Ecuador 2012 Caleb

Sunday July 22,  

I woke up at 6:30 and started a 6 and a half mile run in Huaticocha. I nearly got bit by a dog while I was running through the city (that really made me run fastJ). It rained in the morning and afternoon for the first time. The girls arrived at the Mission School and we had breakfast at 8. After breakfast Jess, Joy, and Jenny cleaned the dishes. Then we had our morning devotions. Joy led the singing, and Uncle Jim delivered the message to us. At 9:15 we loaded onto the bus collecting more passengers as we drove for about 45 minutes to Guamani. Ryan, Jeremy, and I joked around with Fernando, our cook, poking him and calling Tyler “Chinito”. We packed lunch onto the bus so we could eat in Guamani. The girls played soccer first in the mud pit, which was a ‘soccer field’ on Saturday.  The rain made mud which caused a new strategy to play by. You would be running with the ball and then the ball would stop and get glued to the ground but you would keep going, leaving the ball behind. The guys played after the girls against the team that won last year. The first half ended zero to zero, but there were more shots on our side. The next half the scoring began. The other team put five goals in before we even shot on them. Then a miracle happened and I found myself on a breakaway. I somehow got by the other team’s last defender who was a huge, but very fast man, slightly intimidating. I scored which got us onto the scoreboard then soon after we scored again. We held them and finished the game two to five. Daniel had a great game as goalie making incredible saves. Then we played with the kids and I learned a new game. It was called Ecua-volleyball. The game was volleyball, but on a higher net and with a soccer ball. We played three on three against some other soccer players that drove eight hours to get there. They kept on nagging Derek to spike the ball but he could not. Derek kept trying but knew he could not. You could actually grab/hold the soccer ball because it was so much heavier than a volley ball. Nate enjoyed being flocked by the children. Grant got clothes lined by an actual clothes line when he ran to get an out-of-bounds ball. He got a small battle wound across his nose. I really disliked when we ate our lunch in front of the kids. We shared our food, but I did not feel comfortable eating in front of them. For some unknown reason we got second in the tournament even though there were only two teams. We were told twenty two teams played on the field that we were at, but we never played them. They were playing into the evening when we left around 2pm with more teams still coming. The awards ceremony went smoothly. The men and women’s teams lined up and received our medals. Rebecca shared her testimony and Jim translated for her. Mark said the community welcomed us well, which was our goal and an encouragement. There was a food shop next to the soccer field that sold empanadas for twenty five cents apiece. Crazy cheap! The empanadas were cheese filled croissants with sugar on the shell. We had a wonderful day besides the rain.

God Bless

Caleb Wakeley