11. Ecuadorian food – grubs, fruit, agouti, oh my!
This month I’ve eaten so many things I’ve never eaten before. Agouti is a small, hopping rodent that we were served while visiting a family on a mountaintop. And the fruit here is amazing! So many kinds I’ve never eaten before!!! There is zapato, which is a small orange fruit that tastes like cantaloupe but looks like a gourd. There is Gyava (no idea how to spell that), which is a green pod with large seeds. You take the seeds out and suck the white coating off them and spit them out. Chancha, tree tomatoes, narahnjas, the list goes on and on.
But the most vivid food memory of Ecuador is eating Myone, which are white grubs. These grubs come fried on a stick, and are pretty big. But I ate one! It was a disgusting texture, but if you could get past that, and the fact that you were eating a bug, it kind of tastes like bacon!
10. Giant Bugs
Living in the rainforest for a month you can expect to see a lot of bugs, and that has definitely been the case for us. Finding cockroaches on our beds and spiders the size of my fist in the church are regular occurrences. One night while playing games at the dining table a moth the size of a bat flew in, resulting in a lot of screaming and running around until I could catch it in a juice pitcher. And just the sheer numbers of biting bugs is daunting – I stopped counting my bug bites after 98 on my right leg. Leaf bugs, colourful beetles, stick bugs, millipedes, the list of bugs we see every day goes on and on.
Probably the most exciting bug experience, however, would be when Jim realized that the blister that formed after being stung by something wasn’t a normal blister, but rather it was full of eggs. Yup, that’s right. He had eggs in his toe. So we did mini-surgery with tweezers and antiseptic wipes to get all of the eggs out before they hatched.
9. Standing on Equator
Our first day in Ecuador, the entire V-Squad went to the equator! We were at a museum that had marked the exact location using GPS and marked a line. So I have now stood with one foot in both the northern and the southern hemispheres!
8. New Friends
Team Deliverance expanded this month with the temporary addition of three new team members!
Jim was our contact from IncaLink that stayed with us for the entire month, and was also our translator. He is a biologist from Pennsylvania that works seasonally in the U.S, but spends half the year here in Ecuador as a missionary. He is hoping, though, that when he leaves here next week it will be his last time working his seasonal job in the States, and when he returns here next it will be as a full time, career missionary.
Karina is a missionary from Peru that also works with IncaLink. She joined up with our team for the month, and she was a great addition to the team. She has such a gift for getting people to open up; at the end of almost every service at least one person would seek her out to have her talk and pray with them. Her kind spirit and servant’s heart taught me so much this month, and I’m really going to miss her.
The third addition to our team was Marcello, a 15 year old from Quito. Most of his childhood he spent on the streets, supporting himself as a street performer by day, and robber by night. When he was 13 he was involved in a documentary about street kids, and through that he was connected to a Christian foundation that helped him get off the streets. It was there that he became a Christian, and now only 2 years later he is going out a missionary around his own country. His testimony is powerful to hear, even through a translator. He is a typical 15 year old kid, exuberant and loud, but he is maturing and he definitely has a heart for ministry.
7. Praying for Jose
One Sunday our team went to church in Huataraco, a community just down the road from Huaticocha. Just before service started one of the men in the back went into an epileptic fit. The entire church gathered around him in prayer. Afterwards, after the service had finished, our team gathered around Jose again and prayed for him for quite a while. He had many physical problems beyond the epilepsy, as well as a lot of anger and bitterness in his heart. As with Esperanza and Stephanie in the DR, I don’t know if our prayers changed his life or not, but I believe that I saw God working in his heart as we were praying. He was speaking a little bit (which he wasn’t able to do before), and wasn’t limping as much when he left. It was hard not to see instantaneous, complete healing like we were expecting, and praying for, but I believe that something happened that day. I can’t tell you what, but I know I felt God there, and when God is present something always happens.
6. Jumping off the bridge
On our way to the nearby community of Nueva Esperanza, there comes a point where we get out and walk because the trucks can’t cross the bridge over a river, and even if they did they wouldn’t be able to make it up the other side. So, we get out of the truck and hike up the mountain. But first, we usually go a little early and hang out at the river for a bit. The bridge there is about 20ft above the water, and at that point the water is pretty calm, so it’s perfect for bridge jumping.
I have gone cliff jumping twice before in Canada, but both times were into glacial waters, and neither one was quite as high as this. This was jumping into an Amazonian tributary in Ecuador. So much better!
5. Mud Hike
I already wrote about the mud hike in a previous blog so I won’t go into much detail here, but that night was so much fun! The digging out my shoes and socks from the mud, the trying to steady other people but really just falling down with them, the crawling on my hands and knees to solid ground. Those all combined with Marcello hiding in the dark forest and jumping out as we passed made for an incredibly memorable evening.
4. Planting Corn
3. Rosa
Again, for Rosa’s story check out my previous blog (The Perfect Road to Rosa), but she definitely makes my top 11 for Ecuador. Rosa is such a special woman and she definitely touched my heart. Her love for her daughter and husband despite the difficulty is having finding acceptance and companionship in Huaticocha is beautiful. She has such a pure heart to her and such a beautiful smile. I really wish I could stick around a while longer to see her grow in her Christian walk and blossom into a beautiful, confident, joyful woman of God.
2. Learning from God
This month was definitely a month of personal growth for many people on my team, including me. Through the hard days, my time of fasting and prayer, through our team feedbacks, and for me, just being in the jungle, I learned so much. I learned more about God’s character and who He is, but I learned even more about myself. God showed me some of my faults, and some things in my life that I have been holding on to and just needed to let go. He has also been teaching me about joy and how to choose joy in every situation. Whether it is sitting through a 5½ hour church service or getting heat stroke hiking up a mountain to visit a farm, God is teaching me to find and express joy in every situation. There is so much more I could say right now, but for now just know that God is definitely moving and working in my heart, and I can’t wait to share more of what he has been teaching me. God is so awesome!
1. Jungle Hike
Almost anyone who has ever known me has probably known about my dream to go to the Amazon, and this
month that dream came true. Since I was about 2 years old I wanted to go into the jungle and just drink it all in. To look at the trees, watch the birds, and examine animal signs and tracks – I wanted to experience it all. And now I have! We had a man from a local indigenous group take us into the jungle and show us around. At first it was perfect – walking through a nature preserve of virgin jungle where we got to swing on vines and just hike. But then it got even better when our guide took us off the paths. He went back to town through the jungle, not the road. We literally followed Leandro as he used his machete to chop our way through vines and bushes. Down hills that were so steep that we fell more than walked, along stream beds through valleys so narrow we had to walk through the water because there was no room beside them, and then back up hills so steep that we were on our hands and knees for parts of it. By the end we were exhausted and covered in bug bites and mud, but I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my entire life. I got to spend three hours with some amazing people in the most beautiful place on Earth. I got to experience God’s creation fully and it will be a morning I will never forget.
