Bienvenidos Boston College

So a large part of the Rostro de Cristo program is hosting retreat groups from colleges, universities, and high schools throughout the year. Both Duran houses have houses for retreatants right next to the houses where the year long volunteers live, so when a group stays in one of those houses, a volunteer from the same community is the leader of the group. This person stays with the group at all times and has a lot of responsibility but also gets to just hang out with the group. From January 3-11, Boston College came to Arbolito and I got my first taste of being a retreat group leader. I was really excited for it (and definitely a bit nervous because I just didn´t know what to expect) because the retreat group program is something very unique to Rostro, and it was something that strongly drew me to the program, since a cultural immersion trip was basically what started the chain of events that lead me to volunteer for a year.

Boston College was AWESOME. They had so much energy, lots of great questions, and had such a fun group dynamic that I am STILL missing them two weeks later. Everyone took part in reflections and I really felt like I was part of the group, just hanging out and playing Jenga and giving people mohawks? (That did actually happen...by the end, Kenny, Calvin (the two guys in the picture with Aide and I) and Kipp were all sporting mohawks and Ricardo let Aide cut his hair shorter). I was truly and honestly very sad to see them leave.

Every retreat group does more or less the same things. We spent lots of time in the neighborhood, meeting neighbors and playing with the kids. In Arbolito we visited Patricia, Ellsya, Pastora, Jenny & Oscar, and Lupe. BC definitely came with a lot of questions, and even though they all had alternating levels of Spanish, each and every one of them introduced themselves in Spanish and made an effort to speak the language to the neighbors. It was also really fun to get to spend lots of time with Aide, since she works at Manos and is so busy all the time with classes and other responsibilites. Aide was with us all week for market trips to buy food, at neighbors´houses, helping to cook dinner, and she even borrowed a pair of my shorts so she could play in the soccer tournament on Saturday that Ricardo organized. Ricardo and Aide have both known the adult leader for BC (Chris) because he´s lead this trip for BC for the past five years. It was really fun to see how he still held such a strong relationship with the neighbors and with the two of them even though he can only return each year for a week. My group also went to Damien House, which is a hospital for lepers in Guayaquil, for two mornings, visited with the patients there and did some singing (really, I do more theatrical productions here than I ever have before...and my singing is way less than satisfactory). We headed to Nuevo Mundo as well to visit Caitlin´s English class, and again, sang to the entire assembly (Build Me Up Buttercup).

My favorite thing to do with the retreat groups is to visit all the afterschool programs. Because the group was staying in Arbolito and because I work at Semillas, we went there three times. We also got a chance to visit Valdivia and Manos Abiertas, which was really fun for me because the last time I went to these programs was my first week here when they were still run by last year´s volunteers. Having visitors come to our programs is awesome, because we have so many kids and the real thing that they need most is attention. With lots of extra people, more kids can get that one on one attention that they crave. We love the kids we work with, and to see the retreat groups give them that one thing they need so much, it´s just really wonderful.

The last day we went to the Malecon in Guayaquil, as a sort of transition day back to their reality of being US citizen. This is a chance for them to reflect on what they´ve seen and done and who´ve they´ve met over the past week. Honestly, I like for retreat groups to feel uncomfortable with their experience. I guess that sounds really weird, but what I mean is that I believe that being a college-educated US citizen puts an individual in a very privileged, and very small, population of people in the world, and coming to terms with that is awkward, because who honestly likes to think of themselves that way? I feel like there´s a social responsibility to realize that you are part of that privileged population, and to do something with the leverage that you´ve been given. Whether it´s helping out in your own neighborhood or halfway around the world, it doesn´t matter. I just believe that there are lots of people that have the capabilities to achieve amazing things, but just not the opportunities. In one way or another, I just hope that this program provokes retreatants to think about the opportunities they´ve had and taken advantage of, and how maybe they can transfer those to other people that weren´t so lucky. As much as I hope our program made the retreatants think a lot, it definitely made me think too.

I can´t say that I ever thought I´d be so happy to wear a Boston College shirt (go ´Nova!), but this group has converted me hahaha holler at BC :)

Due to lack of my camera capabilities, this picture doesn´t include everyone, but it was the best group shot I had!

Paz, Amor, y Ecuador

Fun Fact: I Can´t Ride Horses

So as I said in the last blog post, we did some travelling for a few days between Christmas and New Years because the foundation gave us the week off from work! The volcano in Banos decided to continue spitting hot ash into the air, so we nixed that plan and headed south to Loja. Fifteen of us ended up going to Loja, but we travelled in two groups. I was in a group with Caitlin, Jon, Jessie, Celso, Tasha, and Jenn. When we first got into Loja, we took another bus right away to get to Zamora, which is on the other side of the National Park Pordacorpus, and it´s the side of the park that enters into the jungle. Total travel time was probably about 11 hours. It was definitely a long day of being on busses, but it was funny and we were all together so we still managed to make it hilarious. We got into Zamora pretty late and checked into our hostel, which actually was more of a hotel, and they handed us seven different keys to seven different hotel rooms...uhhh not necessary, nevermind the fact that we were also scared to sleep in rooms by ourselves because some of the rooms had huge windows that opened into...the hallway of the hotel.

The first day we decided to try a few hikes at the National Park. We found a pickup truck to take us to and from the park entrance, and got some bread and cheese to make sandwiches during the hike. The first hike we did was to a waterfall. It wasn´t too difficult, but it kind of broke us into the hike we decided to try next. The next hike was basically an eighty degree incline that never stopped, and we got separated at certain points but eventually all were able to meet back up. I think we all slipped at least once (let´s be honest, I slipped multiple times) but we all made it down in one piece. We did a short hike to a river afterwards and went swimming in the freezing water (Caitlin actually looks like a dog when she was doing the doggie paddle in the river...). We had our picnic and slept on the rocks in the sun and Jon and Celso (and finally Caitlin) were jumping off of rocks into the water (I´ll admit it, I chickened out...there was no way my little legs could get me over the rocks and into the safe water).

That night we took the guide book´s advice and went to the ¨best place in town¨...and we were the only ones there haha but I tried frog legs! They really did taste just like chicken, and they came with this super great sauce, so they kinda tasted even better than chicken. Seven gringos walking around in Zamora was like a walking circus/freak show. Zamora is definitely not too much of a tourist town, and everyone was staring at us even moreso than usual.

The next day we took a bus to Vilcabamba, which is like a hide out for expatriots haha it was absolutely wonderful and extremely relaxing. Just to comment on how much of a freak show seven gringos in Zamora was, we were on the bus ready to leave for Vilcabamba when the owner of our hotel gets onto our bus and starts shouting about the gringos who were in room 402 (cough cough Tasha and Jessie) that walked out of his hotel with the room key. Jessie reached into her pocket and took out the key to return it (which was hilarious because the keys were MASSIVE). Then the bus company kept telling us to move our seats around because we all naturally had to sit in the wrong seats. She was amused though, not too irritated. We got to Vilcabamba early and headed to Rendez-Vous, which is a French-run (duh) hostel that was just extremely comfortable and quiet and peaceful. Vilcabamba is in a valley so it´s surrounded by mountains and the air is so fresh and cooler with less mosquitos, which was a very welcomed change of scenery from Duran. The first afternoon, we found a cute place to eat in town and then some of us went hiking while others hung out in the hammocks at the hostel and read. That night we found Timothy´s Bar, which was absurdly American and had couches and a Christmas tree? Oh, and the kid that took our orders was probably...six years old. It was a lot of fun.

The next morning, we headed over to Holger´s Horses, a little place that does horseback riding tours through the mountains. There were two routes available for the "inexperienced" (aka me...the only other horse I rode was a donkey ride when I was younger and I fell off the stupid thing) so we split into groups. The boys (Celso and Jon) headed to the waterfall while the girls (Tasha, Jessie, Cailtin, Jenn, and myself) headed with Holger himself up through the mountains to his family´s finca (farm).

I laughed so hard during all of this that I may or may not have peed my pants (again, I know) for a few reasons:

1. I just plain and simple cannot ride a horse. The thing went faster when it wanted to and went slower when it felt like it...I just tried to hold on. And when my horse, Mil Amores (1,000 Loves) decided to partially gallop or even just trot, I was stiff as a board and just bounced up and down in the seat (graceful)

2. I looked like Jane Goodall, meaning I wore Earth tone clothing...and the ranchero hat that was offered to everyone but I was the only one who thought it was necessary

3. I was afraid my horse was going to fall off the cliff, maybe because I saw Jessie´s slide a bit down the cliff.

4. Mil Amores kept walking slower than the rest of the horses, so Holger (who was awesome) kept yelling back to me "Oye, Payasa, todo bien?", which translates to "Hey clown, everything alright back there?"

5. We stopped off at Holger´s mom´s house to meet his four-year-old daughter and to have a cup of coffee. Then we hiked a bit to the highest point on the mountain...and I slipped in slow motion down part of the moutain (like I almost did a split...) so Holger decided he had to walk next to me for the rest of our descent.

We had dinner at the most ridiculous establishment in town that night. Everyone there was a character, with some absurd story. A woman the looked like Cruella DeVille (how do you spell that?) was at the table next to us and she had a puppy with her...which was really ironic. Through eavesdropping we found out she was from LA. We asked our waiter, who was also the owner, why he moved to Vilcabamba from the states and he launched into this huge story about how everyone who comes to Vilcabamba is running away from something. Later, we met up with the other group of volunteers that ended up staying in Loja and went to Timothy´s Bar again. The six-year-old wasn´t working again, but we still managed to have a good time.

The next day, we checked out early, remembered to return the keys to our hostel rooms, and headed back to Loja to make sure we could get tickets home to Guayaquil on an overnight bus. The woman in the bus office in Vilcabamba told us they´d be hard to get because pretty much everything was already full to get back to Guayaquil, but she was lying because we got tickets easily and then had the whole day in Loja. We went to an open market and got little trinkets to take home (I got a necklace with a C on it that´s like the ones that a lot of the kids wear here) and we walked around on a wild goose chase to find a bar called Jugo Natural that Tasha decided we just had to go to...she ended up walking right past it when we tried to use the map in the guide book to find it. It´s this nice little cafe, and Tasha goes to the bathroom and asks us to get her a sausage pizza, which doesn´t seem like it was that funny as I´m writing this but it was HILARIOUS at the time. And then they tried to overcharge us, but we caught them.

That night we call returned home on the overnight bus, Caitlin almost peed her pants because she has the smallest bladder known to man, and we got in to Guayaquil at 6:30am, where I ran into one of my students. During the day, we helped Eduardo finish up our Año Viejo, which he decided to name Joey, which is my boyfriend´s name, meaning that we blew up Joey with sixty fireworks and gasoline on New Year´s Eve. We went to mass at 8pm, then headed to Aide´s house to have dinner with her family. We were starting to blow up some fireworks in the streets with her younger brothers before we headed back home to blow up Joey with Eduardo and Elvis. Megan was in Duran for the night with some of her kids from the shelter and Jenn came in from Monte Sinai, so it was fun to celebrate with them too. At midnight we literally poured gasoline all over our año viejo, then lit it on fire so that all the fireworks started blowing up. It was pretty funny. My roommates and I took a walk through the neighborhood and said hi to a bunch of different neighbors, including Don Felipe (who runs the food stand where we usually buy groceries) who tried to convince us that we could share a little "cervecita" (the tiniet beers I´ve ever seen) with him (we didn´t). We all met up with Megan, Jenn, and the boys at Patricia´s for dancing around 1:30 and ended up staying there until 3:30. Ricardo, Aide, and Frixon showed up too so we had some good teachers, and Brendan and I ended up dancing with them in the retreat house until 6:30am. Then we watched the sun rise from the roof of our house, got attacked by mosquitos and Ricardo cooked us breakfast (miracle) before we slept nearly all day.

Solid New Years :)

Paz, Amor, y Ecuador