Journey's End

It has been a busy few days and I haven't had time to blog.
Wednesday we were at the orphanage in the morning and then in the afternoon, the kids and I took a taxi to a place called "Fatima". It was sort of like a zoo. We probably would have gotten a lot more out of it if we had spoken Spanish but it was fun to see monkeys playing in the trees, cayman in the water (no fences around anywhere), wild pigs, turtles, an anaconda, parrots, and a tapir. The kids got to hold a boa constrictor. The best part though was when we went looking for "Bambi" the tapir. THey are huge. She just lumbered up the path and we could feed her and pet her. We also went to an aviary where there were hundreds of local and exotic birds. We laughed at so many of them, as they had very unusual characteristics like a mop of hair on their heads or big floppy feathers like flippers on their feet.
Wednesday night we went to Hardin's for pizza and lots of laughs.



Thursday morning I was called in to help in the ICU with a woman with an MI. After lunch the kids and I took the bus to Puyo and went swimming at the water slides and wave pool. We went shopping a bit before coming home and went over to Florence's for a typical Ecuadorian supper with 16 of us there. We were the only Gringo's so relied on Florence to do alot of the translation for us. Didn't have much left to give them but gave them our clothes (not the ones we are wearing!!!)



Today, we got up and went to the MAF hangar to fly to Tewano (sp?) a Waorani village where there are a group of Christians. The flight took about 20 minutes from Shell. Dan Whitehead was our pilot. It was a great flight there. Landed on a grass strip and were met by the enthusiastic community. They all crowded around the plane and an older man came up in shirt, shorts and rubber boots. He was one of the men who killed the 5 missionaries. He prayed for us and we went up to see their church and a meeting house that they were building. They are having a church conference there in a few days. They sang a song for us in Waorani explaining how their life was before God and afterwards. We were shown how to "re-shingle" their palm leaf house and they showed us a typical Waorani dance. They made headbands out of a plant and painted "waponi" on them with a red substance from a fruit. Each of us got one as well as some red paint for our faces. Didn't we look great!!
We visited one of the homes and saw their pet monkeys and pet parrot. They also had some blow guns for sale, so we bought two to take home. One of the fellows who made the guns demonstrated how to use it.
We went down to the cook shack and watched some women stirring a pot over the fire. They were cooking deer and Yucca for lunch. Gary and I were then married in typical waorani fashion (some of it caught on video) and then we were all fed the deer and yucca stew.
It started to rain and it was also time to go. The whole trip back was cloudy and rainy. We had left just in time. Another plane a few minutes farther away started out and had to turn around because of the weather. We would have been stuck in Tewano! It was a great visit. I forgot to mention that we had to translate all the time from Waorani to Spanish to English and then back again each time we wanted to converse!
More later....
Lori