Happy June! We all are settling in to life here at ITEC Ecuador! We spent this past week polishing up the facility here. We live on the second floor in large bedrooms, with bathrooms, a kitchen, and a communal room, where I’m writing now. I’m sitting with Boice and Sandi, the other two interns who are studying and working with me. Despite meeting just a week ago, we’re all getting along quite well, and I’m looking forward to getting to know them both better. Sandi is a ballerina from North Carolina who will be going to Moody Bible Institute to study communications; she’d like to do missions with radio and other media. Boice is a pensive Texan who will be attending LeTourneau University to study mechanical engineering in the fall. Gallo Ortiz is the director at ITEC here, here leads our classes and work projects. Danny is another ITEC employee; originally from Miami, Danny married an Ecuadorian woman and is an expert in Spanglish; this mix is far more difficult to understand than Spanish itself.
We’ve spent some time getting to know the town where we are living, Shell Mera, in the Pastaza province of Ecuador, in the Oriente region. Shell has a good small – town feel; it’s very safe, and most everyone is rather kind. For breakfast, we eat the delicious fresh – made bread that we buy at the Panaderia the night before. Lunch is the largest meal of the day here; we go to a restaurant in town, La Casona de Maria, which at $3 a meal, is cheaper than making our own food. Lunch normally consists of a soup followed by the plata fuerte, which is normally meat with rice and a small amount of vegetables; good thing I started eating meat again! As I said, people are very friendly here; the other day we joined a group of workers from a glass shop for lunch and ended up having a great time with them. Today we ate with them again and spent about an hour getting to know each other, en Espanol, por supuesto. We eat with Andres, Gallo’s younger brother for dinner. Andres only speaks Spanish; we go to spend some time with him and his mother at their house afterwards. I take a long time to eat because I am translating for the other two interns, however, this is quickly becoming less and less as they learn to speak and understand Spanish better. Andres is an incredibly kind person, and I’ve been able to get to know him fairly well by this point.
We’ve started our classes in missions, following a program that Steve Saint, Nate Saint’s son developed. This program is entitled “Missions Dilemma”, which covers the current ways that missions are done and how it could be done better. Although we still have much to learn about this, we have learned at least the basics. Currently, missions consists of believers, frequently North Americans, who go to a country to evangelize. I’m realizing how much our American culture emphasizes finding problems and providing solutions. Frequently, Americans arrive in a country with the intent to provide aid, but instead end up trying to give their culture to the people, assuming that everyone needs a nice house, three square meals, and to wear collared shirts. Although this is not always the case, when this happens, it causes people to become too reliant on the missionaries for their needs they didn’t know that they had. Instead, ITEC suggests that the indigenous people be trained to continue these skills independently, so that they can continue to help their own people after the missionaries have left. Similarly, this program suggests that missionaries should begin a church, establish leadership, disciple others, but remain apart from the leadership in the church, so that the people can establish a healthy church, and then be able to share the Gospel with more people. I’d love to hear what you think about these ideas, so feel free to contact me with my info on the right. I’ll be writing more as I learn more.
Although we have spent most of our free time with Andres, we also have had the opportunity to get to know other people from church as well as at a young life meeting this evening. I believe that we start training for the various ITEC programs this coming week. On Monday night, I will be traveling to the north of Ecuador with Gustavo, another employee at ITEC who makes Gospel message recordings of indigenous people and then distributes them. I will be with him until Wednesday night helping to distribute these tracks.
Spanish communication has been an interesting and fun challenge thus far. On the first day that we had arrived in Shell, Andres took us on a tour of the town. We were talking about the flora and fauna of Ecuador; and I attempted to ask Andres if they have tarantulas here. I began to describe tarantulas: large teeth, hairy legs and arms, large and terrible. However, I incorrectly pronounced the word arana, or spider, and apparently said something closer to rana, the word for frog. Andres thought I was asking him about the large and terrible frogs with teeth and hairy legs. It wasn’t until a couple days ago that we cleared up what I had been trying to say.
Please be praying that we can establish relationships which will be mutually edifying. Also, please pray that we can learn how God would best like us to do missions and that our service in the community would be an effective way to share God’s Love.
P.S. Thankfully my contact with what I call “hell-beasts” (large bugs) has been fairly limited thus far.
Thanks so much for supporting me!
God Bless,
Camden
The army has a base just across the way.
El puente.
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