Monday.
We went first thing in the morning to a school in Nigeria to talk with a woman about screening the students at our clinic the last week.
It took only a few minutes of us being on the school grounds before the children noticed us and started running up and talking to us and hugging us. They were so cute as they tried to remember and practice saying the few english phrases they knew.
The lady had some things come up that prevented us from meeting with her. Another teacher then offered to give us a small tour of the school and answer any questions that we may have.
THe school was originally built on stilts over the river until a group from Norway came in and helped them build a new school and help with funding.
After our time at the school we ran into a ride situation.
We had no way to get out of Nigeria for lunch and we were not planning to do house to house visits for some hours.
Us girls got very excited about the idea of riding the canoes across the river and catching a bus on the other side.
The women from the school said that the neighborhood on the other side is a very dangerous one. We were still up for thr risk, but Eric (who was our translator for the morning) was quite decided that this was a terrible idea. He told us "I am your bodyguard, but who is my bodyguard?". I feel that is a legitimate enough question.
Eric then walks right up to the Nigeria police station and asks an officer if he would drive us out of Nigeria. Because God worked out everything in this trip, of course the officer drove us out. We all packed into a police truck and bumped on down the road and out of Nigeria.
My first time riding in a police car, and it was in Ecuador.
Once out of Nigeria we caught a cab back to our church/home.
Eric joined us for lunch. We made our very best American-Mexican for him. We made fajitas with pita bread, plantains, and some left over beans and rice. It is wonderful having our own kitchen.
After lunch we headed back to Nigeria.
Imagine the look we got from the police officer when he saw us back in Nigeria not 4 hours later.
We picked a new street and did house to house visits again.
We encountered some interesting things.
In one house we met a elderly woman with such bad heart failure that she had fluid from her feet all the way up to her chest. She hadn't been able to lay down for something like a week because she couldn't breath if she did.
There was another lady with a kidney or bladder infection.
We ran out of time before we ran out of houses.
We headed back to La Roca (our church home) and spent the evening getting to know the guards who were hired to stay downstairs while we were there. They were men from the church. We joked with them about them being our babysitters, and they responded by telling us that we were good kids. We sat and listened to their stories and testimonies. It is not an unusual thing to hear a person's story and learn that they were in gangs, that they were involved with drugs, that they had ties with the Ecuador mafia, that someone in their own family tried to kill them. Then they tell you about how God has saved them. How He completely changed their lives. That He brought restoration and protection and peace.
At the end of the night we all prayed together and us girls went up to bed.
The really funny thing is that I have been more observant since getting here and I am trying to learn as much as I can about people and the culture, so everyone thinks that I am very quiet.
They keep making comments about me being so quiet and then Jen and Manaal start laughing and try to explain that you usually they cannot get me to be quiet.
Oh Ecuador!!
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