Coffee Day, Take Two

So today the planets aligned and everything worked out for me to be able to have a coffee day! Finally! I first dropped my mother-in-law off at the bus terminal, stayed with her until her bus arrived, and then headed off to the mall.

At first I was considering getting a smoothie, but I decided that I needed the heart pounding, capillary dialating, ecuadorian grown coffee in my veins if I was going to get through the week. So I headed off to my preferred frappuccino place, Sweet & Coffee, and said, ¨One mocha frappuccino, please!¨, my mouth watering with anticipation (except I said it in Spanish). The guys behind the counter made that face. That face people make when they are about to shatter your dream to pieces and are not sure how to phrase it so as not to start a shouting match with the caffiene-starved mother of a toddler who has exactly one hour to herself a week. You know that face? Then he found the right words. ¨We only have hot drinks right now.¨ And just like that, my dream was gone.

Then I remembered that there is a Juan Valdez on the second floor of the mall, and I was off! I thought it might be too expensive, but I found a comparable frappuccino-esque drink at about the same price, so I went for it. One sip and I knew I had made the right choice. Although Jual Valdez is Colombian coffee. Not Ecuadorian. But I´m over it.

I read a few chapters of two books I took along, stopped in a few stores to get some information, bought some soy bean oil and headed home. I ended up having to walk a long way home until a bus FINALLY came by, and by then I needed another coffee. Obviously we are still working out the logistics of coffee day.

On a more serious note, though, as I was on the Trole (trolley) from the bus terminal to the mall, something happened that made me sad. A blind woman got on the trole to beg for money, which is pretty common in Ecuador, so I got some money out of my purse, ready to hand to her as she walked by. She was at the front of the bus, and the troles are really long, so I was just kind of waiting for her to get there and thinking about something or another. As she passed I put the money in her hand and she thanked me, and I was about to go back to my thoughts when I saw her getting off the trole. She was getting off with her son, a boy of maybe 5 or 6 years, who could see. He was apparently escorting her as she begged for money.

As a mother, seeing this hurt me deeply for a few reasons. First, I thought that I really wished I had given her more money. It might sound weird, but seeing that she was a mom, and imagining how, in this culture, she could provide for her son and herself with no job, I wished I could have done more. Then I thought that I wished I had gotten off the trole to talk to her. The I wondered how long she had been blind. Had she always been blind? Had she ever seen her son´s face? Had she ever looked at him as she held him in her arms and seen him looking up her, needing her and loving her as only our babies can do? I started getting teary-eyed on the bus. Then I pulled it together. A gringa calls enough attention to herself without blubbering like a baby on the bus for no apparent reason.

The last thing I thought about as I reflected was how humiliating it must be to have to beg strangers for money in front of your children. In Ecuador, and in most countries, people with conditions like hers have no opportunities for work besides begging. They are looked down upon by others, as though their physical condition had something to do with their worth as a person. And people feel good about themselves because they toss a few cents in the hands of the needy, while they never stop and consider that the ¨needy¨ are people. They are someone´s daughter or son, sister or brother, mother or father. And tomorrow any one of us could become ¨one of them¨ because of some small twist of fate.

And I guess I lied, because that wasn´t the very last thing I thought. The very last thing I thought was this: I wish I would have talked to her about Jesus. I wish that would have been my first thought. And I´m a missionary for crying out loud! I hope she´s around next coffee day, or any day. And I hope I´m not too busy thinking about one thing or another to see supernatural opportunities in everday experiences.

I don´t want to end on a low note, though, so I will end with this: I was standing in the trole on the way home, and I was thinking that it´s nice sometimes to be just another face in the crowd, another commuter going about his or her day, another anonymous blah, blah, blah...you get it. Anyway, all of the sudden I had this memory of a friend of mine who lived in Quito for a few months falling flat on her butt in the trole, and I struggled not to burst out laughing (which would be just as bad as bursting our in tears). Probably not funny to you. I guess you had to be there. Goodnight!

Coffee Day

I mentioned in my last post that yesterday was to be my first weekly coffee day. Well, I got some kind of 24 hour bug, and spent most of the day in bed. The great thing was, though, that I spent most of the day in bed!

Normally when I´m sick I still do everything I must do because there is no one I can call to help out. Jairo is usually too busy, and that´s the end of my list of helpful people who live close enough to actually help!

Well, yesterday was a miracle. Jairo took Bella with him to pay some bills, giving me a chance to sleep for a couple of extra hours. I felt like a new woman when he and Bella arrived back at home. The best part of all, though, was that when they returned they brought me a frappuccino! So I got my first coffee day after all.

Hopefully next Monday will be a normal coffee day, but it was really nice of Jairo to give me my very own, personal, at home coffee day, don´t you think?

It totally made it easier to deal with the people from church who randomly stopped by my house...¨Would you mind teaching my son English for a few hours??¨ No, of course not, just let me hack up this lung and we will be good to go...sigh.

But alas, nothing was able to ruin my coffee day! It was a wonderful day! All thanks to my wonderful husband, who was determined to give me what I had been so looking forward to!

Sweet Victory!

I have been sitting here at my computer for two hours trying to send a file. It is an important file, and I´m already really behind schedule in sending it. One time it almost sent, but then Bella woke up and by the time I got back to the computer the connection timed out. I was just about to call it quits and throw my computer against a wall when, miracle of miracles, the file loaded! I could have cried I was so excited. (That might be the hormones, though.)

I´m about to go to bed and join my sleeping angels (big and small) in the land of sueños, but I felt like it was time the world hear my thoughts again. After all, what would you all do without me?? ha.

Bella and I both have some kind of cold, so it has been a long day (made longer by my stupid, stupid email provider-no, I will NOT like you on facebook!), and I´m looking forward to a few short hours of sleep before we do it all over again. I am also excited, however, because tomorrow is my first weekly coffee day! Jairo has agreed to take Bella once a week for 2 hours or so while I go get a frappuccino and read a book. All by myself. Yes, alone. Are you as astonished by this idea as I am? A moment where I am neither wife nor mother. Although I will probably be thinking about Bella and whether or not Jairo got her to take her nap, and if I remembered to turn on the washing machine before I left...But still! I think it will be fun! So much so that I don´t care if I have to take a whole roll of toilet paper with me to the mall for this runny nose.

I´ll let you know how it goes.

I´m working on a whole new schedule for our home which I think will be better than our previous schedule, which could more exactly be defined as a ¨good effort¨, which all over-acheivers know to mean ¨yeah, not so much.¨ I got the meal plan done which was a huge undertaking. I was underwhelmed by meal plans I found online that include only dinner. I planned for three meals and two snacks, every day, so it was a lot of thinking. But now that it´s finished I LOVE IT! It takes so much thinking out of the mealtime process. So, my goal is to get to that point with the rest of the daily ruitine, so it just flows without a lot of thinking. The problem is that after the meal plan, I was so sick of planning things that I have been putting off getting back into it, even though I know it will help.

But you don´t care about that, right? So, on to tales of our lives. The other day Bella Boo had her first bloody fall. It sounds worse than it was, although that fact did not stop my heart from jumping into my throat and staying there for the whole day and night. She was walking and slipped, hitting her lower lip on the edge of the furniture. She has a perfect imprint of her two front teeth on the inside of her bottom lip. Luckily, Jairo was in the bathroom when it happened and by the time he came out to see what the crying was about I had cleaned up most of the blood. (He´s incredibly squeemish). Finally having a use for Bella´s boo-boo bunny, I went to retrieve it from the freezer, only to find it frozen to the freezer. OF COURSE. So I gave her a bag of frozen peas to suck on while Jairo went to the store to buy her a popsicle. In over-all crisis management I would give myself an A-, if only for that brain-dead minute where I stood there holding Bella thinking, ¨What was it that you´re supposed to do with blood?!¨ But it´s healing nicely now, and Bella herself was laughing with us about 10 minutes after it happened. Oh, the magic of icecream! (More proof that she is, in fact, her mother´s daughter). I, however, still have some high blood pressure every time I think about it.

On a happier note, Bella is now trying to talk more. She already knew a few words, but she added ¨all done¨, ¨no¨ (GREAT.), and ¨chau¨ to her vocabulary. (Chau is bye in Spanish. You probably knew that.) She´s also starting to love on her stuffed animals, which she used to just throw away every time I gave them to her. So, progress. It´s amazing how much there is to learn when you´re just a tot! And even so, it seems she learns it all so quickly, without any discouragement that there is still so much more to go.

In all, I think if you live with a toddler and you don´t find a reason every day to laugh, cry, scream (on the inside), marvel, and kiss, kiss, kiss, then you´re missing something. Because all of those opportunities are there, and you don´t have to look to hard to find them. And you should grab onto them, and live life with that same intensity that your toddler does (tempered with some wisdom and maturity). You might just learn something. I know I do, every day. And tomorrow morning I am sure it will be an extra effort to master a Bella classic: waking up with a smile!