Hey everyone,
I´m going to try my best with this entry but I´ve sprained my wrist and it´s all bandaged up.
I realize that I haven´t updated my blog in awhile and I have lots to say!

We´re officially done with Quito and we left there on Tuesday afternoon. We finished all of our rotations. My favourite was doing physical therapy with kids, but the most shocking was the public hospital. I can´t even describe how rudimentary it was. It kind of reminded me of MASH, because there were rooms that were just full of people lying on beds, pretty busted up. They don´t always use gloves, even when they´re taking blood to test for HIV. We saw some interesting cases, including someone who had been hit by lightning.
Tuesday was interesting, the morning and afternoon were like night and day. I spent the morning at the public hospital, and spent the afternoon dressed as a clown. We organized a pary for kids with Down´s syndrome and it was a great party. It had a spiderman theme and one of the guys on our trip dressed up as spiderman.

So besides our rotations, we finished up our project in Quito. The building is completely finished. The space will be used as a store, for selling donated goods so the foundation can raise money. This is a foundation that provides physical therapy, at a minimal cost, for people who have lost limbs. People come from all over South America to use their services.
The building needed a lot of work. To start with, it was full of stuff. We spent a lot of time cleaning it and then we painted to walls. When we started a lot of the windows were broken and it didn´t have electricity. It´s a pretty basic building, made of cement, with a metal roof. It kind of leaks when it rains. I´m going to post before and after pictures after I´m back.
Last Friday we held a ¨medical bridage¨. There were ads in the newspapers, radios etc. We got a bunch of doctors together and it was an education day for people with diabetes. about 65 people came. We fed them, helped with their physical exams and assessments.
Because everything went so well on Friday, we had today off. We drove to a nearby national park, that was so beautiful. We went to a lookout point, on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a huge valley.
Next we went to the ¨center of the world¨. Apparently the Incans figured out that this one spot is the center of the world and it sits on the Ecuator. So we got a lot of the typical shots, with one foot on each side of the Ecuator. It kind of reminded me of that simpsons episode where they´re all standing in different states.We stopped at a market on the way home. It was fun and we picked up a bunch of trinkets. We´re going to hold a fundraising event when we get back, to help later groups, and we´re buying a lot of stuff to sell at silent auctions.

On Sunday we went to a soccer game. I have never experienced anything quite like it. First of all, they separate the fans for the opposing teams because violence is expected. We sat in the section for the most spirited fans and we didn´t sit down the whole game. It was all chanting, singing and running up and down the stands.

So we´re on our tour now and our first stop is Mindo, and we arrived yesterday. Yesterday we went for a hike. It was really intense. Think of the grouse grind, for an hour and a half, in the blistering heat. We ended up at a waterfall, that was 40 feet tall, that we repelled down. In the afternoon we went tubing down a river.

Today we went for some more hikes, this time to more waterfalls! We started by taking a gondola across a huge valley. Some of the guys went cliff jumping, off a 12 m cliff. My favourite was the second waterfall, which had natural waterslides, formed by the water (this is where i hurt my hand).

I´ll try my best to update more!

Adios