okay last week was pretty fun. mainly because there was a couple from belgium visiting. they are friends of pepes belgian girlfrined and are traveling from argentina to mexico (most of that by bus). monday and tuesday nothing too interesting to speak of happened. wednesday got a little more interesting. in the morning i met with pati from work and we headed to the city center to buy our juconi families some school cloths. i never really spend too much time in the center but it can get interesting during the day. its very south american, its very busy, its also very much a city center. people selling everything everywhere, lots of heat, lots of smells, lots and lots of busy people and a couple of head hunting buses that sprint through the packed streets. somewhere inside of inside of this were three juconi members and three families going from store to store buying shoes and uniforms. my job was more or less crowd control, controling the masses of little ecuadorian children running enthusiastically from one distraction to another. at midday we finished and i got to go home to have lunch with my family. after lunch i went to an afs event at the main office. there we met up with everone and headed to a home for batered women and children. going to this home was incredible not because it was an interesting place but because the director told us about the foundation in a long two and a half hour introduction with no breaks or questions. some of us fell asleep. after this all of us afsers went to have some drinks and discuss our situations. after that i went with my friend from norway christine or "la puka" to meet up with pepe and the belgians (their names are jean-yevs and cora but its just easier to refer to them as the belgians). we spent the rest of the night enjoying the night scene that pepe and i know well. thursday i helped another juconi worker (yasenia) get uniforms for her juconi familys. yasenia has a gift to work for juconi; she is the best worker that i have seen at juconi. she took eight families (the average size of each family was about six people) through all the steps. i worked crowd control. we finished early and i got to go home early. that night i went to see a movie with jack and evelyn. we saw that one movie where the prez of the usa gets shot. even though it was in salamanca i really didnt like it. friday we had more global education in the morning, this time slightly more interesting. friday afternoon i spent shadowing jack as he went to rent a tux for some event he had and then we both had a meeting at the juconi office to asses our sistuation. that meeting went fine. it sounds like we are doing pretty well in our jobs and for that we dont have to work quite as much anymore. on saturday after a lot of loafing around pepe, evelyn, and the belgians headed to playas, the closest beach town to guayaquil. we had planned that a lot of my friends would go with us but when it came to be saturday everyone seemed to have other plans. when we got to playas it was dark which was a bummer because we didnt see the sunset. we stayed at a hostle owned by one of pepes friends. on that note i have discovered that very few people in this country arent friends of pepe. this hostle was in this guys farm house so we stayed along side the family. after settling in we headed to the center to meet up with a friend. also at this time two of my friends met up with us. they had been traveling the andes and had to traveled eight hours to get to the beach. the rest of the night, and some of the morning, we spent checking out the night life in downtown playas. on sunday we woke up at about 11 and our hosts fed us a breakfast of friend fish, fried plantains (verdes which are harder greener plantains) and other breakfast stuffs. that kept us all stuffed for the rest of the day. later half of us went to the beach and me and pepe went to meet my friend poncho-my other two friends went back to guayaquil early. poncho is cool guy who met in guayaquil a week ago but we spent a lot of time hanging out this past weekend. he is really into surfing and he lives in playas on the weekends just to surf and relax. so we definatly had to take out some boards and go surfing. pepe, poncho and i surfed pretty much all afternoon on some kind of small waves. it was a lot of fun and hopefully i will get a chance to go back to playas and do this again. later pepe and i met up with evelyn, and the two belgians to see the sunset. it was a nice sunset, slightly obscured by some high rise apartmemnt buildings, but such is ecuador. it was tough saying good bye to the belgians because they were very good people and we spent a lot of good times together, pepe even teared up a bit. we got on our bus (it was packed but we got seats) and headed back to the big city. shortly after leaving playas the bus was stopped by police and every man had to get off the bus and every woman had to stay on the bus for inspection. there were two dozen police armed to the teath with submachine guns going through our bags and patting us down. such is ecuador i guess. after this was all done we were aloud to get on the bus-the cops didnt find anything-and about 30 guys piled back into their seats mutterign "shitty police". finally around ten we got home ate grilled cheese sandwiches and slept. no major plans this week but i will keep you all updated.
-mark