Day 50 – Jóvenes (young ones) y Empanadas!

We’ve written about them both before, but it was a day filled with good experiences with both.

We slept in until 8:30-yeah!  I made French toast with bananas.  For lunch, we had tamales with onions, peppers, fried egg, avocado and ají. Yum.

They were huge and filled with gigantic, fuzzy fruit

The neighborhood kids were up in our guava tree in the front yard. I think they got down about 50! They gave us a bunch. Well, I guess, we gave them a bunch, it is our tree.

A little Bible reading, workout and it was time to get ready for service. Normally we go at 2pm but we also had to try to fit in a bunch of Ryan & Veronica’s studies, so we left a little early. Our two studies didn’t study and Veronica’s study, Jimena, wasn’t home. Our nice afternoon of studies was quickly disappearing. So we went to do Maite’s study (we had passed her house and knew she was home).

What a joy! She expresses herself really well – like a little adult (with an appreciation for spiritual things). You should have seen the care and attention she gave to cleaning off the couch and arranging the blankets to make it presentable.  At the end, she and her little sister, Jenifer, were intrigued with my hand sanitizer from Bed, Bath & Beyond and how good it smells. It was as if they had discovered gold.  This is her sister reading Rev. 4:11-how cute is she?

Jenifer & Maite (I know i look like a giant, but they r super tiny)

Then, as we were leaving, they scrambled around to find something of theirs to give us. They gave us plastic cell phones and keys.

Perfect present-These are the only cell phones we want

America couldn’t study as she was watching her terror of a grandson and he wouldn’t let her put him down. So we went next door to her niece, Maria. I think she’s 8 or 9 but super smart. She is extremely shy and talks real quiet but she has her whole lesson studied and the scriptures at the end looked up and written out in her notebook.

We walked home and I wanted to check to see if Erlinda was home yet. It didn’t look like it and they had company so we waved to the family and then we saw Erlinda coming out of the store in front of us. She seemed super happy to see us and asked where we’d been. (Ummmm….”you’ve been in Loja for 2 weeks” is what I wanted to say) but I said we could stop over sometime soon and she invited us over right then. She was about to make empanadas with quesillo. How could I say no to food and a cooking lesson?

Erlinda making (fixing mine) empanadas

I chatted with her and her 2 daughters in the kitchen while Erik sat outside with her husband, Hilario. We made probably 50 empanadas. My first few were so bad that her grandson, Santiago, pointed to one and said to his aunt, “mira, ella no sabe como hacer empanadas. ¿Quien va a comer esto? Yo no!” (Look, she doesn’t know how to make empanadas. Who’s going to’ eat this? Not me!”) It’s awesome to have a 5 year old mock your skills in the kitchen.

Erlinda's daughter, Nancy, grandson & husband, Hilario

They served us each a plate of 5 empanadas with cheese and sugar - we obviously look like eaters. They taste a lot like pizza frite. They also typically serve them with black coffee with sugar. It's been a long time since I had a whole cup of coffee-not sure what all that caffeine will do to me. We brought the rest home for Shawn.

By the way, the bite or tiny itchy bump I had on Wednesday seems to have grown. For those of you that remember, every summer I get this weird poison ivy-like reaction on my stomach that the doctor says is “contact dermatitis”. In other words, they don’t really know what it is. Well, it’s back, in the same spot. Hopefully it won’t get any worse! I don’t want to go to the clinic.

Gross and it's super itchy! I may have a skin sensitivity?