Friday, January 28, 2011

Missing Ecuador

It's been more than a week since I returned from my Alternative Breaks trip to Mondana, Ecuador and Yachana Technical High School but I haven't written about it here or in my personal journal. I keep wanting to but I keep getting caught on somehow trying to pretend we are still there despite the fact that it snowed so much in NYC that NYU gave us a snow day yesterday. In case you were wondering, we had no snow in Ecuador. 

We did have lots of awesome food though, including the Tilapia and yucca I found on my phone a minute ago. It was my first time eating fish with scales and bones and was pretty difficult but completely satisfying. 


I was telling a friend about the trip today and she told me that every time I come back from a service trip it sounds like the newest one was better than the previous ones without me saying that in any sort of words. That made me really happy because even though each trip has been different, they could become routine in that I always know they are temporary, that I probably won't return, and that I probably won't keep in touch with the people at the site. I want to say that this trip was different, and I think it really could be, but the hard reality is that I probably won't return to Yachana just like I won't go back to Oak Ridge, TN or Bay Crest Elementary School. But that's okay, because the service and the cultural exchange still happened. I learned. The people we met there learned. And now we can share that learning and our experiences.

I have to go through my photos so I can include them in whatever writing comes up, but in the meantime, check out the blog from our trip to get a general idea of what we did: http://nyuabproecuador.blogspot.com/