Ministry this month wrenched my heart, opened my eyes, and strained my abdomen from laughter. This first post is a “before”, and pertains to the beginning of this month. Internet has been scarce, but I will hopefully get an “After” blog up in the next few days.
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We are spending this month in Quito, Ecuador, where the mountains aren’t far, and neither is the trash. That may not be a fair description, although somewhat accurate. It really is beautiful here and, while I enjoyed Lima, I’m grateful to see all of this green after a month in the dessert of Peru.
We will be working with Ecuasol, a foundation in a poor area of Quito. The staff consists of a group of French volunteers who come for a year and try to help keep kids off the streets through afterschool programs.
Being French, they were immediately cooler than us with their accents and cigarettes, but they never held it against us that we are from the States. Quite the opposite — they have treated us like family.
We showed up a few days ago ready and excited to change the world, like short term missionaries often do. They were surprised to find out that we would be staying with them for a month, and scrambled to show us a few things that they would like us to do.
There was a chicken wire fence falling apart, paint peeling everywhere, and the potential for a brick oven.
Fixing the chicken wire fence took a whopping 15 minutes.
The paint peeling will take the whole month to remove, and then repaint.
The brick oven will take a year of trade school and then a week or two to make.
We may not be able do everything during our stay.
Our first day of working at Ecuasol coincided with the last day of Carnival — the Latin America Mardi Gras which starts Saturday and goes through Tuesday.
We spent the first 3 days of Carnival in Baños, Ecuador, where the locals went crazy with spraying foam. Being crazy ourselves, we didn’t hesitate to partake…
As always, Paris is cool under pressure.
Squad leaders get no special treatment, and I don’t think they’d have it any other way.
We may look intimidating, but the local children put us to shame.
On our arrival in Quito, we assumed that our Carnival soap spraying days were behind us. In our first day of ministry, one of the woman at the foundation poured some water down the shirt of David, a French volunteer. Everything happened so fast, but the next thing I knew, I was throwing a bucket of water at a girl who’s name I didn’t even know yet…
I now know that her name is Chloe…
This was how we spent our afternoon. Changing the world in some sort of way.
We have a lot of painting to do, a lot of little crafts as well, but I have a feeling our ministry will be much more than just arts and crafts.
