what happens with those glasses you donated back in the 70s

One of the things that I definitely should not have forgotten to bring here to Ecuador is anti-itch cream. 

Yesterday I went with my Rotary Club to a town about an hour outside of Portoviejo to help give out glasses to people who needed them. We spent the morning sifting through 6 huge boxes of glasses looking for pairs of glasses that matched the prescriptions that the doctors had assigned. Looking for the correct prescription was only half of the task though- we also tried to find the least-offensive pairs. Most of the glasses that were there were quite ancient- picture huge glasses from the 70s- there were even a couple of cat-eye style glasses! We also had to try to find man-glasses for men, and women-glasses for women.

It was kind of cool to see the end-result of what was at one point a glasses-drive. It was definitely a different point of view.

We ate lunch in the house of someone who lived nearby- we all went upstairs and crowded into the ‘living room’ and ‘kitchen’, while a couple of women cooked over a ‘stove’. The stove was actually a big rectangular shaped thing that had a fire inside of it, and a place where they could place the huge pots that they were using to cook. As usual, we ate soup, along with a plate of rice and meat (chicken this time). I opted out of the meat part- after seeing a whole chicken foot in the pot, I (surprisingly enough), didn’t feel very hungry for meat.

After lunch, we walked down the road to see the river. On the way there, we walked by mango, papaya, plantain, cacao, starfruit, and avocado plants, which was really neat. When we got to the river, there were several families sitting in the water, cooling off. We took off our shoes and waded a bit while eating fresh mangoes and star-fruit.

We walked back to the house we had been at in the morning, just in time for the bingo game at 3 pm. Apparently bingo is a pretty popular thing here. It seemed like the whole town piled into this place to play bingo. While they were playing bingo, we (the exchange students plus some rotaract members) talked and ate starfruit off of the tree.

All day long, the bugs were feasting on my legs, and now I am quite itchy.

The lights went off this morning right on schedule- at 9. Since Ecuador made an agreement with Peru to buy some energy, the power-outages should go down to 2 hours every day this week, but today we had no power for 3 hours again, so who knows!

This week I only have school on Friday, which is quite nice. However, I found out this weekend that at the school where a lot of my exchange-student friends are, classes end in either mid or early December, and at my school, classes continue into FEBRUARY. Which I am not excited about.

LOVE, Kirsty