23rd- 29th January 2012
This week has been rather a quiet one without any small children to keep us occupied as both the school and compassion project are shut! I have managed to make myself ill again probably due to my own cooking capabilities and then had an allergic reaction to an unknown substance! As you can probably guess the first half of the week was spent indoors re-cooperating. But on thursday we managed to escape out of the confines of our room to go visit a lady who creates tagwa jewellery. Gladys is a friend of Jill's and has had a hard life as one of her sons was kidnapped. This was because Gladys and her family used to live in the oriente near the columbian border where there are lots of gangs and kidnappings occur there . But with the help of Lara Flores, a charity set up by Jill to help abused women and to equip them with skills to be able to work for themselves, Gladys now has her own tagwa jewellery business. Her products are very beautiful and we bought a few items to bring back home as gifts. Jill is desperate for someone to sell the products in the UK as it would be a gauranteed income for not only Gladys but other ladies as well. Tagwa jewellery is very beautiful and would deffinitly sell extremely well in the UK. If anyones is interested in me getting you some please do let me know!
On Friday was the schools prize giving ceremony! It was great to see all the children' s faces again even though it had only been a week since we last saw them. The ceremony was held in the church and all the children had been scrubbed and polished with new hair cuts and wearing their smartest school uniforms to collect their certificates and get their photo taken. It was great to see the children with their parents and people who love them. We both felt so proud of them all! All of the pre-school years, 1 & 2nd Inicial and 1 Basica 'graduated' from their classes and even got to wear a cloak and mortar board!!
Amazingly on saturday I managed to buy some jeans. You may well think, what is so amazing about that? But the culture in Ecuador when it comes to selling things is not the same as Britain. There is no variation. If you want to buy a pineapple you may well get 10 stalls selling them but they will all be roughly the same and for roughly the same price. This also applies to Ecuadorian fashion. There isn't much in the way of variation and 'jeans' only come in one style and that is ultra skinny. Now being not particularly blessed in the long legs department or in the svelt, toned, not an ounce of fat on me deparrtment either, purchasing 'skinny' jeans was not a task I looked forward to. But little did I realise that the worst was yet to come! I had to get undressed in the middle of a bustling market and wrestle my way into a pair of skinny jeans on a quite balmy day with the material clinging to my legs (for those of you who have ever gone swimming and then tried to put on tights afterwards you will know what I mean) whilst trying to balance precariously behind a not so stable curtain rail which was all that hung between me and hundreds of people seeing me in my pants!
All in all it has not been a very energising week but it has had it's funny moments. Please check out the pictures by clicking on this LINK.
Please pray for our continued health and safety (boring yet effective)! Please also pray that the children will all have a great holiday and be safe. Also I have applied for one or two teaching jobs please could you pray that the right doors open and that both Robin and I would find the right jobs upon our return.
Mucho amor de Ecuador xxx
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