The ovenless baker

It occurred to me that I could tell you all about our second afternoon at the orphanage, but maybe in a day or so--tonight, there is a far more pressing issue.

I know in an earlier post when I mentioned we had a broken oven, no one paused to consider the ramifications of this.  But consider them.

My daily baking and consumption of brownies and cookies has disappeared into boxes of chocolate wafers and Oreos.  I understand that some people greatly enjoy chocolate wafers and Oreos, but do you have any idea how many of each of those it takes to satiate the girl who actively consumes a significant portion of the raw ingredients in addition to the finished product of her baking?  A lot--and I have been unable to achieve the same warm and fuzzy feeling I get when I have lots of butter and sugar in my stomach.  Yes, I know I could make the raw dough and just eat it--it wouldn't be the first time.  In fact, freshman year at Dartmouth I made chocolate chip cookie dough every night for the entirety of fall term.  Ask Andy, he'll vouch for that.  He made the Topside runs to go get more eggs and sugar with me.  Plus, he helped me finish all the dough.  Some people gained the freshman fifteen in alcohol and vending machine food, I ate raw cookie dough every night.

Regardless, for those who know me well, it will not take much convincing to press upon you the urgency of the fact that I am without an oven.  However, I am taking it in stride and am working on alternatives such as said store-bought options, heated cream with hot chocolate mix, and expanding my repertoire.  So, rice krispie treats.  Ecaudor has sugary cereal and marshmallows, and I have a stovetop and pot.  But when I came home to make them, I realized the marshmallows were pineapple flavored and though not altogether revolting, certainly not going to be put into a rice krispie treat.  Next option, fruit with sugar?  Just kidding, that's obviously not an option. 

Desperate, I looked up no-bake cookies.  I have made a pretty good one in Connecticut in the microwave that could be replicated here, but it involved peanut butter and a) Andy doesn't like peanut butter and b) it is extremely expensive.  The internet, I love having internet, provided a few recipes.  But the one I tried tonight, the seemingly pure sugar confection with some oats in it, well, let's just say Andy nibbled a corner and put the rest of it down.  I ate quite a bit with a spoon, and, as you may be able to tell, am on a bit of a sugar high.  The leftovers, which I smushed together since they could hardly be called cookies, are in a tupperware container in the refrigerator for a sugar hit, but as something worthy of dessert... eh.  Partly to blame is that I don't think Ecuador has cocoa powder (and my hot cocoa mix alternative failed), and I know there are no chocolate chips in this country.  Chocolate bars are quite expensive so breaking them up doesn't seem to be a long term option.  We may be able to afford a batch or two of chocolate chip cookie dough over the next six months, but only maybe, a lot of our food budget is going to cheese.

Anyway, if you have any great ideas (chocolate pudding and rice pudding also occurred to me but you have to be in the right mood for those) feel free to share.  I'm still investigating if we can have someone receive mail for us.  In which case, a Costco bag of chocolate chips (and feel free to throw in some cocoa powder too) seems like an emerging necesity.

Alright, I'm about to crash from this sugar high, so I think I'll go make some cream with cocoa. 

First visit at the orphanage

Yesterday, Andy and I went to the orphanage.  We were driven by Guillermo who is the Ecuador contact with Volunteers In Medical Missions, which is how the Erickson's first met him.  He is also a pastor and connected with the orphanage we will be volunteering at.  He had a director's meeting, but brought us along so we could meet the staff and kids.

The orphanage itself used to keep roughly 50-60 kids.  However, in order to receive funding from the government, the orphanage switched to caring for special needs children. Thus, in order to adequately address the increased needs of its kids, it has cut its numbers down (there were 20 yesterday, 10 girls and 10 boys).

The orphanage is a pretty significant distance from where we are.  We will have to learn to navigate a bus or two, and then walk a final mile or so to the orphanage itself.  The facilities are located directly off a highway on a short dirt road with a gate.  Inside, there are four main buildings.  One primarily for schooling, another for eating, and then separate housing for the girls and boys.  We only were inside the girls' building, which had good bones but was dusty and rather empty.  You walk into a small downstairs where there are two small metal picnic tables where a few girls were working on homework with a couple of tutors.  Upstairs, there is a common area and then two bedrooms with lots of beds.  A mural of the sea with a scuba diver is downstairs and upstairs there are mushrooms, fairies, and butterflies along the walls.  The curtains are a bit overkill with rainbow colored checks, but you could see how the varied illustrations and colors would provide some creative stimulation.

We first met the women who worked in the boys' cabin, and all the boys came flocking out of the building and literally just started hugging Guillermo and us.  It was really something to see these young boys, I'd estimate 7-12 years old, just holding on to you while they said hello.  Then they'd detach and come back again for more hugs.  Andy, who has been to the orphanage twice before, remarked that the hugging had been the most striking thing he had remembered about his times there.  We then went over to the girls' cabin.  Interestingly enough, they didn't flock to you quite as much but ran around eagerly outside.

Guillermo started speaking with people and told us to observe the homework session that was in place with really two girls, with another two looking on and cutting shapes into paper.  Then, the two tutors left (for a brief while we thought), and one asked me to help the youngest girl there finish her assignment.  We had to read about the importance of the sun and photosynthesis, then draw a picture illustrating it.  She did not focus too well, but we got it accomplished.  When other children descended from downstairs, all heck broke loose and the studying was done.

There is what could be a small kitchen area, except for it is empty and there are no appliances except for a refrigerator which might not have been plugged in.  I poked my head in the doorway hearing shouting, and found myself trying to calm down a girl, whose doll had been stolen, with a metal dust pan in her hand trying to hit another girl, squeezing between the wall and the fridge to escape.  However, after she relinquished the dust pan to me, she turned to the broom, then when the girl behind the fridge sprinted upstairs and hid in a bathroom, the other girl grabbed some piping and tried to get into the bathroom, while other girls started to grab and kick at her to keep her from getting to the bathroom door.  It was intense.  Somehow, I talked her down enough that she went to her room and started crying, and after reassuring her enough, I was able to get the doll.  Only to return to her room, and find her not there, but rather sitting in a corner in a rather isolated room off of the kitchen--pitch black, dirty, with raw metal edges on the door.  The doll, hopefully not dunked in the toilet, though most likely so, was sopping wet.  She wouldn't take it from me.  But another girl, who is deaf and mute and had been following me around, took the doll from me and placed it in another corner of the room.  The situation seemed to diffuse from there, but it was quite the introduction.

In the meantime, while I had been frantically chasing and calming the girls involved in that situation, another girl had gotten bumped into and her glass of bubbles had been spilled.  When the one girl went to her room to cry, I saw this one bawling on her bed.  Thus, I asked Andy, who had been making small talk with some girls at the picnic table, to keep an eye on the girl downstairs and went up to talk to the little one upstairs.  I rubbed her back, told her not to worry, told her everything was okay and started rambling on about her bedspread which had pink and white carnations on it.  e.g. Is this your bedspread?  Is that the name for bedspread?  It is very beautiful.  It is pink and white.  Is this a carnation?  I don't know how to say that in Spanish. I think it is.  I love carnations.  They are my favorite flower.  My husband buys me them for my birthday..." until she stopped crying and started chatting with me.  We then played some hand games and she wanted me to carry her on my back, etc.

It became obvious that neither staff member was returning, and we ended up using a long tattered rope as a jump rope for at least an hour.  The older girls hung out upstairs and we were downstairs with five girls, probably eight to twelve years old.  One of the girls, the one who I had worked with on the sun picture, was a durable and persistent little thing.  She insisted the deaf and mute girl have a chance to jump rope, and when one girl who kept acting up prevented this from happening, she did everything in her power to make the girl get off the jump rope, including taking some kicks and punches we couldn't prevent, until she sat on the floor crying.  I picked her up and told her she was a good person and not to worry and we walked around together for a while--though the ground floor is only roughly 12x30 feet.

We were extremely relieved and entirely exhausted when the meeting finally ended.  This promises to be a challenging, tiresome, yet rewarding experience.  And, at least to start, we are going to limit our time there to structured activity time in the afternoons. 

This is a picture of another building, probably more housing, taken by Andy on a previous trip.

Here is a picture of the school building also taken by Andy on a previous trip.

Our Apartment

Here are a few photos from our apartment.

We are on the third and highest floor of our apartment building.  This is the rooftop we cross to enter our apartment.  The concrete basins are where we will do our laundry.

 

This is our kitchen.  Our bedroom door is right before the blue refrigerator.

 

This is our bedroom/living room.  The white wall off to the right is an entire wall of closet space which is very impressive.  Also immediately to the right of where I took the photo is the bathroom.  To my left is a wall of windows.

These are the stairs we climb to get up to our apartment.  You can't see a very tricky corner with triangle steps and a rather high railing.  The refrigerator was carried on my head in this area.

This is our little bathroom.  To the left is the shower which I poured bleach all over on the first day.  The drain doesn't work well so by the end of a ten minute shower you're standing in four inches of water.  We tried Ecuadorian Draino to no avail.

We are here!

We left Kalispell, Montana on Monday 10/18 with four bags weighing in just under 50 pounds a piece checked through to Quito, Ecuador.  We flew to Seattle and then to Dallas Fort Worth.  We arrived just before midnight, thought about how nice it was to be in John and Christine's hometown, and checked into a hotel in the airport.  FYI, the most frightening aspect of our travels that day was the Monorail train that navigated around the Dallas airport.  It was like a tipsy roller coaster ride in the dark.

Bright and early the next morning, we departed to Miami and then on to Quito.  We arrived about 6pm Ecuador time (which is currently an hour behind EST, but soon to be the same once the East “falls back.”)  The baggage claim and customs went smoothly.  We were met by Fabiola, a friend the Erickson’s had made while down here on medical mission trips.  We took a taxi to our driver, Romero, an acquaintance of the Erickson's , who was waiting out on the highway in order to avoid the downtown Quito traffic.  When Andy and I were in Malta in December 2008 we thought we would never be more scared on the road—e.g. our bus navigated steep hills and sharp turns—all without headlights in the pitch black.  We, however, were wrong.

The driving system in Ecuador is rather peculiar.  Sure they drive on the same side of the road as we do in the States, but actually, not necessarily so.  Lanes are really just a suggestion and all vehicles swerved in and out of them at will--blinkers? ha.  Even the double lines in the middle of the road can be ignored in order to leap frog vehicles.  The main form of communication seemed to be flashing your brights at the car in front of you-- to make them move into the safety lane so you could pass them, for instance.  Yet the lack of seat belts and swerving aside, what was most noticeable was the constant supply of broken down buses, cars, and trucks along the side of the road, which, I’m sure you can infer, made the swerving and the lack of consideration for lanes or other vehicles, all the more frequent.  There were people, too, just walking next to the highway.  In fact, school buses just kind of stopped in the right lane and let out the kids to walk alongside the highway to wherever home was.  Nonetheless, Romero, though fully integrated into the Ecuadorian driving system, was an excellent driver, and we only felt fear from the automobiles around us rather than the one we were in.

Phew.  All the above for a two-hour car ride, though Fabiola and Romero considerately included a bathroom stop.  At the stop Fabiola inquired to as whether or not I had papél—which I did not (because it never occurred to me that a bathroom would not have toilet paper, or for that matter, toilet seats.)  She kindly gave me 2/3 of her own and all was well, except for perhaps the burning in my thighs as I squatted over the toilet seat (after having sat all day long.)  We were delivered to “the compound” which is an apartment where visiting missionaries stop over before leaving for more remote parts of Ecuador.  We stayed there for a couple nights until we had set up our apartment (a minute down the street).  This included constructing a bed frame and removing and re-installing a propane tank among many other tasks (e.g. picture us carrying an ornate, round, wood table down the street).  Thank goodness for the tools Dr. Erickson had sent us down with.  We would have been up a creek without them.

As it were, the busy day of moving I had an extremely sore throat (and nearly finished one the bag of Ricolas we brought with us).  Then Friday I awoke achy, rather feverish, and in full sinus infection mode.  Andy and I agreed that I should start on Zithromax and Tylenol Cold (which fortunately has a decongestant in it.)  I slept most of the day until we went with Anita, another friend, who was the translator on all of the Erickson’s trips down South and also Fabiola’s daughter, to see about internet and meet and pay the landlord our monthly rent.  

Which brings us to today, in which, not unlike most days, we spent nearly the entire day reading Harry Potter in Spanish (Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban), practicing with Rosetta Stone on the computer, scouring 501 Spanish Verbs, and reviewing grammar concepts.  I woke feeling a bit better, so hopefully I’ll continue on the up and up.  It would certainly be nice for Andy who has made every meal and cleaned up every meal (including the bleaching of all the vajilla—our dishes), since I’ve been too weak to stand too long.

Speaking of dishes, it’s been a rough week culinary wise and not because Andy’s been left in the kitchen by himself.  There is a small, i.e. dorm room size, Micro Mercado where you can buy the basics (though more expensively) and then there is the MegaMaxi (a Target/Walmart type store) where you can buy anything.  It is a twenty-minute walk from where we live, though it usually requires a taxi ride back.  Taxi rides, by the way, are a dollar to just about wherever you go in the city.  Anyway, it’s been rolls of bread for breakfast, lentils for lunch, and plain pasta for dinner.  Oh yes, we do not have a refrigerator yet (Fabiola is lending us an extra of hers though we have yet to figure out how to get it from her house to ours.)  Thus, we have been on the zero perishable food diet, which has already gotten old.  Today we bought saltines and Gatorade mix—which seem like they might become a staple for our stomachs.

We must not ever drink the water here or use it to brush our teeth or open our mouths in the shower (which I found out yesterday is hard when you can’t breath out of your nose and you’re washing your face).  We’ve done well so far with this, as in the bleach bath after we (okay Andy) has washed the dishes, but you have to stay vigilant.  And along this train of thought, they do not put the toilet paper in the toilet after they use it.  Which I’m assuming is because of a poor plumbing system, but the concept of putting your toilet paper in the trash next to you after going to the bathroom is taking some getting used to.  I fear the day when one of us accidentally intakes bad water and loose bowel movements result.

On that note, I bring this entry to a close and wonder whether or not publicly displaying all this information is really a good idea.  Perhaps I’ll need to censor myself, but to record an experience like this, where’s the fun in that?

Welcome to our blog!

Howdy, or rather, hola.  Andy and I are going to be spending six months in Ecuador.  Rather than filling up your inboxes, we've created this blog so that you can check in however infrequently you want (or be notified of our every post).  We're not sure ourselves how often we will be posting, but we hope it is at least a weekly endeavor. 

We have an apartment in Ambato, Ecuador--two hours south of the capital city, Quito, via the Pan-American Highway (which, Andy has just informed me, runs from Canada to the tip of Chile, who knew--Andy of course.)  We'll fill you in over the next couple of weeks as we get set-up and settled-in.

We're packing right now (or at least Andy is), so I'm off to do the same.