A very Ecua Christmas

On Christmas Eve I went with my scholarship girl, Janeth, to her school's Christmas program. It was dominated by elementary school kids lip synching to poppy Christmas songs, but also featured some lively renditions of Silent Night played on their recorders.

The costumes were fantastic. There lots of pretty little angels, and cutie kids dressed as sheep and cows and chickens in the stable. The shepherds even had goatees.... although this poor kid below is going to have his on for at least a week, as it appears he applied it himself... with a sharpee marker. My favorite part, hands down, was the LIVE baby Jesus. (see here in lower right hand corner). No baby dolls for this crowd! Nothing but a real screaming pooping hungry live baby for this show! I had my hands full with my own baby (okay, not really, it is my friend Silvia's daughter). I somehow successfully held the baby while eating a plate of bbq chicken, rice and yuca with a flimsy plastic spoon. Quite a feat, I must say.

Here I am with my crew.

By the time I got back to the apartment after all the festivities, Jer got home and our friends Casey and Roger had come over for a little Nochebuena Christmas Eve dinner. I was pysyched to be able to hang out with two of my bestest Peace Corps pals for the holiday.

The next morning we had a Christmas Day breakfast extravaganza which featured bacon, a rare and expensive commodity here in Ecuador (which is weird, considering how much they love other pork products). After gorging on good food, we headed out to take a hike on a trail about a 10 minute busride from our house. It was a nice day and we encountered exactly 0 people on the trail. As we hiked along, we stumbled across the perfect little place to take a dip.

So we did.


It was our very own beautiful little swimming hole in a bend of an emerald green river...surrounded by steep hillsides swathed in in ferns. It was awesome.

So, all the sadness about being away from family for Christmas was washed away by the refreshingly cold current of the river. So as past Christmases seemed to blend and blur one into another in our memories, we all agreed that we would always remember Christmas 2008 where we played in the river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Joy to the world!