(Note: No internet in the town I’m in. Traveled to the next town over
for the day to
post this, catch up on e-mail, and find out who won the Super Bowl. Heading deep(er) into the jungle tomorrow to
a town called Pactu Sumaco on the side of an active volcano. If I return with a shrunken head, I promise
I’ll blog about it)
When I was informed of the city where my team was going this
month in Ecuador, I jumped on Google and typed in the city:
Huaticocha, Ecuador. Search found no results. Hm. So
I Google searched the nearest city on the map and clicked ‘images’. This was in the first 10 pictures that came
up.
Unfortunately, the river water that runs through the jungle
of Huaticocha is slightly too cold for anacondas to live in, so it doesn’t look
like I’ll be fighting snakes and Jon Voight this month. There’s always next month in Peru.
Though we haven’t hunted anacondas, there’s been plenty of
time for
other adventures. In fact, just
about every day provides a new and unique experience that makes me stop for a
second and take in that I’m in the Amazon jungle1.
So I thought it would be fun to let you in on a normal
living day in the jungles of Ecuador…
4:00am – Wake up to the sound of an 18-wheeler driving past my
room at 60 mph. My bed is
about 10 feet away from the main highway, and separated by some wooden
boards. Put Mat Kearney on the Ipod and
go back to sleep.
5:00am – Wake up to the roosters crowing outside. The pastor whose house we’re staying in also
raises and sells chickens, and roosters wander the property. More on these chickens in my next blog. Turn the Ipod up louder, and back to sleep.
6:00am – Wake up to the pastors son, Isaac, watching
cartoons with the volume on max in the next room over. Look at my Ipod and see that it can’t be
turned up any louder. Pillow over my
head and back to sleep.
7:30am – Wake up to Marcelo, our energetic 15-year-old
Ecuadorian teammate, shaking me and tickling my feet. “Vaminos Kel -len, Lets go! Deseyunar, Comina! Break-fast is riddy!’ Fortunately, I found his weakness a couple
weeks ago: his long, curly hair that he is way too proud of. I reach for my hair clippers and he runs out
of the room.
7:45am – Check the inside of my shoes for
roaches, spiders or snakes, and head down to the basement for breakfast.
8:00am – No surprises this morning. My bowl is filled with chicken and rice, like
most breakfasts, lunch, and dinners. I
look behind me and the pastors wife is pulling the intestines out of the
recently decapitated chicken in the backyard.
We’ll be having him for lunch.
9:00am – Now that I’m finally over my dreams of a
Chick-fil-A chicken
biscuit and hashbrowns, the team meets in the church for
worship. No huge statues of Jesus, stained-glass windows, or a high-tech sound system here. The only church in Hauticocha is in the
basement of the house we’re staying in, right next to the kitchen. A few wooden benches and Jonathan David Helser on the ipod are all we need for a great praise and worship.
10:00am – After worship, the guys are told to grab the machetes and
the girls are told to grab their Bible. We walk down the
street, and after a few blocks we come to the empty property that will one day be the future home of our little basement church. Where do we come in? The grass is long, and the 3 guys with machetes will be
playingthe part of a lawnmower. The girls are going with the pastor to visit a woman and her baby. We get to chopping.
11:30am – I’ve been in Ecuador long enough to immediately
know that when there are multiple stings coming from my ankles, I’ve probably
stepped on an ant hill. I throw my shoe
and sock off, and my ankle starts to
swell.
12:00pm – My teammate Jeremiah goes into Chuck Norris mode
with his machete. Blades of grass
don’t stand a chance.
12:30pm – Chuck Norris mode ends when he comes running out
from the high grass with bees chasing him. He’ll live.
2:00pm – We finish lawn mowing, and rejoice that of the many
bites we did receive, none of them were snakes or deadly-poisonous-jungle-mutant-spiders.
3:00pm – Time for lunch means time for chicken and
rice. The girls return from their house visit and
join us for lunch. They’re excited as
they start to tell us about their experience.
The woman they visited was a new mother whose husband works in Quito for
3 weeks out of the month. She just moved
to Huaticocha and she’s very lonely. The
girls spent a few hours with her just hanging out, talking about Jesus, and
playing with her daughter. They said she
was so grateful, and they invited her to dinner tomorrow night.
4:00pm – Now that I’m over my dreams of a Chick-fil-A
chicken sandwich, fries, and sweet tea, we find out what’s next on the
schedule. Normally, we would be leading
church tonight or visiting a kids ministry.
“Tonight, because it’s February 14th, we’re going to do
something a little different,” says my teammate Rachel.
5:00pm – After an hour of racking my brain, I finally figure
out why February 14th is significant.
5:30pm – We head towards
the river in Huaticocha.
The river is 30 minutes down a dirt
road through the jungle. A rickety wooden bridge crosses the river and
leads into the path where we carried the electric poles.
6:00pm – The girls finally tell us the plan: jump off the bridge into
river, shower in the river, hike to a waterfall about 30 minutes away where
we’re going to make a campfire and grill hotdogs and smores. So much for blogging about a normal living
day in Ecuador.
6:15pm – We get to the bridge and it starts raining. Good thing we’re jumping into a river. Now, this bridge is, to quote John Goodman
from the Big Lebowski, “not exactly a lightweight, Dude.” The jump is about 30 feet above the river in
between two rocks, and you have to start swimming as soon as you hit the water
to not be carried off by the current. 
6:45pm – We’re alive and bathing in the river, when we realize the river is rising fast. We make it out before the
flashflood, but the rain has canceled the hike.
7:00pm – We find cover under an empty shack at the beginning
of the trail and Jim gets to work on starting a fire. I realize that this might take a while since
everything’s wet, and my teammate Erin was sick on the day we went up the trail
with the electric poles. We cross the
bridge and start to climb the trail.
7:15pm – The trail is much more enjoyable when 4,000 lb.
cement poles aren’t involved, even if it is raining and muddy. We get about halfway to the top. We can see the river down below and the
jungle goes on forever. But it’s getting
dark, so we decide to turn around.
7:18pm – Marcello (the energetic 15-year-old) comes
sprinting around the corner. ‘Vaminos
Kel-len, let’s go! Naranjas
(oranges)!” He grabs our arms and we
head back up the trail.
7:30pm – We get to the top of the trail and walk into Nueva
Esperanza. Marcello climbs the orange
tree and throws oranges down for us.
“Marcello,
we have to go now! No mas luz!”
7:45pm – Erin and I knew coming down the trail would be
trickier than coming up. It’s still
raining, and knee deep mud covers the trail.
It’s dark. There are no
flashlights, and we’re in the jungle. We
knew all this. Marcello didn’t.
7:50pm – Marcello falls face first in the mud and his
precious oranges go flying. Erin and I almost die laughing. Mad and embarrassed, he starts throwing muddy
oranges at me. We laugh harder.
7:55pm – Marcello falls.
We laugh. He throws oranges. We laugh harder (Repeat every 2 minutes for the next 20
minutes).
8:10pm – As crazy as it sounds, Erin and I figure out that
running down the mountain is the best strategy, as it doesn’t give the mud a
chance to swallow up our feet.
8:15pm – I’m running down a muddy mountain. In the rain.
In the dark. In the jungle. In Ecuador.
8:30pm – We make it back to the bridge. The water is now about 10 feet below the
bridge, and raging. Our worried teammates are glad to
see us and greet us with
smores. Marcello’s typical youthful enthusiasm
has been replaced with mud. Poor
guy. I can’t say I feel too bad,
though. He woke me up this morning.
9:00pm – My teammate Rachel is clearly disappointed that
their plans for Valentine’s Day didn’t quite go as planned. No hike, no campfire by a waterfall. But I can’t help but be thankful. I mowed grass with a machete today. I was told a story about a lonely woman
hearing about the love of Jesus today. I
jumped off a bridge into a river, and then I bathed in the river. I wasn’t attacked by piranhas. I ventured up a mountain at night. I peeled oranges in the middle of an
indigenous jungle town. I ate smores in
the rain. I’m in Ecuador. I’m on the World Race. It’s only month two.
1Example: The first day in Huaticocha was spent carrying electric poles up a mountain on a steep trail. The village where the electric poles were going, called Nueva Esperanza (‘New Hope’ in English), was truly something out of a movie – thatch huts on stilts on the top of a mountain overlooking the jungle for miles and miles. The poles were bringing the people electricity, something the village had never experienced before.
The poles were made of cement, and we guessed they weighed about 4,000 lbs. Along with about 25 men from the village, we carried three poles up that day. Like every day, it rained. And the steep trail turned into a muddy, slippery, steep trail. Perfect for carrying 4,000 lb. cement poles. It was difficult, painful, tiresome, and awesome.
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