Off to the Galapagos!!

Adam and I are heading off to the Galapagos this week to see the turtles, Darwin finches, iguanas, seals and the blue footed boobies with our first visitor from America- Renee Dalenta! Woo hoo!

Prepare yourselves for photo overload when we get back!

5/14/ Photo-Every Day Animals

Every day on my way to and from town, I see plenty of animals. The majority are stray dogs, but it is also pretty routine for me to pass by the following animals (as I did yesterday on my walk to Supermaxi):

Ecuadorian goat- he was tied up near the park

The llamas at the park near our house

The noisy roosters that cockadoodle at all hours

And of course, other photos that I haven't captured are the burro, horses, and cows. The funny thing is that we live in a fairly large city of 150,000...so we aren't talking about the countryside here!

Celica and Puyango- More Origami with Teachers!

Wow, I can't believe a week has gone by- so much for the photo a day thing! Lol. It lasted about a month- that is pretty good right?

So as I mentioned in the previous blog post, Eri and I, along with a few colleagues, were going to Celica and Puyango on a two day trip to do an origami workshop with the region's teachers. It was organized by the Ministerio de Educación, with the idea that Eri and I would teach the teachers how to use origami to encourage creativity, concentration, patience, and motor skills among school aged children. They were the ones that had organized the 3-day workshop that we conducted in March, and they wanted us to reach out to teachers that worked in some of the more distant communities. Hence we went out to Celica and Puyango, which are about 5-6 hours by car, depending on the fog.

The first morning started out semi-disastrous for me! We left at 4am and when they go to my house to pick me up, I headed down the stairs without turning the lights on. I thought that I was on the bottom step (clearly not) and totally fell flat on my face! I bent up my glasses and had a cut under my eye...BUT no broken bones! Hurray!! And clearly no photos of me with my crooked glasses (which I have since fixed).

We spent the first full day in Celica working with about 75 teachers. When Eri asked some of the teachers what Celica was known for, their response was, "La neblina" (the fog). And sure enough, though the morning started as clear as could be, the fog quickly rolled in and out! The photos of the school below show the quick change within just a few hours! I have a bunch of pictures of the teachers doing origami, but really...I think you all have seen just about enough kids and teachers folding origami! Let me know if you want to see more though!

Sunshine!

Then fog!!

Then lots of rain!

Lost in the fog during our 10 minute break from origami!

Our white board introduction! 

After our long day in Celica (we started at 8am and ended at 6pm), we drove to the city of Alamor (which everyone kept calling Puyango because that is the canton) where we had a typical Ecuadorian dinner (rice, chicken, some veggies, and fried banana) before crashing at the hotel around 9pm! The next day we started off bright and early at the school, working with about 65 teachers. It is the same routine as the other charlas (starting out easy with origami tulips, dogs and cats...advancing through birds, frogs, cranes and boxes...and then ending with the kusudama). Unfortunately we didn't get to stop at the Puyango Petrified Forest because we had to hurry home to beat the fog that fills the highway, but Adam and I hope to go in the future!

Just in case you haven't seen enough similar shots in our blog!

Even in Puyango, the fog comes rolling in!

Some people have asked how we get around when we go to barrios and towns far from the city center... well hear you have it! INFA provides a driver (usually it is Juanito from my trucha fishing adventure) but for our Celica trip, a different driver of the same name took us. 

Scheduling mishap and hiatus for 2 days!

Oops! Eri and I made our first scheduling boo boo! We had an origami workshop with the 6th graders (I discovered that is indeed technically our U.S. 5th grade) at Escuela Dolorosa, the school we have been going to. They were the last class to have a workshop with us so they were pretty jazzed.

I had written in my calendar that it was at 2:10pm but when Eri called me this morning, she told me that we could me in front of the school at 4pm or 3:30pm in the office. I assumed that I had written it into my calendar wrong and didn't even say anything, so we met up at 3:30pm in the office and arrived at the school around 4pm. The kids from the 6th grade were on recess and they all came running to us saying that we missed our appointment with them! Eri opened up her calendar...and saw that she had written 14:10 on her calendar...but she didn't see the "1" when she had doublechecked it yesterday. How terrible!

So of course, there I went again...having some possible information but not saying anything because I assumed I was wrong. We were so mortified because the kids had all brought their paper in and were waiting at 2:10 for us! We apologized to the teacher and are now scheduled for 2:10pm next Wednesday.

Tomorrow we are leaving at 4am to head to Celica and Puyango- towns that are about 5-6 hours away but only 4 hours away by INFA truck. We are going to be doing a workshop (of course on origami!) with teachers in the region for 2 days. It should be interesting. Adam's first few days away from me in a long time! Hope he survives! And I hope you all survive with additional lapses in photos.

5/1-4 Photos- More food, more origami. Our life in the Peace Corps.

Sorry for the lapse in photos lately. Things have been pretty busy and by the time we get home, make dinner, and relax a little bit, I become way too tired to upload photos or resize them to post on here. Plus it is just life as normal here- workshops, meetings, errands, cooking and bad Spanglish. But here are a few from the past few days.

Over the weekend, as promised, I made cinnamon rolls and broccoli slaw. Both turned out terrific and we ate them up (well, Adam didn't touch the slaw, I finished it by myself!). This Saturday I am planning to make more cinnamon rolls and also a big lunch of chinese food (a few of the new volunteers will be in town, so I figure why not make some food! Haha). 

This week has already been another exhausting one with more workshops for little ones (this week we have already hit the ages of 4-5 years old, 8-9 years old, and 11-12 years old). Adam and I also went back to a week of arts & crafts with the kids at the orphanage, and as I predicted, they were not happy with not playing on the computers this week- so next week we will put them back on the computers to play Dora the Explorer and Stuart Little. I am guessing we will alternate every other week (computers one week, art & culture another week).

These little guys were 4 years old. And when I mentioned that I was from the US and Eri said she was from Japan, one of the kids shouted "I am from close to Supermaxi!" That made me laugh. And if you look closely, one of the boys in the back has a little beanie with a marijuana leaf on it. I don't think that many people here know what that image is...but imagine if you sent your preschooler off with a marijuana leaf stitched on his clothes!!

We have essentially done origami workshops with all of the kids at Escuela Dolorosa. As a result, during recess, shouts of "Emiiiiily!!!" and "Errrrri!" can be heard (and lots of waving) because they all know who we are. These kids are great, if not a little on the noisy side! And we did have to walk two crying 2nd graders to the teachers because they had hit each other during the break.