I'm Spiderman!

Today was a little bittersweet. We finished up all our work here in Guayaquil and packed up to leave for Quito tomorrow!

In the morning, we took the bus out to the Hogar de Cristo headquarters. We spent a few hours compiling all our data from the schoolchildren assessments for them to use later. They are going to distribute multivitamins and iron to those who are anemic and try to follow up with children with other medical problems. It took quite a while to add up all the numbers and assess whether each child was underweight/overweight, small for age, or anemic according to their hemoglobin level.

We presented the information to Hogar de Cristo in a little meeting and they were pretty excited. They had made a bunch of goals for the year regarding health in the communities and one of them was to screen 1,000 schoolchildren. We came close! We screened 918 because some of the students were absent from school when we came. It was sad to say goodbye to the volunteers we have been working with this whole time. They are amazing people. I would love to work with them in the future but in reality I don’t know if I’ll ever be down here again.

I got a picture with my two favorite volunteers- Pamela and Vivi.

After the meeting with Hogar de Cristo, we ran back to the hotel for a second and then on to a lunch with the Junta de Beneficia. They are the group who provides healthcare to the public through the lottery. They own Sotomayor and Luis Vernaza Hospital, where we’ve been doing clinicals. I don’t know why they’re so nice to us but this was the third nice meal they have treated us to! We got to eat at a snazzy restaurant on the Malecon (river walk). One of their employees, Vincent, has gone with us to clinical every day over the last three weeks! He is so sweet and gets us into a ton of cool opportunities in the hospitals. Here’s a picture of all of us with him.

After this we went home to blog, pack, and relax! For our final evening in Guayaquil, we got batidos (smoothies) at a little corner fruit shop and played love-odometer. This is basically a glorified game of MASH with playing cards. We had fun predicting each other’s future lives (husband, number of kids, wealth, etc.) and having girl talk. I love all the girls here. We seriously have so much fun together. Here’s the fortune telling crew with one of our sweet instructors- Cheryl.

That night was spent packing up all our gear! I had a random idea earlier in the week to make a movie like we were spiderman scaling the wall because our elevator had an open side that would pass by while we were going up. Anyway, Katie and I decided we should definitely make these videos we had talked about. We were exhausted and delirious so this probably was a lot funnier to us than it will be to you but enjoy!

P.S. I don’t know why I keep putting really embarrassing stuff on here but hopefully you guys appreciate it!