A person I admire once said, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” I think Winnie the Pooh was onto something with this one.
One of the sweetest and yet darnest parts of the Race is meeting so many people and experiencing so many things that make it so hard to say goodbye. Each time you enter a new place your challenged with the choice to dive in and risk leaving half of your heart there, or guard your heart by not getting as invested.
Last week, my team experienced their first “I’m leaving but here’s half of my heart” goodbye. It came after 10 days in a little town called Puerto Lopez, on the coast of Ecuador. Within these 10 days my team chose to love their neighbors with all they had. And it brought the sweetest memories! As well as some hard goodbyes.
When we first stepped off the bus into Puerto Lopez we met a man named Marcus. Marcus is a tuk tuk driver, tours man, bus man, and quite the character. After following us around on his tuk tuk, helping us find our new home, Marcus quickly stole our heart. We came across Marcus almost everyday. He was everywhere. When we walked to the beach, went to the bus station, or walked back from dinner, he was there! Bumping into him was always full of adventure, laughter, friendship, and good conversation.
In Puerto Lopez we stayed with a local family. We met their son through AirBnB and he became a source of getting plugged into the community as well as a friend. Each time we ran into his parents we talked for what felt like hours. We shared with them the purpose of our trip and spent some of our time helping out at their business, selling tours to foreigners. It was a really neat opportunity because the parents don’t speak much English, which is what the majority of the tourists spoke.
Almost immediately after we found our home that first night we searched out for some cheap food. We came across the best pizza in all the land, run by Valentine and his 12 year-old son Carlos. Easily two of the kindest men who made it a point to stop and say hi anytime we ran into either of them. A few days into our stay we discovered Valentine had gone out of town for the week and left Carlos in charge! We then made it our personal responsibility to get pizza every night so we could check in on Carlos and see if he needed anything. By the end of the week he introduced me as his friend, and I knew any belly aches from excessive amounts of pizza were worth it.
Our neighbors also had a huge impact on our time in Puerto Lopez. Our first interaction with the neighbors was simply trying to get their dog to like us. We slowly became friends with the kids. We talked to them about their favorite music, danced with them, and took them out to pizza. Through interacting with the kids, we gained friendship with the moms and grandparents. When we left we got to hand off some clothes, bags, and games to the family. We all hugged and promised if we returned to Puerto Lopez we would come straight to their home.
We quickly discovered our burger lady (aka the lady with the very best burger stand around town) was a Christian and made it a point to share encouragement with her each time we stopped by. She told us about her church one Saturday night, just 5 blocks up the road. The next morning we went venturing to find it and ended up on some backroads where the end of blocks aren’t distinguishable and only locals travel. It was the best. We’re pretty sure we ended up at a completely different church than the one she attends. But it stole our heart, as we were invited to return again and again.
As we took a soccer ball to the beach one night, we knew instantly we had just discovered the art of making friends. We put the ball on the sand and a group of guys immediately asked us to play. More and more people joined in. Turns out one of the guys, Daniel, had heard about us through his mom whose church we went to! We connected and got to meet up a couple times throughout our stay to testify even more about why were were there.
During our many returns to the pizza place we met tons others, such as Andres and Raquel. Raquel is the sister of Daniel, the sister-in-law of Valentine, and goes to the youth service of the church we attended. Andres is Carlos’ step brother. One night as he escorted me to the bathroom we ran into his dad, who also happened to attend our new home church. We discovered pretty much everyone in this town is related in some way. And we were becoming a part of the family!
One of my absolute favorite people we got to meet is a young adult from Taiwan. Gigi is currently studying abroad in Peru. We met her our second to last night in Puerto Lopez and took her in as our own, having her join us in soccer and pizza and all the things. We invited her the next day to our usual pizza before we left. When she showed up we were so excited as she said she had the absolute best time the night before and had experienced so much joy, life, and love that she knew she couldn’t miss another opportunity to spend time with us. We are hoping to see her again next month in Peru and cannot wait to minister to her even more! Please continue to pray for this relationship 🙂
At the end of the day, I’ve discovered people are always worth leaving half of your heart with.
