Late Nights and Busy Days

Sorry for the delay in writing another entry. It's simply not been possible. The final 14 arrived at the Quito guesthouse at about midnight Monday night. Made it through customs without a hitch. Our arrival at the guesthouse was rather chaotic, because as soon as we arrived we had to divvy up luggage and divide up between two guesthouses and then divide into rooms. The altitude is about two miles above sea level, and several us were huffing and puffing whenever we talked too much. Poor Norma had it the worst, but she's fine now.

After about four hours of sleep we met together for our first meal together in Ecuador, hopped on the bus, and began our adventurous drive to Shell. We stopped in Banos, which is close to the active volcano that erupted several weeks ago, and got to experience bits of ash falling. Everyone handled the curvy roads without too much motion sickness...except Teresa. I told her we were going to give her a big tranquilizer shot on the way back and just tie her to the roof of the bus!

We made it to the Shell guesthouse around 1:00, unloaded groceries, unpacked VBS stuff, crammed lunch down, and walked to the church to prepare for 2:30 Vacation Bible School (videos to be posted soon I hope). One of our daily adventures will be walking to the church over a long swinging bridge...lots of squeals and hollering!

Emma has not felt good on and off all week, and today once VBS started she felt rotten, so I took her to the local mission hospital and fumbled my way through Spanish talking to nurses and stuff. She got two big ol' penicillin shots, just in case, and is at this moment sleeping off the trauma of that event. Hopefully she'll be fine tomorrow.

We had about 100 kiddos at VBS, which was done "on the fly" because of our late arrival. It was adventurous, but great. Afterwards, we crammed in vehicles and toured the orphanage and got an idea of what we'll be doing tomorrow there. Quite an eye opener.

There is so much more I could say...it has been such a fast and furious and full 24 hours. I will try to add a couple of pictures later. Until then, hola!