Turning toward home

Turning toward home

Dear Friends in Christ -

I hope you all had a blessed Sabbath and a happy Halloween.  Here "el Dia de Los Muertos" is a five day celebration.  The kids get three days off from school.  Many people go on vacation and many people have family celebrations and visit the graves of their ancestors.

Yesterday we spent the morning worshipping with the people of Esmeraldas in their church, Santa Maria.  Like the people of Tacusa, they don't currently have a priest there, so part of the grace of our coming was that we had two priests (me and Padre Raul) who said mass and did baptisms.  Usually on Sundays the can have only morning prayer led by a lay volunteer.  The temperature in the church was 90+ because there was no breeze like on the shore in Tacusa, and vandals had stolen their fans.  We gave a gift of money for replacements, and they were grateful!

We then put our tired, sweaty bodies back on the bus and headed back to Quito, enjoying the beautiful scenery and stopping for and amazing lunch of Argentinian food - an amazing array of roasted meats - including cow udder, liver and heart - along with sausages pork chops and steak.

Padre Raul gave us his blessing as we parted.  He is a deeply spiritual, deeply hopeful, hardworking man of God.  It was such a grace to have him leading us, along with our spirited translator, Dolly Mejilla.

Again in the evening, as we have each evening, we took time to debrief as a team, talking about the things that inspired us, broke our hearts and challenged us.

Today, we evaluate, pray, celebrate and have a little down time before packing our suitcases.

Blessings,
Janet+