Ecuador Day 11: Meeting and More Shoes

The past few days have been very busy. Saturday started off with the National Committee meeting at their office at the seminary. It was great to meet many of the pastors. Some of them I'd only met once or twice several years ago, and some of them I'd never even seen before. The Lamberts translated for us some, and I was able to pick up enough on my own to at least have an idea of what was going on. It was a meeting though, which means it can only stay interesting for so long.

We had planned to go back to the house to grab some food before picking up the shoes for Hands 4 Ecuador's Happy Feet program, but the National Committee had other plans. They decided to treat everyone at the meeting to lunch down the street. I'm still not sure where the money came from, but the food was very good. We went to a small restaurant that is close to the Seminary. The food was roast chicken, rice with beans (can't remember what the dish is called), french fries, and cole slaw. It was a neat experience. I'd wanted to eat at a place like that for quite a while, so it was nice to finally do that.

With lunch out of the way, we headed off to the shoe store to pick up 300 pairs of shoes. Mariano went with us to help us load and unload them as well as get a truck for us. I would say that it took longer than I expected to get the shoes, but that would be a lie. At this point, I'm getting pretty used to the concept of Ecuadorian time. While we were waiting, we found some more shoes on sail, so Karen and Cindy picked out another 14 pairs of shoes bringing the total to, I think, 344 pairs. One interesting thing we noted was that the price tag on last years shoes were $26. The same shoes this year cost $36. That's a huge increase in just one year! Because of the increased price of shoes, school has just gotten much more expensive for families, and it makes it much harder for many families to send their kids to school.

The best part of dropping the shoes off at the Seminary was that we planned to get paila afterward. Have I mentioned how much I love paila? It's pretty awesome stuff!

Jon and Cindy showing off their paila

We took Mariano with us to help thank him for all of his hard work. He said he'd only had paila once while he was in the military. I think he's as big a fan of it as I am!

Mariano and his delicious paila

We spent the rest of the day at the house working on our lessons for seminary and just relaxing a little bit. We knew that Sunday would be a long day. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we didn't need to go to Ofelia for church so we discussed where we'd like to go. We decided on Zabala once we realized that it would be their anniversary celebration. The downside was that the service starts at 8:30 so we'd need to leave by 8:00. Oh well, I figured it'd be worth it.