Last week while we had renters in our house for Master’s and spring break was occurring all over our little city, I had the privilege of traveling to Ecuador with a medical team to work with local missionaries in sharing the Gospel and treating the sicknesses of many underprivileged Ecuadorian people. So I thought I’d share my experiences from the trip last week. It all started early Saturday morning April 2. I arrived at our team meeting place where the bus and van were parked. We packed up all of our gear (16 crates of medicines and supplies) and our luggage and set off for the Atlanta airport.

We boarded a small Continental flight to Houston where we caught our flight from Houston to Quito, Ecuador. In some respects, I’m probably still a kid when it come to flying. But I don’t know…there’s just something cool and mesmerizing about flight. I love the take-off. There is just nothing in the world like being mashed into your seat because of intense acceleration coming from the thousands of pounds of thrust produced by engines. It’s just so cool. But not only is it cool…I always marvel at flight once we are cruising. I mean the only thing holding us up in the air is the simple fact that air is moving faster over one part of the wing then the other. You look out the window, and it’s like…wow, we’re just floating on this equation: Lift = coefficient x (density x velocity squared)/2 x wing area. That physical equation is what an industry is built on, that’s what we float on! Crazy! Anyway, it was about a 5 hour flight from Houston to Quito and since we left Houston at like 6 we arrived in Quito around 11 or 11:30 so we saw the sunset on the plane. It was a good flight, but I didn’t get to see the scenery or Ecuador on the flight in because it was dark.

We got off the plane, checked into Ecuador (went through immigration) and then got all of our luggage and gear. We definitely had to remember all of our Spanish because we were just submerged in it. Fortunately, the missionary we were working with met us at the airport and got a bus for us. We flew into Quito, but we still had to travel to the city where we were going to operate out of which was Ibarra. This city was about a 2.5 hours bus ride through the mountains. So we loaded up our stuff in this blue bus from what appeared to be the year 1964 and headed off into the mountains in the dark. The trip wasn’t too bad, just a lot of twists and turns, ups and downs, which also makes your ears pop from all of the elevation changes. And unfortunately, all of the ups and downs got to one of our incredible team members and didn’t make him feel too good. He got better in time for the first clinical day which was a huge blessing. But after the long bus ride, we finally got to our hotel, Pueblo Vieja and got into bed for Sunday recovery and preparation.

After about 6 hours of rest we got up on Sunday morning to a stunning view or our surrounding area. We had some tasty breakfasts with fresh squeezed Guanabana juice (a sweet white juice that looks like coconut milk but tastes amazing..my favorite of the fresh fruit juices) and then we piled in a little van and went to a local church in Ibarra to worship with some spanish believers. That was really cool. Then we went out to lunch and saw the area that we would be working with throughout the week. After all that, we went back to the hotel and began to pack all of the medicine we needed for our first clinic on Monday morning. At this point, I think we all went to bed early to get ready for an early get up and a full day of seeing patients. Here are some pictures from the first day!