family around the dinner table… it felt about as close to home as i could get. i told karen, ¨These brownie sundaes are a MINISTRY!¨ haha because my mom always makes them when we have company. We got to talk about a lot of really neat stuff and Kara and I stayed there until nearly midnight playing cards with them. It was so awesome of them to have us over and we were really blessed by that. saturday i was a little sad because my cousin got married and i really wanted to be there.

Sunday, church was awesome. We had to sit on the floor because it was so packed, but it didn´t matter. After church jose and eduardo organized a futbol game in the park by our house. it was so much fun! running here is crazy because of the altitude.. and well i must have been a sight because i don´t do well with sports at HOME let alone thousands of feet above sea level. i think latin americans come out of the womb playing soccer. we had so much fun though, and afterwards we all randomly played games… you know like the icebreaker games you are forced to play when you´re at some leadership buildling retreat… ahah it was so random.

HOWEVER, the weekend took a turn for the worst at about midnight last night. now you have to understand, i am almost finished with the last season of alias and it´s getting intense. i knew i had some reading for lit that i could do this weekend, but my quiz wasn´t till wednesday, so i kind of just didn´t get the head start i planned to. but just before bed around midnight, i thought it might be wise to check the syllabus just to make sure the quiz was wednesday. to my shock and horror it was actually monday. and i had class at 10 am. i had to try to read 6 short stories throughout the night… looking up every other word in my little electronic dictionary. it´s so frustrating because if it were in english, it would be no problem. but these are written with dialogues with accents… you know how southern accents in english lit change the spelling of words? they do that with the indigenous language in spanish lit so you can´t even look the words up. i only got through 3 and have to leave a bunch of answers blank this morning. i´m so mad at myself and so frustrated that i can´t speak this language. grades always came more or less easily to me and now i have to work so much harder than everyone else just to keep up.

all that to say… next week study time for the following quiz will be better planned and probably take 10 hours, give or take. i need to remind myself that most ecuadorians can´t get this kind of higher education and i am lucky! but i just hate school right now!

A few pictures from life lately September 22, 2007

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que tal September 22, 2007

Hey everyone!  i am enjoying a relaxing saturday in quito, the first weekend we´ve been home in 3 weeks.

Things are going well.  The semester is getting a little bit tougher and homework has picked up a bit.  I continue to enjoy spending time with the awesome group of girls from BCA, and with our Ecuadorian friends, who thankfully are increasing in number!

Kara and I actually made a new Ecuadorian friend named Ivana.  She now attends our celula (small group) at church.  She actually just got saved like 3 weeks ago and is really excited about the Lord.  I respect her so much because in the course of three weeks she has completely turned her life around – broke up with her boyfriend, stopped dinking, quit smoking, changed the music she listens to… the list goes on.  I am so proud of her committment and dedication.  We went out to coffee tree last night and she brought some girlfriends along.  She will be going along with us on the retreat next weekend so that will be really awesome.

Last night Kara, Christa and I went to the best birthday party I have ever been to.  Seriously, birthdays here are insane.  Eduardo´s cousin turned 23 and they suprised him with a party at Edu´s house.  All the cousins were there, a lot of them we already knew too because of going with them to Baños.  When people have a party at their house in Ecuador, they push all the furniture out of the living room and play salsa and merengue.  It´s so different from the more formal parties we have in the states for birthdays.  We played the most hilarious games… including musical chairs.  yes i´m serious.  but you had to salsa dance around them.  and a few other traditions here are that the birthday person gets their face smashed into the cake, so it gets destroyed instead of eaten, and also gets spanked with a belt by the whole family.  Apparently this is very common.  The Cardenas family is so different from mine… there are about 25 cousins that are all around the same age and they hang out all the time.  It´s so interesting to watch them all, and I can´t help but wish that my family could be as huge and spend as much time together.  I think that Americans could learn a lot from observing the way Ecuadorian familys act around each other.  Anyways, it was really fun and we felt very included and welcomed by them.

Today I had a bit of a tense conversation with my host parents.  They probably don´t intend to, but sometimes I think they overstep their boundaries a bit and get the idea that they are my actual parents.  They gave me the ¨consejo¨ that I should be taking more spanish classes instead of fun classes, and that I´m not preparing myself well enough for my future.  Without relaying the full conversation it´s hard to explain, but they said this in a way that felt very offensive to me.  This was difficult because I had to be respectful but I felt hurt that they didn´t think I was preparing well enough for my future.  It is difficult to explain in spanish that this semester is a much needed break from the academic stress of Messiah, and that I came here more for the experience than the study.  My academic goal for this semester was to learn spanish, and that is what I intend to do.  I am trying to remind myself that they mean well but I almost cried after what they said to me.

Tonight, Kara and I have been invited to dinner with the missionary family I know here in Quito.  Should be nice to have a home-cooked gringo meal and get to know them a little better.  Then I have reading for lit… lots of it.  speaking of, I should probably go get started.  Have a great weekend!

And we´re on in 5…4…3… September 18, 2007

Hey!  There have been a few exciting happenings in the past few days…

Do you remember me mentioning this girl Maria T that goes to our bible study?  she is a film major at the university here and an awesome girl – so on fire for the Lord and stuff.  Well yesterday Kara and I called her to see if she wanted to do lunch.  She was like, oh my gosh, yeah!  So we met after school and she was like, hey, i kind of have to do my radio show this afternoon would you guys maybe wanna come?

Carli had told us about maria T´s radio show.  It is broadcast from HCJB which is a pretty well-known thing.  Her show is played in all of mexico and central america, all of south america, and spain.  She has been doing it for 3 months now and has had tremendous success with it.  the show is every afternoon from 2-3 pm and discusses different topics, with guests that call in, music, and live chatroom feedback.  Kara and I got to sit in the studio and watch it all happen, and she even interviewed us on the air!  The topic yesterday was fear, and kara and i were asked what we are afraid of (to which i replied speaking spanish on the air and bumblebees) and a little bit about ourselves.  It is so crazy to think that yesterday I was broadcast to the entire spanish-speaking community!  She does 3 hours of research every day and the way she presents it is so solid, always incorporating her faith into the subject.  It is especially popular with young people.  What an awesome experience to be a part of it!  It was so random!

Then last night I had an interesting cultural experience… i am taking modern dance here, which is actually a lot of work.  we have to go to dance performances around the city and write 3 pg. papers about them.  last night i went to my first one with some friends from the class, and it was so awesome!  It was a tiny little theatre lit by candlelight… a really artsy crowd.  the dancers were incredible.  The cast was 3 people and the movements were so crazy i don´t even know how they did it!  it was really abstract but so beautiful.  I really enjoyed myself and i plan to go back!

Tonight i have a Bible study with all of the BCA girls at christa´s house and we´re gonna split pizza hut… don´t judge me for eating at an american chain in ecuador.  sometimes it is just so nice.  i miss dana´s cooking!! haha!

things are going well and thanks again for all your continued prayer and support.  my parents say that people are always coming up to them asking about me and saying they enjoy reading this… i appreciate that and thanks for reading!

Back from Baños September 17, 2007

Well i am back safe and sound! What a great weekend!

I just put up a great album on facebook if you wanna check out the pictures. It was so much fun. About seven of us girls went from BCA, and on saturday we met up with Eduardo´s entire extended family to go to some waterfalls (biggest i´ve ever seen!) and do some other fun stuff. the town of baños is really neat and the setting couldn´t be more gorgeous. we stayed in a creepy little hostal called Hostal Patty hahaha which was $3 a night and pretty sketch… but we had so much fun. some of the highlights:

- we went to a waterfall and stood close enough to it to get soaking wet… i have never been so wet
- we rode a zip line type thing kind of like in mindo
- an old lady grabbed my butt when i was walking down the street. turns out she´s not all there and does this to every girl who walks by.
- we ate at a restaurant that did a bad job of translating their menu into english, so some of the dishes were called things like ¨Chicken with cream and fungi¨, ¨chicken to the pinecone¨, ¨pancakes with fruit and icy¨ ¨Pepper to the chop¨… oh the list goes on
- We toured the town basilica.. gorgeous!
- Hiking.. my favorite, right?
- we danced salsa
- we rode this crazy kiddie ride type thing that flashes lights and drives you around town doing doughnuts
- we went white water rafting all day on sunday with the scariest yet most hilarious guides of all time… and yes i did fall in.

there was a lot we didn´t get to do like bungee jumping, the springs, and 4 wheeling due to time. it´s a 4 hour bus ride so it was hard to fit everything in in a day and a half. but it was really fun and i´m so glad we went! we´ll definitely go back at some point during the semester. i´ll put up a few pictures on this page soon.