Quiet Day

Today we had our second Spanish lesson.  Had wanted to impress the teacher but she threw us a bit of a curve and had a quiz to see if we could put together the numbers to pronounce larger ones like...956, etc.  WOW!  do we have a huge mountain to climb.  Good thing we have the free time to learn and an environment that allows for nothing less.  Very little English is spoken here so we will be forced to learn and that is very good.  Discipline is not our strong suit so necessity will carry us through. 

It was a slow day cloudy and cool.  We went for a long walk and sat in the park watching children play and various ages of people drift by.  We also saw one of our servers from the restaurant in the park who recognized us and was eager to greet us.  Then up drove a car and out stepped the minister from church.  He saw us and stopped to say hello.  He was on his way to a bible study up in the mountains where they are gathering 3 groups together to form a larger group who can reach out to more neighbors.  He said there are not alot of Indigenous people in the group mostly Ecuadorians.  Someday when we speak and understand Spanish we will be able to attend one of these which will be great fun.

We were reflecting today on the fact we had not seen any wheelchairs or walkers and only one cane since we had been here. The Indigenous people, even the very elderly walk many miles from up in the mountains each day and obviously are in much better shape than we are. Also we noticed that the children we see playing are clean and quite happy. We tried to take some pictures of them today but they were a bit bashful. Did however get a cute picture of a young boy all bundled up just hanging out.

Of course he was smiling until I took the picture!