The second day of the project, last Saturday, I decided to stay at the volunteer house with a couple of students who were planning on shopping and cooking lunch for the team. Richard (the teacher) went with the remainder of the group to Ayambe. About 1 ½ hours after they had left, while I was in the supermarket, I received a call from Richard telling me there had been an accident. It would seem that the rather unsafe and wobbly wall that we had been working around the day before, had decided to fall onto Harry’s foot (somewhat helped by Harry himself). Excellent.
Plenty of phonecalls later I managed to get Pedro (our host) to get to the project site with a bus and take Harry to the local clinic. Unfortunately the clinic in Puerto Lopez is not all that well equipped so off he went in an ambulance to Xipixapa (pronounced hippyhappa) to get an x-ray. A few hours later and Harry was back, having broken two metatarsals (David Beckham eat your heart out), with a cast on his foot and looking a little sorry for himself. Richard, on the other hand, spent the next 4 hours driving around the region of Manabi trying to find crutches. He eventually returned about 7pm having spent all day in a taxi with two non-English speakers (he speaks no Spanish). He was not, however, empty handed and came equipped with two, somewhat small, but useful, crutches! We decided to go out for the night (I secretly wanted to celebrate finally breaking a kid after 7 expeditions) to one of the beach bars. The group had a mass salsa lesson on the beach, which was hilarious, and drank lots of milkshakes while I had my first beer in 3 weeks. Lovely :)
Sunday was a rest day but as we are wicked and therefore deserve no rest, we headed off on a boat to watch some whales. Richard and I escaped the masses and sat atop the boat with another English couple unfortunate enough to have organised a boat trip with 13 teenagers from the UK (there’s nothing like getting away from it all...). All was great for us, the ride out was fun, the whales were close by and easily spotted – not so for those mere mortals below. An amazing 10 out of the 13 got seasick enforcing an early return to port as the captain of the boat was rather concerned. I was more concerned about the other passengers who had paid to go on a four hour trip and had actually only got two!! But then I’m not that sympathetic to people who are sick on a boat after eating ice cream and drinking fizzy drinks for breakfast (am I being too harsh here?).
The rest of the week we have been back to work, well, back to lying around sleeping and occasionally getting up to mix some concrete. This afternoon, after almost completing the building, we were treated to a dance display by the kids from the school. The first was an incredibly surreal display by the younger kids dressed as sea creatures and dancing to Rod Stewart's 'Do You Think I'm Sexy' (I know, not really very appropriate!!). I was going to include a video but it's taking way too long to upload - maybe I'll add this later. This was followed by a more traditional but equally funny dance by some of the older children in beautiful dress. Tonight we are off out again, but as they are all such lightweights (normally in bed by 8.30pm) I'm sure it won't be a late one. Maybe 10pm if I'm lucky?
Back to Quito tomorrow, before heading north to Ortavalo for some serious market shopping on Saturday. This time next week I will be back in lovely North Wales and back on the vino tinto. My mouth is watering in anticipation :)
No comments:
Post a Comment