Mission: Ecuador: Day 7 - Thursday, July 4

Update from Jay:

Hello from beautiful Cayambe! Thursday was another full day of work and friendship. You can see in the pictures below that we tackled a number of (very) odd and interesting jobs, however, I would like to tell you two stories.

First, the kites. One of the crafts we decided to do with our "English Club" students was to build kites. The kite-building event was one of my primary responsibilities on the trip. A few weeks ago, I found a website that had some very simple designs for kites using trashbags, dowel rods, and electrical tape. After talking with the Meyers, we decided that we would be able to find all the materials in Cayambe except for the dowel rods. Oh, those tricky dowel rods. They had to be 3/16" diameter, 36" in length, and made of hardwood. We would need about 100 of them. I found them online from California for $30 shipped. Since they were 36" in length, they wouldn't fit in our duffel bags, so I used a guitar case. American Airlines charged me $70 for my second checked bag, so now the dowel rods were at $100. OK, fine, this was going to be a really cool craft and still well under $2/kite. Guess what. The dowel rod/guitar got lost at the airport in Cayambe. After everyone had their regular duffels, we were still waiting on that guitar case to come down the chute. After about 30 minutes, we gave up and went to report our lost bag. They pointed me in the direction of the "odd sized bags" and we found the trusty guitar case full of our precious cargo. Well, to shorten this story a bit, we got all the necessary materials and constructed our wonderful kites. Controlled chaos. Friday was kite-flying day and it was wonderful, but that story can be told in tomorrow's blog.

My second story is about a fun adventure at our hotel "Cabanas". We are staying in small cabins that beg for the telling of many interesting stories well beyond the scope of this blog. Our adventure on Thursday involved the case of the lost pillowcase. Cheryl likes to pack her own pillow on trips like this. Today, a trip from the cleaning crew resulted in a new pillowcase for Cheryl and the loss of our own personal pillowcase. Ha...simple eh? I would just take my handy little Spanish dictionary with me and we'd have that pillowcase back in no time. Wrong. After working through some "Spanglish" including "la funga" (pillowcase) and "sucio" (dirty), the cleaning/receptionist/waitress girl went into action. Before I knew what was happening, I was helping her carry a mop and broom to our cabin for a second cleaning of our cabana. Oops. After a bit more mangling of the beautiful Spanish language, we got it worked out and we have our pillowcase back, along with a new set of clean towels and an empty trash can. And a new friend. Whew.