I get this question, or something very similar pretty often. At first glance I feel like this question is lame, but now, after being asked by almost everyone I know, I have had to come to the harsh truth that I have never really explained how my experience unfolded after I left. Where do I work... what do my days look like... who do I live with... do I live in a church... do I only eat rice... how do I get around...what does a typical day look like... etc. And so, ladies, gentlemen, and other humans, here I am to answer it all. (first, I NEED everyone to know that someone's cell phone just rang at the cyber and their ringtone is the Harry Potter theme song music. Okay, we can continue) I feel like running everyone through what should be a typical day is the best way to approach this... I also did NOT prewrite this blog post as I used to do earlier this year. I wake up anytime between 5:00am and 7am. I have been trying to incorporate yoga into my daily life because it makes my whole life better, and so sometimes I do yoga in the morning. I will then shower, get ready, and start making coffee in our french press (Evan Korol if you are reading this YES I learned how to use a french press and it's amazing and amazingly easy) unless a communitymate has started that process. {Let us now talk about community... I live in a community of 4 women pictured to the left: Sarah, Caro, Clari, and me. We live in a volunteer house in the greater community of Arbolito (translation: little tree). We have our own rooms but share the rest of our home together. That includes many things you would find in a regular home... we have bathrooms, a kitchen, living room, a house chapel, laundry area, hammock outside... the usual. We have two dogs: Wookie and Maní. They cute. We have a gate around our property and guards always on duty. Our guards are cool people but as someone who has lived on my own for a while now, it's hard to ask someone to let me out when I want to go buy eggs down the street, ya know? (Brit Christopher, if YOU are reading this please don't make me check in with you when I want to leave our apartment but please be prepared to hug me on the daily because that's a part of my life now.)} Clari and I leave for our morning worksite anytime between 6:45am and 8:30am depending on what the day has in store. If retreat groups are visiting us at Damien House (aka my morning worksite) {Morning worksite info: Damien is a home for people who have been diagnosed with Hansen's Disease and you have access to Google so you can do that Better yet, you probably have Facebook and/or Instagram so follow us there! FB: La Fundación Padre Damian IG: damienhouseinc and then if you have questions about it please ask me, I'm happy to answer questions!} then we need to leave super early, and if we get distracted by neighbors or community discussions then we leave super late. Typically we strike a 7:45 middle ground. We take the bus, which is sometimes like being packed inside a sardine can, and sometimes it's relatively packed but there are seats. Bus ride takes around an hour. We start at 9/9:30.... Working at Damien means anything could happen, and typically everything does! Sometimes we are hanging out with patients and play dominoes, sometimes we paint a mural, sometimes we shop for things across the street, sometimes we bake banana bread, and other times we fold clothes or organize donations. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I make felt animals with the ladies though. That always happens. We eat lunch there around 12:30pm and it always includes rice. Lunch is a soup with a plate of food. Rice is always there, even if you think it's not. It is. From there, Clari and I walk to the bus stop to catch our second buses. We don't work together in the afternoon, so I hop on the 3 ruta 40 bus and ride it to the last stop, a community called, Una Sola Fuerza (our translation: One United Force). *There I spend about two hours in the afternoons Monday through Thursday hanging with a bunch of wild kiddos at an afterschool program called, Semillitas (Little Seeds). Our program is aimed at instructing these beautifully wild humans. They are cute and crazy and all my teaching nightmares have come true inside my half of a small classroom that I share with another teacher. I do not teach English. In fact, for the first several months, the kids taught ME Spanish (thank God). I teach math. Or I try to. I really love teaching and in my career I have been blessed to have experienced some beautiful "Aha!" moments with my students. I think all of those moments are magic and my soul thrives off of them. I see God's grace move through each moment, each human who sits in front of me or stands at a white board, trying to understand a concept and then finally having it click. I won't compare those moments, but I will say that there are some moments here in Ecuador that still bring chills to my arms and tears to my eyes. Moments so beautiful I don't feel worthy of having witnessed them in person. But I did. I have cried from the beauty and cried from the stress, the laughter and the frustration, the joy and the injustice. I could (and probably will) write about my experience at Semillitas, and if you have questions I would encourage you to reach out and ask me. I do a lot better with questions. I leave Sola anytime from 5:30pm to 6:30pm depending on the day. It takes me around an hour and fifteen minutes to get home on the bus, despite the ride in car being only twenty minutes. The bus has been a big way for me to practice patience. I'm still working on it. When I get home I either cook dinner or wait for it to finish being prepared. We rotate jobs so some nights I cook and sometimes I pray or do dishes. Dinner is typically a run down of everyone's days. In the beginning this conversation turned unfortunate moments into hilarious stories (thanks to Sarah) and slowly transformed into trying to unpack a lot of the hardness that we see. We still laugh a fair amount at the chaos that we exist in, and we still try to unpack things that we can barely understand. We listen. We share. Sometimes we cry. and typically we laugh. Because something we all agree on is that our neighbors have shown us how to hold suffering and joy at the same time. Weekends look different. But it's a Tuesday, more than a month after I started this post, and I have to get going to work. Like I said before, I do a lot better with questions than with self-disclosure. If this post leaves questions with you, please let me know. Time is slipping here and I am starting to feel it. This daily routine may seem simple to whoever reads this, or maybe it seems confusing. But it's how I've spent majority of the last nine months. There is a lot of beauty in this routine and lots of things I haven't mentioned... neighbor time... hosting retreat groups... any true details about my experiences... But my hope wasn't to put a magnifying glass to my experience, only to give you a picture and allow you to decide where you aim your focus. Where I aim my own changes daily as the picture itself transforms and changes. All I know for sure is it's a crazy photo with lots of colors, some blurriness, and lots of light. *This is where I continued adding new stuff a month after I had originally started this post... if you notice a difference in tone and style....that's why. ya girl got busy!
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AuthorHi! I'm Kate and I am spending the next year in Ecuador as a volunteer with a service organization. I am using this platform to share pieces of the journey as I go. Archives
May 2019
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