Last Saturday in Otavalo

Last weekend we had the privilege of visiting an aids orphanage in otavalo. The orphanage is about 2 hours away from where we live so we spent most of the day there. This is the same orphanage we visited while I was on the justice tour last summer. You might remember me writing this post about this little girl last year after I returned from my trip to Ecuador.

She never spoke and so I never learned her name while I was there last time. Well as you can see from the picture above she was a much different child this time. A much healthier and happier one!

I was finally able to learn her name was Lizbeth! We were all given chores to do when we first got to the orphanage and I was outside washing some toys when she came out of the house and started playing in the yard, then her and another little girl Leslie came over and started helping me wash the toys. They were enjoying helping me scrub all the toys and listening to me try to speak Spanish.

We had so much fun, needless to say we did not fully finish our chore :/ whoops!

We spent part of the afternoon just playing with all the kids after they finished eating lunch. It's very bittersweet going and volunteering at an orphanage. It's great to be there and love on them, play with them, and just give them undivided attention for a while but it's also hard because these aren't kids who when you leave go back home to their parents. For a little while you almost forget they are orphans, that is until you get ready to leave. When it's time to say goodbye it kind of hits you again that all these children are sick and have no parents to raise or love them. All the children have such different reactions to saying goodbye too. Some won't let you go and follow you all the way to your car to yell goodbye at you because they had so much fun playing, while others, like Lizbeth did, just shut down once you tell them you have to leave. I tried to tell Lizbeth goodbye but she wouldn't even hardly look at us once we said we were leaving. I'm glad I get to love on these kids even if it's just for a little while but it's always so hard to say goodbye. I mean look at all these precious faces!

I'm really hoping we get the chance to go visit again while we are here. My heart for orphans has grown so much more since I have been here, hoping I can use my life to make a difference in the lives of orphans.

-Jamie

Adventures in Mindo!

I missed updating my blog last Monday, I was recovering from an intense hike in Mindo the day before and had zero energy to sit down and write a blog post about it. This post will be mainly pictures because I finally pulled my camera out again. If you follow me on facebook or instagram you have probably already seen what I've been up to the past couple weeks here but for those of you that haven't let me enlighten you :)

I have mostly been posting pictures of all the fun stuff we've been doing and I thought "people probably think they just donated money for me to go on a 5 month vacation in South America!"
Although I have been having a ton of fun that is not true. I have been taking classes and we have started doing campaigns and outreaches. I just don't tend to make it a habit to bust out my camera in the middle of class, just know that it's happening. Just this last weekend we did our first 'GOYO' which means 'go on your own'. We are told to just go love on the community as a team in any way we decide. So we decided to buy flowers and pass them out to women around the park and just let them know they are valuable and loved by God.

When we gave our last flower out we met the friendliest lady who ended up taking a walk with us and having lunch with us after. A couple of the girls even saw her again this week while she was on a walk, its crazy to live in such a big city and already run into people you know around town.

On Sunday my roommate Laura and I met up with some of her flight attendant friends who happened to have a layover in Ecuador that day and we took a day trip to Mindo.

 Since Mindo is a couple hours away we hired a taxi driver for the entire day. Let me just tell you how great this guy was but first a picture of him:

That is Ivan and he was the sweetest taxi driver I have ever had. Not only did he drive us wherever we wanted all day long, he went with us on all our excursions! We ended up going on a pretty intense hike (which we were not fully prepared for) that felt like we are in the jungle. It was humid and muddy and my hair grew to the size of Texas. So whenever we would come to a spot in our path that was extremely muddy, Ivan would break off one of the huge leaves and place it along the path for us to step in so we wouldn't get stuck in the mud.

We rode a cable car over to some waterfalls which is where we hiked for a couple hours, not knowing how brutal the hike back to the cable car would be.

 

After we rode the cable car and went on the hike we went and found the zip lining and 3 of us decided to zip line and it was such a blast!

We did a campaign and visited an orphanage this weekend which I will post about soon, I already uploaded an album from the orphanage on facebook if you wanted to take a look! 

-Jamie