Building Character

Ecuador is a great place – it’s got big mountains and nice beaches, verdant jungle and a diversity of people, plants and critters that should make the rest of the world jealous. Still, the day-to-day can be a little…well…“character building.” This post is a tribute to those moments over the past few weeks in Jahuapamba [...]

Imanalla manta Jahuapamba! (Hello from Jahuapamba!)

For reference, Jahuapamba is pronounced sort of like Cawabunga (Hawabamba).  It is a tiny indigenous town just north of Otavalo (2 ½ hours north of Quito), and the site of our second Fe y Alegría school visit.  While, like Cuenca, it’s at high elevation – about 9,000 feet surrounded by 16,000 foot [...]

Cuenca Part 2 – We Go to School / Things Get Interesting

During our six months in Quito, we accumulated enough cultural knowledge to realize that if we visited a school and started cross-examining the principal and faculty right away, the only answers we’d get would be along the lines of “oh yes, everything’s fine, thank you, everything’s going well.” People are much less direct here than [...]

Cuenca, Part I – First Impressions and the City Itself

As some readers may remember, Matt and I long ago promised to do school visits as part of our year in Ecuador. Language difficulties, side projects, bureaucracy, vacations, family visits, inertia, and the Ecuadorian conception of time all delayed the start of that plan. But in February we finally completed our first school [...]