The Good, the Bad, and the Buggly

Our last full day in Ecuador is here! One J-term abroad almost finished. The past week has been good, bad, and yes, buggly. Let me explain:

After we finished our final exam last Thursday morning we began our community service project. We were originally told that we would be painting a school. When we arrived at the school, though, we were presented with a much more challenging task- building a fence. The school wanted a fence to enclose their garden area. It was our job to first take down the original barbed wire fence, measure and mark the provided wooden planks so that they were the correct height for the fence, dig a trench for the fence to go in, and then drill the wooden planks and connect them to resemble a fence.

Doesn't sound too bad, does it? In fact, it sounds like tons of fun, and it was, except for one minor detail: The soil was full of rocks (some the size of a human head) that had come down from the nearby mountains and were strongly embedded in the land that we were supposed to be excavating. So for parts of 3 days we were removing these big stinkers out of the land. Our group of 12 students and 2 adult males had 1 pick, 1 shovel, 2 hoes, and 2 hammers to complete our job. It tested our teamwork and patience getting the numerous rocks out of the way for our fence. But we did it. And it was awesome! What a sense of a accomplishment we all felt when we saw our beautiful, unpainted fence up on Monday afternoon.

I am convinced that I will return to the U.S. with bulging back and shoulder muscles from heaving that pick around, trying to break up the land around the rocks, and then trying to get to get the rocks out of the trench that was continually getting deeper. Anyways, after working each day I would return to my host family very dirty, very sweaty, and covered with nasty big bug bites. They are all over my legs (due to the fact that we were wearing shorts since it was pretty warm out) and somehow even on my torso. Some are the size of quarters and very, very pink. It´s been a week now that I've had some of them and they still aren't healing! I´m hoping when I return to the cold Iowa weather the itchiness will just get frozen away- probably not gonna happen, but a girl can hope.

This week we've spent a lot of time in a bus going from city to city, visiting the middle of the world, seeing some new musical demonstrations, and seeing some things we've seen multiple times already- like tapestry demonstrations. It hasn't been the best week of the month just because I´m ready to get home at this point and be done with the touristy activities, but J-term in general has been very, very cool. Much better than staying in Decorah, although I do look forward to getting back to all of my friends. The only thing I regret is having to leave our host families when I was finally starting to feel very much at home, just like another kid of the family, and I could actually understand most of what they were saying! I guess that means I´ll just have to travel again so that I can really test my fluency. So long from Ecuador!