Welcome to Shell!

Last Wednesday three new staff members arrived in town. Erin and I got them settled in their houses, then showed them around town.

The Park  in the center of town

The playground where we sometimes take the kids (it has Astroturf this year. Weird, but really nice!).

The local grocery store that also serves yummy lunches.

The building also sometimes has fresh produce vendors

This building is always fun to walk past

The old orphanage building. It looks so much better after the new owners remodeled the second floor and painted it.

One of the covered play areas where we sometimes take the kids

After showing them around the city, we took the new staff members to the orphanage.

Over the bridge….

…Past the dique (dam)…

…allllll the way up the trail…..

…and we arrived at the house!

We toured the whole property and introduced all of the kids and caregivers. I think that showing people around the orphanage for the first time is one of my favorite parts of our responsibilities this summer. It is neat to see it through their eyes, and introduce them to the kids who will soon steal their hearts.

That night a whole group of us met up and we gave the new staff their first taste of Jhonny’s famous food.

Tablitas aka Jhonny’s

Quito-to-Guayaquil-to-Riobamba-to-Shell (Sara)

I had a good weekend in Quito. I got to rest a little and do some sightseeing. On Saturday I spend the morning catching up on laundry and emails, and in the afternoon I went to a park called “la Carolina”

On Sunday I went to church with my Compassion guide, Omar and his fiancé. My Spanish served me pretty well and I was able to follow along for the most part during the service. Afterwards they dropped me off at the mall where I had lunch, picked up a few things for my trip, and caught a taxi back to the guesthouse. That evening I spent resting and repacking my bags. I was able to leave one suitcase at the guesthouse and it will be brought down to Shell by the group that is flying in on Saturday.

After an all day bus ride on Monday I am now in Guayaquil. We found our hotel without problem but when we checked in it turned out that the rates were a lot higher than we had thought. We decided to stay for the night, but the next day we planed to move to a cheeper hotel. However when we went down in the morning we found out that there were some rooms that cost half as much because they had a fan instead of Air Conditioning. So instead of changing hotels we just changed rooms.

On Monday after getting our bags settled in our original rooms we went to the river walk and enjoyed the view. We had dinner and then walked back to our hotel.

We have a busy schedule planned for this week. I have three child visits here in Guayaquil (Tuesday with Kevin, Wednesday with David, and Thursday with Angela). Thursday night we travel to a town four hours away called Riobamba where on Friday I will visit my last child, Pamela.

Please pray for safe travels and for good visits with my kids. I will update you as often as I can, but I am not sure how often I will have internet access.

The map is a little hard to see, but it shows where I have been, and will be during this trip. The blue and yellow star is Quito. The route I took to visit my two kids last week is in blue, and the route for this week is in Yellow. The last yellow star on the right is Shell where I will be for the rest of the visit.

Chau, Sara