Learning, Being, Serving in Quito, Ecuador: A Roller Coaster Ride

The last few months have been a roller coaster ride of ups and downs and twists and turns. I think part of the reason I've neglected this blog is the feeling that I haven't been able to fully get off the roller coaster to process much of what has happened.

In late July, my entire family was able to come down to Ecuador for a wonderful family reunion. We shared some really action packed days together and were able to spend time in a few of my work related activities, but also did lots of sight seeing and meeting lots of people from my community here. It was a really special time to be with my family and have the opportunity to show them where I live and work.

In early August, I traveled with my parents to Bolivia to the community where they lived for 2 years during a service term with MCC. It was a truly amazing gathering after more than 30 years had passed without my parents knowing anything about the status/well-being of the community and vice versa. Within 10 minutes of arriving to the small village an old woman approached my parents and said "my teachers!". It was a realization for me that my parents had actually been in that exact remote location many years before I was even born and that people still remembered them for being the first teachers in the community. The whole experience was surreal on many levels. We were received with such hospitality and my parents were treated as long-lost honored guests during various community celebrations including independence day and the anniversary of the inauguration of the school (which had happened exactly 34 years before while my parents were there). Of course part of being the honored guests meant that we were asked to be judges of the annual beauty contest...a unique experience to say the least :)

In Bolivia, we also had to the privilege to spend some time with Reuben Maldonado-Nofziger's family in Santa Cruz as well as Benito Miller's parents in Cochabamba. All were excellent hosts and showed us a great time.

I spent the better part of late August in Colombia with a Witness For Peace delegation in order to learn more about the complex issues in Colombia. My hope was that through this experience I would be able to relate better to the Colombian refugees that I work with on a daily basis here in Quito and understand more fully their context and background. The delegation greatly exceeded my expectations and broadened my perspective of the Colombian conflict immensely. During the delegation we met with an Afrocolombian community that had been the victim of a massacre by paramilitary groups, a human rights worker defending the rights of sugar cane workers, an indigenous group defending their territory using non-violent strategies against armed guerrilla groups, parents whose children were killed by the military, wives who have lost their husbands to the violence, a displaced indigenous community in which more than 60 members of their community are currently living in a one room shelter as they await the day they can return to their land, people working on conserving the memories of lost family members, and other internally displaced people who are currently in hiding. The content of what I heard and experienced was actually not too far from what I deal with daily here in Quito with refugees that come from very similar backgrounds. Nevertheless, the power of meeting these people, hearing their stories and being in Colombia took my understanding/knowledge to another level. The injustice marked by their experiences and those who have been forced to migrate to Quito is greater than any other that I have witnessed on a personal level.

I know that summary doesn't give you a very good idea of what our actual encounters with these people were like, but I hope to write a bit more about specific experiences that were especially moving and powerful.

Inspired by my experiences in Colombia, I arrived back in Quito with a few new ideas of ways that I can make a significant impact in the lives of refugees here. My rough ideas are to work compiling the stories of different individuals/families, help them with goal setting on a short and long term basis, and work on compiling a list of all of the resources available to refugees in Quito in order for people to have a guide of how to get oriented and where to seek help for specific issues.

I'll leave it there for now so your eyes dont get too tired...but I will hopefully write more very soon.