Ecuador – Page 2 – dannypeck.net

Celebrating

Last night we got to celebrate a little bit that I got a new job. What’s really cool about this is that most of the people celebrating were somewhat disappointed that I won’t be coming back to Youth World full time, and yet they were living out our summer motto of “People over Projects” by joining me in my excitement over what’s next. I’m really pumped to be joining the Soapstone UMC family, but I am truly going to miss this group of people that dives fearlessly into life and ministry together, knowing that the kind of people who wind up at Youth World are only ever here for a season.

And by the way… sometimes “celebrating” in Ecuador just means going to the BK Lounge.

Ecuadorian Day

There are some characteristics we ask our short-term teams to have or adopt. Flexibility is a big one, and one I needed today. And by today, I mean yesterday because it’s technically Monday now, and I’ve been awake since 6:30 Sunday morning.

Our plan today was to go to Emaús and for Ezechias to preach, and then to do his Africa/Rwanda presentation for the kids at the church. In the broadest sense, that did happen. But things started to get off course all the way back at “going to Emaús.”

Pablo (who was translating), Ezechias (who was preaching), and I (who was the only one who knew how to get to Emaús) left the house shortly after seven this morning. That seemed like plenty of time to walk down to the Trole, catch a Trole that wasn’t packed, and ride for about an hour down to Terminal Morán Valverde near the church. It took a while to get on a Trolebús, but eventually we were on our way.

And then suddenly we weren’t.

It turns out the newspaper in Quito was sponsoring a huge race today. So the Trole was only running in the north of town, down to El Ejido, and the roads were closed farther south. So everyone on the Trole had to get off seven stops down the road, before we were even truly out of North Quito.

The three of us walked a ways, and finally managed to catch a taxi. But it turned out it wasn’t just the roads around the Trole stops that were closed, it was every main road we needed to get across the city. Our driver kept saying “I’ll just get on that road and then we’re home free,” (I’m paraphrasing) but we would immediately run into another metal barrier on the road. What should have been a 20 minute, $3 taxi ride took 45-50 minutes and cost us $8. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a large amount of money. But I’ve been taking taxis in this city for 11 years and I’ve never paid $8 for one. Ever.

The other issue with an $8 ride is that instead of reaching for my change purse to pay the driver in Sacagawea coins, I reached for my wallet to pull out a 10. At which point I realized i didn’t have my wallet. After thinking all day, my best guess is that somebody snagged it from my front pocket as all of us had to pile out of the Trole at once. Fortunately I had eel over $8 in coins, because that’s as much a reality in this city as getting your wallet stolen on public transportation. And after twelve years coming to Quito, and as many hours as I’ve spent on the Trole, a total of two wallets taken isn’t really a bad statistic.

We got out at the Puente Guajaló and I showed the guys a sliver of my old neighborhood. They laughed when I told them what funny looks I used to get, because gringos don’t generally go to Guajaló. Part of that may have been the Ecuadorian and the African laughing that even this morning, I was still the only white guy for miles, and yet I was the one who was able to guide them around this section of the city that feels so like home to me.

We arrived at Emaús at almost exactly 9:00. Which is the time painted on the wall outside at which the service starts. Most of the congregation got there around 9:30, and we actually started then. But as they trickled in, and we three greeted everyone, the other guys were surprised when almost everyone greeted me by name. Pablo finally said “man… you know everyone here. Why are you so famous?” Ezechias preached, and it was wonderful. Pablo translated, and did a fantastic job, made even better for me by the fact that I wasn’t the one doing it. I also didn’t have a guitar with me, so for the first time since 2010, I just got to be a part of the service at Emaús from the congregation without needing to lead.

Ezechias was also supposed to do his Rwanda presentation right after the service for the kids who are in the Education=Hope scholarship program. But it turns out it was Día del Niño and there was a children’s program going on outside after the service. So the expectation was actually that he would do his presentation for the parents. His very kid-friendly Powerpoint was basically useless, but fortunately he was flexible (and prepared… he had the presentation he’d used for Youth World Staff meeting last week with him as well) and jumped right into what needed to happen.

Our time at Emaús ended up lasting much longer than we expected. Even after the Africa presentation, there were snacks, and a birthday party upstairs for two of the youth. We were finally able to excuse ourselves with the true story that we were supposed to be at Alliance Academy back up north to play soccer with the Casa G boys at 3pm. So we took off, and way too impatient to ride the Trole or bus again, Ezechias paid for a taxi all the way back home.

Soccer went about how you’d expect it. We got to hang out with the boys and some of the staff from Casa G, which is always fun, and then headed to Chelsea’s house for dinner. We intended to watch a movie until the hosts and I needed to go pick up a team from the airport, but we ended up just sitting on the roof with a bluetooth speaker, having a sing-along for several hours.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church is the team that was scheduled to come in at 10:13pm. Then they were delayed an hour. Then they were delayed another hour. Our bus driver was not happy with us that he had to wait, not that we have any control over Delta’s schedule or the weather in Atlanta, since that was the actual culprit. Finally at 10:45 we left for the airport. Grace and Bleu (the hosts) slept all the way there. I watched half a movie and slept for a while myself, on what should have been about a 40 minute drive at that time of night. There was no traffic whatsoever, and somehow it still took us an hour and twenty minutes to reach the Quito airport. I think our driver got lost while we were all asleep. We arrived around midnight, but our team (not surprisingly) didn’t get out until ten minutes after 1am. With 24 people, they are usually at the back of the immigration line, and take an hour after landing to actually walk out the door. So it wasn’t any big problem to us, but certainly didn’t help our driver’s mood. And again, he took twice as long to get home as we thought, but this time I knew for sure why, because he missed our exit from the highway and had to drive all the way to Central Quito and turn around to come back North. He really should pay more attention, but in his defense, the city of Quito should really build more exits on the Oriental. At any rate, 3am was when we finally left all those gringos at the hostel and headed for bed. Or for me, to a computer to record all the ordinary unexpectedness of this crazy Quiteño day.

Photos from Training ’18

I haven’t stopped for a moment to write down all the things I wanted to about Quito Quest training this year. But here is a photographic glimpse of what has been happening for the past couple of weeks.

My guitar didn’t quite make it in one piece all the way to Ecuador.

Liam (4) decided where all the toppings should go on the pizza.

The Youth World team (mostly Casa G) made it all the way to the Finals in the Quito Cup.

A good-looking team and their cheerleaders from Youth World.

Cameron translates Ezechias’s presentation on Africa to the Youth World staff.

A fish farm, as seen from the overlook at the restaurant outside Baños, Ecuador.

The bridge was only a couple inches wider than our bus.

Jorge Luís pouring us some Guayusa in Tena, Ecuador.

The canoe that took us 30 minutes up the Napo River to Bella Vista, Ecuador.

And look at that, our canoe was named “Guayusa” too.

Organizing games with the kids in Bella Vista, Ecuador.

Francis helped make dinner when we got back to Quito.

Italian food during Quito Quest’s traditional “Fancy Dinner”

Fancy Dinner. Absolutely the nicest this group will look during our entire 78 days.

We must be official, now that we’ve got T-shirts. D-boss thinks she’s cool with her mustard “I’m in charge” shirt.

The Education=Hope staff for the summer. Interns Ezechias and Morgan, Director Cameron, Administrator Rocio, Maestro Danny, and Roberto… who may or may not do any actual work.

Ecuadorian intern Pablo… who is frowning because he couldn’t figure out how to change the gas despite living his entire 19 years in this country.

Ezechias and Grace were no help changing the gas tank either, but offered their encouragement.

Día del Niño at Emaús. The kids ministry leaders dressed up as characters from shows and movies.

Marthita’s 19th birthday party during youth group at Emaús.

Up on the roof! Morgan, Pablo, Danny, Grace, Bleu, and Ezechias having a sing-along with photographer Chelsea on her apartment’s roof.

Headed back to Ecuador

If you know me at all, it probably won’t surprise you to hear I’m getting on a plane to Ecuador. And it probably shouldn’t surprise you, because it will be the 13th time I’ve done this since 2007. Through Quito Quest, I’ve been a team member, a Team Host, a Site Host, and a team leader, but I am taking on a new role in a new department over the next couple of months as the Summer Maestro for Education=Hope.

This means I’ll be using my administrative skills to help organize all that our four E=H teams will be doing, and I’ll be training and supervising interns. In the midst of that, I get to hang out at some of my favorite places with some of my favorite people doing everything from ministry with teams to maintaining relationships between Youth World and our partner ministry sites to probably more than a little babysitting of Vivanco children.

Quito Quest has always been my favorite excuse to blog, and I expect working with teams this summer will be no different. So keep an eye on it for my adventures.

Bonus pic:I always love it when I make the Youth World Monday Memo.

This Place Breaks My Heart

Since Saturday night Roberto and I have been hosting a team from South Carolina. It’s a fascinating group because it’s centered around a couple who is getting married on Tuesday. Part of the team only thought they were coming on a mission team and didn’t even know there would be a wedding while they were here. Part of the group only thought they were coming for the wedding.

Having worked so long with an organization that focuses so much on doing short term missions well, there are some things about this that I struggle with. But this group has had particularly fresh eyes for the things around them. I think little-to-no preparation on the part of the team members was in this case better than bad preparation, because they simply didn’t have time to have any preconceived notions. This struck me the first time when a 50-something team member said during our orientation at Carmen Bajo “This place just breaks my heart.”

I initially wanted to push back on that, to tell him “no, this is a place that’s full of joy,” to argue with him what a difference it makes in the community. Knowing that I have served at Carmen Bajo for almost 10 years and whatever was going to come out of my mouth was going to be an emotional response, I held my tongue. And I’m glad I did, because while all those thing I thought are true, that doesn’t mean we can’t all (myself included) be heartbroken at the underlying need for a place like Iglesia Carmen Bajo and it’s school and social project to even exist.

We heard Pastor Fabian’s story of being called to the neighborhood. I’ve heard it many times before in orientations or at dinners at his house. We heard testimonies from church members and stories about the students from the staff. Most of those stories were things I’ve heard before. Tough, terrible stories of loss and hardship, but familiar problems in that area just with new names and faces to go with them. Those stories are shared so we can give glory to God for what he has done in the midst of it all. For healing and wholeness found in His Church, for hope that has come through educational opportunities, for a generation that is giving back to their community because of grace and mercy encountered through people sharing love, and for there being enough resources to solve social and economic problems because basic needs like food are being met through the compassion of teams and a church and a people who care.

But the relief that comes through that place doesn’t mean all the problems are gone. There is still endemic abuse and neglect in the neighborhood. We met a woman who is fighting to give four of her sons with disabilities a better life, but whose son’s disabilities were caused by fetal alcohol syndrome. There was a kindergartener who is happy and healthy and learning, whose education is funded through the scholarship program and whose lunch is funded by Compassion International, but who has to walk an hour and a half each way, each day between his home and Carmen Bajo. A kindergartener.

There are times when I’m listening to a story or translating on a home visit when I just sort of turn off my heart and only use my head. I change the words from Spanish to English and regurgitate them for the team so they get the information. But I do it with a certain sterility, not letting the emotion effect me in the moment. I become the task-oriented North American with data to get across rather than the missionary, the minister, the brother in Christ who should be broken-hearted by what I see.

And what I see is injustice. Brokenness. Sin. Those things are why we need the church. We we need missionaries. Why I’m here at all. I’m very rarely shocked at a story I hear in his place anymore. But familiar as this brokenness is, and optimistic as I hope I continue to be about all that is going on to fix it, my prayer is that i will continue to be as broken-hearted about it all now as I was the first time I came here.

Forest Gump day

One of my favorite movie lines is in Forest Gump when he says “So I went to the White House again. And I met the president again.” I quote that line, or derivations of it, often to express that sense of repetition in my life. And sometimes it’s with that attitude of boredom that Forest Gump had. But sometimes it’s to express that same sense of irony the audience should feel upon hearing such a statement. Who would ever get bored of the White House? But I most commonly quote that line when I’m hosting a Quito Quest team during their first week on the ground. I have been to the Basilica and the Presidential Palace and Plaza San Francisco. So. Many. Times.

But even while I brace myself for the monotony, I can’t help but remember Deborah and Roberto taking me to all those places for the very first time. And I can’t help but be excited that I’m with a group of new friends who have that sense of wonder and excitement that I had eleven years ago, and who I will get to know through this day and the rest of their time on the ground.

Today I also had a small sense of terror in knowing that I would be delivering Partnership Orientation tonight. Partnership is the most important orientation we do with a team, and it can be something very powerful to hear. I’ve heard it three dozen times at minimum, and I’ve given it to several teams, most recently a modified version to my Costa Rica team from the NCCUMC youth ministry. But if I gave Partnership a thousand times I still don’t think I could stop worrying that I’d screw it up. It’s a lot of pressure and I want them to get it. This is the very reason I keep coming back to Youth World, because I think we live out Partnership so well here. So this was important.

I think it went well. The team asked good questions about it. So I could breathe a sigh of relief. And thinking and planning for it added a little but if a beak to the monotony of the same tourist day I do all the time.

But I also had a couple moments in debrief that made this day memorable. The first was when we realized that all seven students in this team are introverts. My tribe is here! The second was an observation by Brett about myself and Caroline. He said we kept pointing out changes in the city, where restaurants used to be, or where there is a new building. He compared it to the story of the Basilica, which is always under construction and never technically completed because legend says when the Basilica is completed, the end of the world will arrive and they don’t want that responsibility. The basilica has to change and grow to stay alive, and the city does the same thing. We all are either growing and changing or we are dying.

Leave it to a Sewanee student to make an observation I’ll be incorporating into my orientations from now on.

Travel Prep 2018

March is here again, and with it come plane tickets and a host of technological projects.

First, my ancient iPhone 4s finally gave out. It has a hardware error stemming from an issue with the WiFi antenna. I cannot connect to WiFi at all, which means I cannot disconnect the phone from Find My iPhone, which means I cannot even reset it to factory defaults. Maybe I will get around to finding a SIM card with a data connection so I can fix at least some of these issues, but for the moment, it is simply out of commission. Enter, “new” iPhone.

My iPhone 4s was the first iPhone I ever purchased, and I purchased it Factory Unlocked (which was not a common, nor inexpensive thing back then) and it was with me through three US cell carriers until I finally switched back to Verizon and CDMA service, and a new iPhone 5s. The 4s then permanently became my Ecuadorian phone, replacing a refurbished 3GS I had purchased in the meantime, and I would just keep my Ecuadorian SIM card in it and add a few dollars to my prepaid account every time I was in the country. And the 4s outlasted not just that old 3GS, but the 5s as well. That phone’s battery exploded when I was in California in 2016 and I upgraded to a then-band new iPhone 7. So it has been the Ecuadorian 4s and the North American 7 until today, when my refurbished iPhone 6 arrived.

One of the things I have learned with all these generations of phones is that SIM cards keep getting smaller. At one time, I had what we referred to as the Nokia “Brick” phone (those indestructible candybar phones that we still give to our Youth World interns in 2018 because the cockroaches will be calling each other on them after the nuclear war). That phone had what most people would call a full-size SIM card in it (although that’s technically a “Mini” SIM). I purchased a SIM card cutter way back in the day to slice it down to fit in my 4s, which required a Micro SIM. And that card just got sliced down again with a new cutter into a Nano SIM for the iPhone 6.

Restored from the 4s Ecuaphone backup, it will be all ready to use when I step off the plane. Or at least it would be if I ever managed to have any saldo left when I finish hosting a team. Hopefully I’ll remember to turn off my cellular data instead of blowing through all my saldo before the team even arrives, which I may have done… two years in a row. My Quito Quest pareja, Caroline, gets a little frustrated with this phenomenon when all outgoing phone calls and texts have to be on her phone until we remember to send someone to the Farmacia to recharge my saldo. I could solve all of this by just using one of the Nokia phones. But what can I say? I am spoiled.

The other tech project has been updating my website. I generally renew my hosting and domain registration in February, so that has been done for a couple of weeks, but parts of the site have been broken for a long time. The DNS records were a little wonky, probably since I switched hosting providers years ago, or possibly since I added Google Apps. At any rate, if you got here by putting a “www” in front of my domain name, then my update worked.

The site was also running a WordPress theme that was at bare minimum 5 years old, and had survived heavy coding updates I did to it throughout that time. The bulk of those coding edits were to incorporate a head image randomizer, the thing that makes the top image change every time you visit the site, click “Refresh,” or go to another page within the site. This option is now something that’s built into the WordPress software. I was just doing it before it was cool, thanks to some PHP script found and then reworked by Mike Turner. The result of all this was that as the underlying software has changed and modernized, my theme would not even display my blog posts on the front page anymore. Obviously, you’re reading this, so I’ve corrected that error. For the moment, I have done this mainly by changing to a less archaic WordPress theme. It will probably change again as I get annoyed at searching for post dates off to the side. But at the moment, I am simply happy that there is no quest required to access my content, or even my site anymore.

Photos from Sewanee QQ Team 2017

Rhythms of Refreshment

I’ve begun writing some thoughts/devotions/articles for my youth group emails, and the one that went out today just seemed more like something that I would typically post on my blog. So here it is.

About this time nine years ago I began telling people that I was going to Ecuador for two weeks out of my summer. Most people seemed to think that was pretty cool. This time eight years ago I began telling people I was going back to Ecuador to work for the entire summer, and the reaction tended to be more impressed. Seven years ago I began telling people that I was moving to Ecuador for an entire year, and people at that point began to be concerned for my mental health. These days I find myself in conversations where I’ll say “I just got back from a couple weeks in Ecuador,” and someone will say “Oh, I didn’t even realize you were gone.” Ecuador, Youth World, and hosting Quito Quest teams have all simply become a part of the rhythm of my life.

This year, it was Phil Payne who made an observation about this phenomenon. Phil is one of the Directors at Youth World, and many years ago was my boss in the Short Term Teams department. He was asking me about my time off from church and working with Quito Quest this year and I joked about it. I told him that I think “Pastor Joe lets me come down here for a couple of weeks each year so I can get my fix and he doesn’t have to worry about my moving away from North Carolina.” Phil’s response was “That’s a smart senior pastor.” And Phil (who would much rather that I did just move down to Ecuador) elaborated that this continued experience effects the way that I minister, the way that I teach the Gospel, and the way that I perceive God and his work in my life and his world. “You get refreshed here and you take that back to your regular context.”

Hosting Quito Quest teams is certainly not a vacation. It’s been described by one former staff member as “The most work on the least sleep you’ve ever gotten in your life.” But connecting to God and his people outside your routine is refreshing in a spiritual sense, even when it might not be in a physical sense. God speaks to us wherever we are. He teaches us wherever we are. But our environment can change our perception. I hope that you look around during your spring break. During your vacation or stay-cation or regular routine and actually become aware of what it is that God has to teach you in this season. Look for God’s rhythms so that you allow him to refresh your soul.