Sorry its been awhile since the last update – its been pretty crazy since we moved from Atuntaqui to Ibarra. We moved in just a few days before Keith Myers, our first visitor from back home, was showing up, so we had to settle in quick and then hop on the 2 1/2 hour bus ride down to Quito to pick him up at the airport. It was great to see someone from back home. It is especially great when that person is bearing gifts! Yup, Keith brought down two of the suitcases we had left back home because the embargo wouldn’t allow us more than two bags each when we came down. We weren’t really sure exactly what was in the cases so it was exciting to go through them. Sam’s mom, Jane, had done some rearranging of the contents and decided to give me a little surprise – you probably cannot imagine how excited I was to find a jar of Adam’s Crunchy Natural peanut butter in there!! You don’t understand – you see there is NO, NONE, NADA, good peanut butter here, period. Maybe there are places to find some in the big cities of Quito and Guayaquil – but I doubt it. I’ve already checked some of the big malls in those cities, even going into the specialty import stores, and there is nothing. The few brands of peanut butter that I can find here are all pretty much some version of Jiffy – really sweet with sugar added, not natural, not the kind of flavor like Adam’s. Maybe peanut butter is not as big of a deal in your life as it is mine..but for me, I go through a Costco size tub of it every 4-6 weeks or so back home. Its the fallback food for every occasion, whether for a snack or a fullblown meal – I need the stuff!! Ahem, but I’m not addicted or anything, really. Coincidentally, at the time of this writing, I’m pretty much out of it (hint, hint, Jane…) Those bags also had some extra clothes we needed (and some we didn’t), along with some pots and kitchen stuff that Sam had been sorely missing. Anyway, we were really grateful to Keith for lugging it all down with him.
Before I tell you about Mindo and some other stuff, I wanted to share a pretty cool experience in the ministry last week. Wasn’t my ‘door’ (it actually wasn’t even a door, it was a small tienda/store for DVD’s (yep totally ‘legit’ DVD’s for only $1.25, but I digress)), it was actually Fernando’s turn – an MS in our hall that I was working with. It’s pretty late in the morning and we’re getting close to wrapping up. We have one more block to do and we agree that we’ll call it after that. Two ‘doors’ into it, Fernando runs into this man who is just opening up for business (the DVD store). Fernando, in his quiet spoken manner, dutifully starts going through the Bible Teach book presentation word for word that had been suggested at the field service meeting earlier that morning – it was the one based on Rev 12:9 where you can then show how ch. 10 answers from the bible who/what wicked spirits are, etc, and you demonstrate a study. The man’s response was amazing. He stopped what he was doing and listened intently to Fernando’s textbook intro. He answered thoughtfully on the question posed. Fernando then showed him the suggested paragraph in the book, read it to him, showed him the scriptures it cited (even having him read them directly from the bible), and asked him the question. The man responded based on what he just read in the bible. It was like a perfectly done presentation in a service meeting demo!! He ends up inviting us into his shop, grabbing two chairs for us, and we sit down to continue the discussion. Fernando ends up going through about 4 paragraphs, including the man reading every cited scripture (including the entire account of King Saul seeing the spirit medium). He answers all the questions from what he’s learning. We had only one or two interruptions from customers coming in, after which he would sit right back down and pick up where we left off. The sad part for me was that me and Sam had a Spanish class to go to and I had to leave early! I haven’t had a chance to ask Fernando how much longer he stayed but it really was a thrill to see someone so sincerely reason on the scriptures and learn something from them right off the bat on the first visit – but that just isn’t really uncommon here! It pumped me up big time to hurry up and learn this language and have a fuller share in teaching all these sincere people here who are willing to listen to the bible’s truths!
Even with our limited Spanish, the ministry has been a lot of fun for us. I think I enjoy it the most when Samantha and I go out together without anyone to help us with the language. Like I mentioned in the last post, we are forced to fumble through conversations with people but we ALWAYS seem to get them (conversations). Maybe these folks are simply entertained by these gringos who can barely speak or they just feel sorry for us. Either way, we’re having a good time sharing something scriptural with them and it improves our Spanish bit by bit! I have to admit, though…at times it can be very, very humbling…yes, very, very, very humbling. A couple weeks ago, I was offering a brochure to an older woman who owned a little tienda/corner store. For whatever reason, I was tripping up pretty bad on my Spanish (ok, worse than usual), but eventually I got through a presentation. The whole time this dear woman was looking at me with that sweet motherly look that kind older women give to little children who are offering boy or girl scout cookies. AW, OF COURSE she will take my cookies, I mean brochure…and how much is it? Sadly, I didn’t even understand that question, so my daddy, er, the Spanish brother with me, had to respond for me and tell her that the literature is free but she is welcome to donate to our work, which we could forward on for her, etc. So, she says ok, and so sweetly goes to her cash drawer, pulls out 50 cents, comes back and gives it to me…all with that sweet, sweet smile of ‘awww, how cute!’. Yeah, pretty much wanted to shoot myself at that point. If she would have said something like ‘you did such a good job’ or similar at the end, I’m pretty sure I would have just stepped out in front of the next speeding bus passing by. Thankfully she didn’t (as far as I could understand) and I’m still here to talk about it. More importantly, I’m trying to learn some more humility from it and it makes me even more consumed with trying to learn this language ASAP! Oh, and I hope she reads the brochure :) it will do a lot more for her than cookies would.
Well, back to Keith’s visit. While Keith was here, time went by pretty fast. We hung out in Ibarra just for two nights after he arrived before jumping back on the buses again (this time for almost 5 hours) for a place called Mindo. I’ll segue here to mention that I’ve posted a lot of the pictures of stuff we did with Keith on Facebook already. If you saw it there, this might be a little redundant. I just started using FB, and posting stuff there on the fly with a quick blurb is a little faster to share before I can get a chance to blog about it. Anyway, I digress… Mindo, in the Cloud Forest, is absolutely amazing! In some ways, it reminds me of the interior of the island of Kauai. It is a lush thick jungle at around 5000’ – still up in the Andes but not as high as the area we live in. The town is pretty small and quaint, and everything is laid back (ok, that’s pretty much everywhere in Ecuador outside of the big cities). Laid back = just because the town bus station posts it’s hours out front doesn’t mean that you should actually expect someone to be there during those hours – really now, c’mon. It took 2 or 3 tries to buy our return bus tickets. Anyway, it’s pretty much what you would expect of a little jungle town in South America – dirt streets (which turn muddy in the rain), friendly people, cheap food, and beautiful sights. Mindo is a butterfly mecca, a bird-watchers paradise (literally, I read somewhere that little ol’ Ecuador has 10% of the bird species found on the entire planet!), and a nature-lover’s must-see. In the 4 days we spent there we went to a butterfly conservatory, a frog concert in the evening, rode a ridiculous maybe-Chevy-powered cable car across a 500’ canyon, hiked to some waterfalls, did zip lines until it hurt, and rode 4-wheelers. We’ll have to do the river rafting and bird watching next time. Although we did see some Toucans in the wild while zip lining - that was amazing! Some pics:
That is just spooky…
Some funny Cuban dude who had a knack for getting the butterflies to land on him…
In the States, they pretty much have to idiot-proof this type of thing for liability protection. Here, if you are idiot enough to not hang on and you fall out..well, enough said.
I keep wondering what type of car/truck the cable car engine/tranny was pulled out of…and automatic or stick?
About 500' up in the cable car
Zip lines! Absolute blast and must-do in Mindo!
Sam coming in on the final zip (we did 12 – there were 14 but we ran out of time..)
While Keith was here we also went to the Otavalo market, the leather places in Cotacachi, and one of the other great highlights was the Guayabillas animal reserve, which is on the outskirts of Ibarra where we live. Who knew something so cool was so close that we didn’t even need to get an another !$%@ bus to see it?? (really I love buses.) Want monkeys? They got ‘em…want 90 yr old turtles? Them too…how about lions?? YEP! Although it’s kind of odd that you have to hike on foot about a mile or so up and over this hill to get to the entrance (maybe they don’t want paying visitors..? or only visitors in good enough shape to run if the lions get out of their pen..?). And the rules were pretty lax – basically be careful that the monkeys don’t grab your sunglasses off your head – maybe there were more rules and I just didn’t understand them because I barely speak español. Anyway, we spent the next couple hours checking out turtles, noisy birds, bobcats (probably called something else but they looked bobcatty to me), playing with monkeys, and…watching the LIONS. THAT was the highlight…a full grown male and female lion. The size of just one of the male’s paws was almost unbelievable (maybe the size of my head??). The sheer power that this animal has was obvious in the way he moved and awe-inspiring to experience so closely in person. Every inch of these things exudes power. Its at that point of thought that you come to this realization that the cage that these magnificent beasts are in isn’t all that high or sturdy looking. I mean its a pit but the concrete wall is only about 10-12’ high. There is a wire fence that goes up another 6 or 8’ but it don’t look strong enough to stop no mad lion. Is there a lion out there that can’t jump 10 or 12’ AND not strong enough to knock over a wire fence above it? Yeah, it made me nervous. But the show was rather unique so we kept watching. Apparently, the female was in heat and it seems the pair were trying to mate. It was a slow process where the male would follow the female around and she would seem really annoyed whenever he tried anything. Maybe they actually meant that the male was in heat, not the female. Poor guy seemed frustrated. In fact, at one point, I was hollering a little too loud and I made him mad – he turned towards me, snarled, and bolted towards me for a few steps. That was enough to give me a minor coronary. I immediately flashed back on the San Francisco Zoo case where the Siberian tiger got mad, leapt out of her pen, and killed a 17 yr old kid who was taunting it. Lesson learned – don’t tease big male lions that are, uh, in heat. In any case, it was pretty amazing to see something like this in person and not on a nature TV channel. Who woulda thunk that you could go to a little Ecuador animal shelter (that you have to hike to) instead of like Africa to see this? At the end of the day, just watching these two powerful cats walk around the cage and then stretch out full length on the wood platform from massive paw to tip of tail was something I won’t forget.
When he gave me this look I should have known to shut up..
Time to run!
I’m pretty sure this is the guy you had to watch your sunglasses around…
Sure, its easy to moon someone when you can swing from a tail…
Making fast friends with crackers
Its interesting when you’re in a foreign country surrounded 24/7 by a different culture, different food, different looking people, different landscapes, different way of doing things, etc..I find that when I do see something or someone that looks familiar, I immediately gravitate towards it/them. It is clearer to me now than ever before why foreign language/culture groups in the US are such tight knit communities. When someone there who is in business for themselves can get ‘in’ with a foreign community, usually they have a goldmine of opportunity to service that community as the word spreads very quickly that you can be trusted and you understand those people and what they need. It is pretty similar here, too. If one of the gringos here tells me where I can find something that I’m looking for, I have an immediate trust of that place and feel no need to really shop around (and not just because it is so painful when you barely speak the language). And when I’m walking around and I hear someone speaking English or see someone who is clearly American, I have this impulse to want to go over and start talking to them – about what? Well, about anything, anything familiar – heck, given my current lack of ability to casually converse in Spanish, I’ll talk about anything UNfamiliar too – just talk to me! I’ve noticed one problem that I have in this respect, though: While I can immediately spot the obvious fair-skinned, floppy hatted, backpack-toting traveling gringo – they never recognize ME for an American! My Pacific Islander heritage has me blending right into the surroundings. I spot the gringos, I get all queued up to be like, ‘hey, what’s happening! whatcha doin’ down here, where you from’ and all that, and alas, I don’t even get the needed eye contact to get a chance to say anything at all! It’s like I’m not there…they glance right over me – apparently I just blend right in with the rest of the short, brown Ecuadorians in the crowd…figures.
After moving to Ibarra a little over a month ago, we’re starting to get settled in. We’re learning some names, hanging out with some of the friends, making arrangements to work with them in the ministry, etc. One thing we might not have minded taking a little longer, though, was our entrance into the School. Yep, just one week after being announced as part of the cong, we get school assignments! I have a reading this coming Wed night (of all things, Numbers…for a first talk in a foreign language?!? really now that is just mean…) and Sam has a talk next week. Even though its Numbers, I’m pretty sure I’m still getting off easier between the two of us this time, but I’m sure she’ll be doing plenty of laughing soon enough when they start throwing actual talks at me. In the meantime, I am all over the assignment board for Attendant and Mics for next month. Not sure how I’m supposed to perform these duties with my pitiful Spanish and I don’t know hardly anyone in the hall yet…but hey, I’m here for the adventure too, right?…should be interesting…
Well, that’s it for now. Below are few more random pics. We’re missing everyone quite a bit lately, and missing some of the comforts and conveniences of home, but we’re having an amazaing and challenging adventure here and the best part is that we’re getting to serve Jehovah more fully. Love and miss you all…
At the shop where they make leather goods for JW books, etc – something tells me they’re not supposed to use that logo..but hey, its Ecuador..
Had a weak moment and went cowboy at the Otavalo market…been threatening to wear it in service but haven’t quite gotten there yet…
This is one of our most adorable service buddies, 3yr old Israel – in a ‘longest eye-lashes’ contest, I would be all-in on him (what if they grow more as he gets older??? he’ll need a comb to untangle them every time he blinks)
Going away party for Trevor:
Trouble… :)
Night falls pretty fast at the equator…next two pics were from the rooftop deck of the Elam’s new place in Atuntaqui
Jeff and another bro talking some serious business on the couch…while licking suckers
More trouble…
Jeff & Robin Elam
