The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

This morning the first set of supplies we brought down were delivered to a daycare in Ecuador, including all of the clothes and stuffed animals. They are still sorting through some of the stuff for older kids, they may split it between a couple of different projects because there was so much stuff.

Thank you to everyone who donated!

This is the letter they sent us:

February 13^th 2015

Donations are an essential part of the work we do. On this occasion we had the blessing of receiving suitcases that not only contained stuffed animals, clothes, toys or didactic material. We felt we received a part of each person that took the time to donate a part of their past life and they also bought materials for children in another country. Chloe Nasser.

San Roque is a Day care center located in old town Quito. Here at Fundación Bolívar Education (www.ecuadorvolunteers.org) we work with them since 2006. It attends mostly children with an indigenous background. They arrive every day at 08:30 to receive breakfast. In the morning they start to learn basic things like going to the toilet or eating their fruits. At 11:30 they receive a delicious and nutritive lunch to later take a nap until their families pick them up around 16:00.

Most teachers are indigenous women with a practical training. We have also volunteers from all over the world to help the teachers and the children. Here you can see some pictures about the center and your donation:

Children at lunch time

The donations

This church is tied for the first church in Quito. San Blas and San Sebastian churches were both built in 1568. At the time it had a straw roof and mud walls.

The reconstruction of adobe, wood and stone happened in the 17th century.

We wandered inside this museum and found this giant ball.

Kerri was instructed to remove her shoes, stand on a vibrating platform inside the ball, listen to a recording of birds chirping, and spin in circles with her arms out at shoulder height 12 times. This was supposed to help me rediscover my connectedness with the earth, presumably by causing me to fall over.

Matt did not try. We did not explore the rest of the museum.

This is Kerri on the equator line.

This is Matt on the equator line.

This is Jesus on the equator line.

We went up to the top of the monument. This is the view to the North.

The East.

The South

And the West.

This is Matt about to cross into a whole new hemisphere, and he doesn’t even realise it!

There were a couple of little museums in the equator park.

One had a scale model of the city of Quito that lit up.

There were plenty of sundials.

They said that the sundials don’t match your watch because they follow the true solar day, whereas our clocks are adjusted to give a whole number of days each year.

But that fails to explain why the sundials don’t match each other, either.

There was a small planetarium where we got to learn about the constellations visible from Quito. In Spanish. We recognized some of the Northern hemisphere ones, and understood “cruz del sur”, but that’s about it.

There were also opportunities to make sure the equator line pictures were not the cheesiest pictures you took all day.

They even had a green screen! I’m not sure why all of their props have frills if they can’t accurately copy frills and hair, but they do!