a full house

This week has been pretty uneventful; I've had some service learning, which was normal, although I hadn't been in a while so the kids were very excited to see me. We also most notably did another project which involved cutting out preprinted rectangles in a photo and then reassembling them and gluing them down. Using scissors is extremely hard for a lot of the kids, and several of the kids who normally are good at doing their work without any help would ask me every thirty seconds if they were doing it correctly, which of course they were. Then others wouldn't ask but they would do something totally wrong, such as cutting out the people's heads instead of cutting on the nice printed lines.

In school we've continued reading Maria by Jorge Isaacs. It's very classic latinoamerican literature but it's very old and has far too much arbitrary description that has nothing to do with the plot. My host mom said she read it in 6th grade, but it still takes me forever to read it and then write a summary.
For the same class we also watched a movie, Amar Te Duele, which is basically Romeo and Juliet where she is part of Mexican upper class and he is part of, you guessed it, Mexican lower class. It was, of course, not a happy ending, but I liked this movie infintely more than the last one we watched. It was challenging to understand the conversation (no subtitles this time...) but the general plot would have been clear even if you didn't know Spanish, and the movie showed the emotions of all the characters nicely.

In my other class, we've been talking about a variety of topics every day, but the most interesting has been Cuba and the cold war. It's sort of a random class, but I've never studied the cold war since the only good history class I've ever had stopped after about World War 1. I'm enjoying reading Wikipedia and then sharing with the class what I read haha. Our teacher also told us to forget our homework and go out and experience Ecuador/Quito. Two weeks ago when we said we didn't have any weekend plans she was genuinely concerned and chastised us for not doing more things.


Today for lunch, there was bean soup, rice and shrimp with carrots. I not a fan of beans, shrimp, or carrots, but I ate everything and it was still much better than Galapagos food. It's nice to be home.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the birthday of my host parent's son Richard, who is the Ecuadorian Labor Minister. This is sort of a big deal, so my host mom's brother, his wife, their two daughers, their husbands, and four kids flew in from Cuenca (another Ecuadorian city) last night. That is 10 people, plus me and my host parents, and today their empleada (maid) arrived. She mainly takes care of the kids, I think. I assume that she got here a day later because she took the bus instead of flying, but I don't know for sure. Since they're leaving on Sunday she'll have been here less than 2 days, but I guess it's nice to have a babysitter even for that length of time. It's fun to have so many people around the house. Miraculously all of them fit here and have beds since there are three normally empty bedrooms, a couple extra mattresses lying around and a borrowed inflatable mattress. There are only two showers but it doesn't seem to have been a problem. We also had a variety of family members drop in this evening to visit. I enjoyed listening to their conversations, although I never contribute because it always takes me a while to catch on to the new subject, since it changes so quickly. They talked about going to the Liga vs Barcelona soccer game on Sunday and I told my friends so I really hope that works out, since Barcelona is one of the two best teams in the world and Liga is the best in Ecuador and I think in South America.


Love Alex