I Can't Believe It!

I just can't believe it! I'm going to be home a week from now. This semester has just flown by. The last 2 weeks have gone by even faster than most of the semester.

Tuesday night, November 17th, the power went out because of the energy crisis. We played games outside with the seminary students and had a lot of fun. The first game we played was Hide and Seek. Kevin decided to hide on the roof of the tallest building on campus. He told me this while we were waiting to start, so I had an idea where he was. The seminary is situated on a hill and the building is on the top of the hill. When everyone else had been found, I decided to tell the students that he was hiding up top so they had a general idea of where to look. After looking and yelling for another 10 minutes or so, they gave up and started to play a different game. Kristin, Manuel, and I decided to go up and look for him ourselves, but couldn't seem to find him. We tried calling his cell phone, but he wouldn't answer. We eventually got Dan and Kristina to help us look, while Caleb (their 3 year old son) started praying. About 30 minutes after the game had finished we saw what looked like a person laying down at the very top of the building. We shined flash lights at him and yelled his name, but still got no response. Kristina thought maybe he hurt himself or something and was worried. Finally, Kevin looked around, saw us, and came down really quickly. We were all slightly mad he was fine and had made us worry. He told us, "I'm sorry. I was praying. I couldn't hear anything with the cars and wind." Since then, any time we can't find Kevin, we've joked that he's up on the roof praying again. After this, we all went and continued playing games with the seminary students.

Wednesday night, one of the volunteer missionary couples invited us to dinner. We headed down to Carcelen to pick up some pizza, after searching for Kevin (again). We then enjoyed hanging out and eating Mariam's Pizza for the last time while we're here.

We finished up our Spanish classes on Thursday with our final presentations. We each had fun sharing about our experiences during the semester with everyone from NILI. Thursday night, we headed to another Liga soccer game! The game was moved from 7pm to 5pm because we had another power outage, making it difficult to get anything done (oh the joys of Eco-friendly power...). The game was really exciting. We went with a group of 11 people and had a great time jumping, yelling, and cheering Liga on to a 7-0 victory!

Friday, we traveled to Evelyn's house which is south of Quito. Her family owns a beautiful house with a really nice yard and garden. We cooked a nice "American" lunch consisting of Taco Salad and Apple Crisp for dessert. After lunch, we enjoyed climbing the many avocado trees in the yard and picking around 100 avocados bigger than your fist.

Saturday, it was a really nice day, so we all decided to walk to El Condado, the mall, for lunch, which is about a 2 and a half mile walk. Afterwards we took a taxi back and then watched the seminary soccer team play some soccer.

On Sunday, it was time for Kevin, Jen, and I to head to the airport to catch our flight to the Galapagos! We spent 5 great days on the Yolita II, out yacht. We were in a group of 16 passengers made up of some people from the UK, some Asian Americans from San Fransisco, and some people who live in Austin, TX from Italy and Bosnia. We also had a very good guide, Washington, on our boat with us who took us to the islands and told us all about the animals and plants. During our trip, we traveled to 3 or 4 of the main islands along with some of the smaller ones in between. We saw all of the animals that live on the islands including marine iguanas, land iguanas, tortoises (though only at the Charles Darwin Center), blue-footed boobies, masked boobies, tropic birds, flamingos, albatros, sea lions, seals, finches, mocking birds, canaries, lava lizards, crabs, frigit birds and many others I can't think of right now. We also snorkeled a lot and saw thousands of fish, white tipped sharks, rays, sea turtles, octopus, lobsters, star fish, sea lions, and seals. We went inside a cave like lava tunnel, visited the post office (a place to leave post cards, where other people will pick them up and mail them if they live where the post card is going), and jumped off the top deck of our boat. It was a great trip and I have tons of pictures to show (though I'm probably not going to have time to put them online 'til I get home).

We got back from the Galapagos on Thursday, just in time for Thanksgiving dinner with the missionaries. We headed straight to dinner and enjoyed all the normal things you would expect to have on Thanksgiving. It was delicious! Thank you everyone who helped cook :)

Yesterday, since I didn't have classes, I had the opportunity to work alongside some of the students and some other people who live on campus with some construction. At the bottom of the seminary, they're working on building a new house for the rector of the seminary. Yesterday, it was time to start on the floor. I helped tie steel, which isn't hard, it just hurts your back. It took us 3 hours to do this for about 2/3 of the house. The we took about a half hour break and had a snack of rice and beans to tide us over until our very late lunch that took place at about 3 in the afternoon. Then, it was back to work. While most people were shoveling gravel to even everything out before pouring concrete, I helped mark the level of the concrete. Then, it was time to start mixing concrete. I helped shovel gravel into buckets and then move the buckets to the concrete mixer so they could be dumped in. This was very tiring work. After just a half hour I had a blister on my thumb that popped from shoveling and started to get some on fingers from carrying the buckets. Soon, I was too tired to shovel any more, but I kept helping move the buckets when it was time, which allowed me to take some breaks. Eventually, after lots of hard work, there was concrete covering about half of the area that we had prepared earlier in the morning and it was time to stop for the day. After cleaning everything up, we headed to lunch to get some leftover chicken and rabbit that had been cooked on the soccer field like earlier this semester. It felt great to sit down, relax, and eat after 7 hours of work.

Last night was graduation. Many students, including my roommate, Carla, graduated. It was fun to go to the ceremony and celebrate their accomplishments. I was also able to see my family, that I had stayed with, again since they were there.

Things at the Seminary are winding down. All of the students are going to be gone by Monday. We're leaving for the jungle tomorrow, so when we get back, the campus will be empty. We get back from the jungle on Thursday, and then I head to the airport on Friday night to catch my 12:20am flight out of Quito on Saturday. I'm going to be home sooner than I know. The next time I post, I'll be home. What a crazy thought! I have a lot of pictures to share, but I don't have time to put them online right now. I'll make sure to get them up when I get home so all of you can see them. Until then, "Dios te bendiga" or "God bless you."