Our travel went very well. Despite starting in Upland at 2AM and having a 7 hour layover in Miami, everything went as smoothly as you can imagine and we arrived in Guayaquil (a larger coastal town) to be picked up by our hosts. After spending the night in a hotel and eating some wonderful fruit for breakfast, we made a three hour bus trip to the tiny town of El Guabo in the province of El Oro.
Here we met with church leaders and had a great reception service in the evening during which I introduced the team and we all danced and sang together. The pastors shot little confetti cannons and it was a very warm reception overall.
My host is a young man named Joao (pronounced Yo - ow) who is only two years older than I am and he is the worship leader at church, Man he gets into his singing and it gets him so sweaty! But it's a such a great part of a very vibrant church. His house is small with only two bedrooms attached to the kitchen/dining room which we share with his mother and his sister. It is a part of a small compound that contains two much larger houses and three similar sized apartments.
On the first day, our team spent time playing with the kids at Compassion and we did one skit and puppet show for them. The day after we were in Santa Rosa where we did some evangelism and were surprised by a crowd at a disabilities hospital who wanted us to perform for them. We used all the songs and skits we had prepared and they loved it.
But one of the more exciting cultural experiences was when we stopped at a farm belonging to a friend of the church. We swung in hammocks by his lake while some on our team canoed and we ate the most excellent fruits: mango, papaya, fresh coconut (which I had been craving since Sierra Leone), and cacao which is this intensely bitter and sweet slimy thing that you suck on but don't chew. It was a wonderful time.
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