So I arrived in Quito Wednesday night, and made it to my home for the next year somewhere around midnight. All I’d done Wednesday was sit in cars and airplanes and airports and attempt to sleep in each of them. I thought I’d be up all night watching movies, but when Matt left here a little before 1am, I had just enough time to call my dad before I realized I just needed to crash.
Sophia wrote at the beginning of the summer about her amazement at not having to be awake ridiculously early in the morning. I have to say found it pretty weird myself to sleep in until 9:30. I have literally only done that once before in this country. Even after that I still had a leisurely hour or so to eat breakfast and get ready before my meeting with Matt, Lunch at Youth World, and staff meeting. It was pretty fun to get to see everyone, some new faces and some old friends. By the time everyone was leaving the office, I’d been recruited to run sound for a concert and gotten multiple dinner invitations.
Friday was the start of language lessons. I headed down the street to the office around 8, and ran into Dana on the way. She was pretty shocked that I was awake, which I found pretty funny since 8 is about what time I’m used to heading off for the day’s adventures when I’m here. It’ll probably take me a little while to get used to the slower pace of things at Youth World now that it’s not summer.
At any rate, Matt showed me how to navigate the Trole to get to language school. Which is actually not really a huge deal. The hardest part of making it the four stops from La Y (pronounced “La Yay”) to Colón is actually getting on the car. It’s not so bad early in the morning, but on the way back you sometimes just have to put your head down and run in like the unmoving crowd of people already aboard is the opposing team at the line of scrimmage.
So we’ll back up to the four hours in between my two Friday Tole rides. I can’t say I wasn’t a little nervous about language school, but mostly because I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect. Turns out I’ve got a hilarious teacher who makes fun of how my handwriting is huge on paper and tiny on the whiteboard and from whom I feel like I’m going to learn a lot. I’ll let you know how that progresses as lessons continue, as Spanish is my main focus for the next three weeks.
Today was another sleep-in day. I just decided that I wasn’t going to take a shower with inconsistently hot and cold water until my house had kind of warmed up, so I didn’t. I was still debating whether to have breakfast or lunch when Roberto called me and made the decision for me. I met him at English Fellowship Church to start packing up some of the instruments and sound equipment for the Gideón concert (Gideón is Roberto’s band). We met the rest of the guys at a Chifa place around the corner from Youth World and I tried to keep up as Roberto, Miguel, Daniel, and Mauricio made jokes in Spanish about the Three Stooges and how we were eating cat.
After lunch and more packing (I really did not know that a sanctuary’s worth of sound equipment and seven people could fit in one car) we headed over to the church where the concert was being held. It took a while to bring everything up to the second floor and set up, and then even longer to do a sound check. We started actually practicing with sound around 3:30 and finally took a break about 5:15 (the concert was supposed to start at 5:00, which in Ecuador means 5:45). I had a lot of fun just being there for the worship time and the concert, and everyone was really appreciative of my ability to be the sound guy, even though one of the monitors inexplicably stopped working when it actually came time for the band to perform.
Afterward, we packed up once again and unpacked it all at EFC before heading off for questionable food. I’ve eaten a lot of questionable food today, but it’s all been quite good. Miguel and I exchanged stories about being summer hosts and about the stupid shower at the apartment (Miguel lived here while he was a Quito Quest host this summer).
So now after a really busy and really fun day, I’m back at home and looking forward to worship at EFC tomorrow and hopefully a little time to do some more writing.
