(This section was written Sunday morning, but our hectic schedule was not published until Monday)
Saturday night on the town in Puyo is like most any other town. It depends on what you make of it. Last night we were invited to a social gathering of the teachers of English of the Pastaza province. In addition to the social opportunities, this was a fundraiser for a member who is battling cancer. We were to play bingo.
The meeting was held in a nice building owned and operated by the teachers union of the Pastaza province. Previous visitor to Puyo will know the location which is near the very nice Catholic Church across from central park. This organization has been functioning since the early 1980’s.
The starting time for this gathering was announced for 7:00 PM. Even we knew that this time was not really the starting time. At 7:45, the organizing person said he hoped we could start at 8:00. We did start promptly at 9:00 PM. In the meanwhile, the sound system guy had the music turned up so loud I could feel vibration in my feet from the floor. The volume drove all “early” arrivals into the street below.
The bingo game was played using bingo software, a computer and a projector. The person in charge of equipment had an emergency in Quito. At 12:30 yesterday afternoon another organizer made arrangements for us to go to the school at 3:30 to get the projector we brought to Ecuador with us. At 8:00, it was discovered that a lap top brought by someone else did not have the proper connecting ports. We jumped in a taxi and came back to our house to get my lap top. As it turned out all this near catastrophic equipment problem had nothing to do with the starting time. The fact that we ended up providing all the equipment escaped the notice of the crowd of 30 some people who all seemed to have a good time until midnight.
This morning we noticed our eardrums had recovered. The financial damages totaled $6 for both of us for the evening. This included buying bingo cards at .25 each and a liter of wine to share at our table for $1.
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4 comments:
That is an amazing series of events to put together a fund raiser. The delayed starting times certainly teachs patience.
How was the wine? The price was certainly reasonable. May the good lord look after you down there . Don
You are wild and crazy cats--staying up so late. Omer never seems to make it much past 9 here. Amanda pushes it and sometimes it's 11:30 before she finally is down for the night--weekends only. She has school in the morning and the only way to get her to stay in bed is to say "you can't go to school tomorrow if you don't stay in bed." She quickly jumps in bed and closes her eyes then. = ) Too bad she doesn't go to school every day--just kidding. She's growing up too fast already.
We have been following your adventure in Puyo.
My wife and I werePeace Corps volunteers in Banos for a few months and then Puyo in the years 1967-1969.
I worked in the jungle dooinfg land surveying and assisting the indigenous people to get land tites. My wife, Deidra, worked with the local mission hospital in getting a leader in the surrounding vilages some basic medical training so that these people could encourage the members of their community to get to town and seak proper medical attention rather than wait until it was too late.
We will continue to follow your adventure with interest.
Greg Groppenbacher
Hi......you sure are leading a very interesting life!!Probably more so then mine!! Frank had his infected knee removed on May 15th..spent the next 81 days in a nursing rehab...then had surgery to put a new knee in and another 19 days back in nursing rehab. The worst part of the whole ordeal was, that he got a dropped foot after the first surgery. He came home on Sept. 5th (113) days. Now it is very painful...the brace is miserable...we are always going back to have it adjusted and it still isn't good!! I had been going to church each Sunday until Frank came home. Today we took a ride over there to pick up Joyce and Debbie's reports..Frank was having a pretty good day today.
God Bless you two for all you are doing...guess I should not complain about my life!!
Look forward to seeing you when you come back to the states.
Elise and Frank Brearley
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