What's happenin' man?

Hey all!

I thought, since there were being questions asked (both in your comments and emails I'm recieving) about what life is like here, I would blog broadly on what this place is like and what's going on.

Quito, if you look it up in an atlas, is high in the andes mountains, nestled in a long but narrow valley. It's a crowded city, since it's hard to expand outwards. Incidentally, the airport is right in the middle of the city, so it's hard to expand upwards too with the building limits to stop airplanes hitting things (I know, scary place to land a plane, let me tell you!)

It's not an ultra-poor city like calcuta or something. There's a lot of people here that make single-figure US$ per day, most of the city in fact. But then you get enough to eat and drink for about $3 a day, so that gives you some idea of things. People are poor, but not many are starving. Having said that, on any main road you can't go more than 50m without someone asking you to buy something. I've been offered everything from tv remote controls to lollypops to Icecream to sunglasses. You can buy most things from the street! There's also jugglers and buskers at traffic lights, and windscreen washers, and ladies with boxes of fruit.

We've got supermarkets and an 8-screen cinema complex and an iceskating rink just 5mins away from the house here, even with macdonalds, so that gives you some idea of how normal it can sometimes seem. It's this kind of weird dicotomy of western culture meets thirdworld economy. Very strange!

The house is big, but there are only three boys here at the moment. Over the last six months, or maybe a bit more, seven boys have left the house for various reasons and gone back to live on the streets. This is pretty hard on the missionaries, but teenagers are like that I guess, especially ones with such a difficult background. I met one of them the other day - he's a windscreen washer and lives in a bus-station. He's not malnourished or anything, and he seemed happy enough, but his life holds few prospects. Please pray for him and the other boys who've left, that the gospel would not be something they forget, but that they would look to God in there hardships and remember his promises to be there father when they need support, friend when they're lonely, and the saviour of their souls when they fall into the temptations of life on the street.

That's enough to make you read for one day.

Thanks for your support,

Your brother Johnny