March 28

Birthday pics

these past couple of months....

Well, where do I begin? My first cycle of teaching ended in the beginning of March. A highlight for me was cooking an East-Indian meal for my Comparing Cultures class--we sat on the floor and ate with our fingers and everything!

In the middle of March, I had two weeks of vacation. Monica and I took a few days to travel up north to the volcanoe Cotopaxi, which we climbed part way, and to Lake Quilotoa, a GORGEOUS lake in a volcanoe crater. It was so nice just to get away into nature--and also to hang out with my roomie (our schedules sometimes keep us from seeing much of each other in the day).

April has brought a lot of new things:
I started my new teaching cycle. I had been hoping to continue on with my students from my evening class--didn't happen, though, which was pretty disappointing. I am, however, teaching Comparing Cultures again, which cuts down on the prep time A LOT--life has gotten very busy for me, so God knew what he was doing. Two of my classes are children's classes as well, so that's pretty new--never taught English to children before. So far I'm really enjoying it--just need to have a lot of energy every afternoon!

I started giving English help/classes to interested youths at church Sat. afternoons. I've been going to the youth services, but I like the one-on-one connections with people, so that'll be neat to be able to build those through these classes.

I started playing piano for the worship band in the young adult service. This is something that I've always wanted but have been too afraid to do. So, they were looking and looking for someone....and I said, "Ok, God, maybe now's the time!" We played for the first time together this past Saturday and it went pretty well. I'm really enjoying the chance to get back into music!

There's been a few lessons on trust in the past few weeks, as well. For one, Monica's brother showed up one day to stay with us. He's been living in Guayaquil, in a psychiatric hospital, but ran away because he was being mistreated there. It was really hard on both Monica and I: she couldn't turn her brother away (all of the rest of her immediate family is either in Spain or the States) and I really did not want him there. I had finally felt like the apartment was my HOME--and now I felt like a visitor who had to tip toe around a stranger. I was praying a lot for compassion, patience and wisdom and was starting to accept the situation. He ended up taking off after about 5 days, though, to go back to the hospital, which was fine with me.

So, anyways, that's what's been happening in a nut shell these past couple of months.