Still Here

Since the bus incident on Friday night, a lot has been going on. We actually made it back in time to get to the soccer game on Saturday afternoon, and it was a great way to forget about what had happened the night before. On Sunday I finally got through to my parents, which was probably the hardest part of the whole ordeal. They had already heard from my sister, who I´d gotten through to earlier on, but of course she didn´t have the whole story.

They were needless to say freaked out but happy that I was still alive. They, after all, didn´t want me to come to Ecuador in the first place, and had warned me that I would be robbed and kidnapped. And now that it had happened, all of their fears were confirmed and they could rub it in my face completely. Worse was that it happened only after one week. I told them that if it happened 8 months later it would make no difference.

In Machala, I´d seen a girl get mugged right outside of my house. Then at my meeting at SECAP, I was told that I´d have to take a taxi every time to get to and from work, and that I´d be teaching night classes. SECAP was located in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city everyone told me. All this on top of what happened on the way back to Quito, and my parents flipped out. They wanted me out of Machala. I honestly couldn´t blame, them, though the bus thing didn´t really have to do with Machala.

So after talking it over with the Field Directors, I had the option to stay in Quito or head to Cuenca, a slightly larger city in the south in the Andes. After much vacillation, I´ve decided to switch sites to Cuenca. It´s not a decision I wanted to have to make, and I hate having to leave the city before I even got a chance to know it. I just don´t want to put my parents through that situation again and put myself in harms way if it´s avoidable.

So now I´ll be teaching at the University of Cuenca and staying with another great family. Cuenca is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is build in a traditional Spanish style. This week has been extremely busy with 15 hour days, and it will keep up for the next week and a half.