Although we had installed a small gas powered hot water heater for showering, Audrey was little sick and didn't want to go outside to shower. Also the water pressure gets pretty low on Saturday afternoon with everybody doing laundry and cleaning. So Audrey decided she wanted to take a bath in the room. Although I thought it wasn't going to be fun, Amy, being the nice mom that she is, obliged her. We kept having to go and heat up more water because it wasn't quite warm enough, and after sitting in the bucket for 30 minutes or so, I think the novelty wore off. Bentz decided he needed to do it to. Tons of fun. So here are both Bentz and Audrey taking baths in their room. If Audrey doesn't make it as a cement mixer quality control professional, I think she should be a contortionist. Here she manages to fit as much of her body under the water as is humanly possible. I feel kind of bad for Bentz, because we tired of heating up water after the 5th pan or so. He got a shallower bath. Jorie thought about it for a minute, but then realized that she was really just too big now to fit enough of her body under the warm water.
It is now the season for planting corn. Many of the families here rotate two crops, peas and corn. There are also potatoes, but I haven't yet learned when those fit in. As far as I can tell, they plant the corn, and when it is ready to harvest (or maybe sooner), they plant pea plants near the corn stalks, so the peas can climb the stalks. This is the field behind our house. First we clean it by cutting down all the old plants. Then we till it but hoeing up the old dirt and mixing in the old plants and whatever the pigs have left. Once all the soil has been turned over, rows are hoed and then corn planted. Although we kept telling Carlos we wanted to help, he usually ended up rising at 5am or so on Saturday to get most of it done before we woke up and before the sun got too hot. This was last Saturday.
Jorie was a good worker, and stayed at it for an hour or so. Bentz tried hard to get dirty, and was quite successful. He also chased the chickens around and found some huge looking caterpillars to feed them.
So as of last weekend, we had been in Ecuador for 4 weeks. I (Beau) was very impressed and proud of our family for the fantastic transition that we were all making. Realize, mind you, that in Hong Kong we had a maid and the kids were attending a first rate international school. In little time at all, they had transitioned into a rural and quite poor environment, into a school where they understood very little. Amy and I were now washing our clothes outside on a cement slab and hanging the wet clothes out to dry and hoping for sunshine so we would have something clean to wear. Our little home was quite cold in the nighttime. A dirt yard, cinderblock walls and cement floor and a rough wood pole and old tile roof meant that dirt was ever-present. If we had just washed and dried a towel or some clothes and they happened to fall off the bed onto the floor, they would be dirty again. There was just no way of getting all of the dirt out of the house. The bottoms of our socks where always dirty unless we kept shoes on at all times. You get the picture.
To add to the dirt, our bodies were also transitioning to a different climate, different food, different water, etc, etc. Everyone in the family had by now gone through a bit of stomach problems, except for me (Beau) (knock on wood). Jorie was the first, probably because she had been buying food outside of the school gates. She had been complaining of stomach aches, and we though she might need to vomit soon. One night, Amy woke me up, saying that it sounded like Jorie needed to throw up. I got out of bed and went over to her bed and, in leaning over to touch her head, inadvertently stuck my hand into a pool of vomit. I couldn't see anything, and Jorie was still asleep. Yes, one of her talents is vomiting while remaining fast asleep. Anyway, you can picture trying to clean up the vomit with some sanitary napkins and taking Jorie outside in the cold to shower her off and wash the stuff out of her hair. After cleaning Jorie up and climbing into bed with her to warm her up, I realized that I probably smelled like vomit, and didn't want Amy to get sick, so I went and took a shower as well.
Then Amy got sick, but took care of herself well enough to not vomit. Audrey threw up a couple of times, once in the bathroom (nice) and once in Bentz's bed, where she was resting. Bentz didn't throw up. All of us, at once time or another (or more accurately, multiple times), have had bouts of diarrhea. For the most part, I attribute this sickness to just getting used to the new environment and food and climate. Hopefully our bodies get used to all of this and we build up some immunities.
So, after that long explanation, you can tell that we were looking for a break from the dirt and sickness. At first, we thought we would head to Quito for a weekend in a nice-ish hotel. But after looking at the prices and what the hotels had to offer, it didn't seem worth it. We wanted a hotel with a pool for the kids to play in. After looking at a variety of different options, we thought we would head to the coast. We looked into the travel costs and times, and found out that we could take a bus to a cool little coastal town named Puerto Lopez. We were told it would be about 10 hours to the coast and then another 2 hours up the coast to Puerto Lopez.
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