Why Ecuador

One of my best friends from high school asked me to write about why we chose to come to Ecuador in particular and I thought that was a great idea.  So here goes.  Matt and I decided we wanted to do a mission trip early in our lives as I wrote in the first blog post.  When it came time to start the initial planning stages, I was pregnant with Melayna.  Matt was very busy with school at the time so while he worked on school work, I looked at possible places for us to volunteer.  I looked at Christian sites, Catholic sites and medical sites and Ecuador kept coming up as needing volunteers.  I knew I wanted to work with children so that narrowed my search.  We also knew we wanted to take Lucas and Melayna with us which further narrowed the search.  I was finding that many organizations would support an individual but not a family.  I kept running into dead end after dead end looking for places we could go.  I prayed about it every night.  One night while at a course for Physical Therapists I prayed particularly long about finding a place we could go as a family.  The next day at the course a girl stood up and talked about her pediatric clinic in Tena, Ecuador and how they desperately needed PT volunteers.  I thought we had our answer.  I conversed with the girl briefly at the course and then extensively through email for about six months.  As things unfolded, I came to find out the girl wanted Matt and I to possibly take over the clinic!  We were not equipped for that, but I wanted to go check it out.  Matt started talking to the teachers at the University of Kentucky and ended up talking to Lynn English who helps take groups of students to Ecuador three times a year.  She offered to let one of us go with the group and go check out the clinic.  I went with the group and after talking it over with Matt we decided that we would consider working at the clinic that UK serves and maybe taking a student for an internship, but not go to the clinic in Tena.  The trip was amazing, but I decided I did not want to take the kids to Santo Domingo and be so far from good healthcare.  It really felt like I was hitting another dead end.  While on the trip, I met a lady who worked for a bigger foundation in Ecuador called Timmy Global.  She said we could pursue working for them and live in Quito.  I looked into it when I got home and started the process of interviewing and sending resumes and having phone conferences with them.  We ended up finding out that they expected us to pay for everything on our own and that if we stayed in the volunteer house we would be on the fourth floor of a big house with a bunch of other volunteers sharing one kitchen.  We felt like that was just not a good fit for us and we would have had to have been separated the whole time with one person working while the other watched the kids.  It was not right either, so I continued to pray and one morning I found a volunteer site that offered to host families.  They work in many different areas of Ecuador in schools, homes for teenage mothers, day cares, farms and in the ocean.  The company is Ecovolunteer and they have been really good to us so far.  Matt is working at the clinic UK goes to still and we will be hosting a student so some of the plans stayed the same and this way we do not have to take the kids to Santo Domingo.  So when it comes down to it, it was answered prayers that led us to Ecuador.  It was a long process, but I feel we are in the right place.