dinner and some scary stories

meagan and her husband paul dropped by last night for dinner. they are working out in dos mangas, a tiny two road village near manglaralto on the coast. in town for a few days to unwind, get some research done and visit the internet cafés jane agreed to whip them up a dinner. i was out of the loop on the planning process but contributed a bottle of wine to the affair and all was forgiven.

things are not going quite so smoothly for the couple. not that they're having a bad time, far from it, it's just that the gods seem content to smite them with bad luck from time to time. they are without passports, for instance, a situation that has existed for over three weeks now. the government went on strike a day or two after they submitted the passports for registration and there is no sign of an agreement in sight (not that i would know however). so that kind of sucks. also on the negative is the fact that paul misplaced his bank card and meagan's bank card has decided to stop working. luckily they have a stash of traveller's cheques that, while incredibly inconvenient to cash, are at least worth money. luckily they are expending little money to begin with. their apartment, lacking much of the luxury of our guayaquil pad, is only 40 bucks a month and that includes sporadic meals from the family that lives downstairs. i say sporadic because apparently they drop off food of all sorts at almost any time of the day. paul says that he actually wishes that he could cook a bit more but facing the barrage of food that he faces it's difficult.

yesterday's meeting was almost cancelled. one person did show - diana, a 17 year old who will be helping us in santi esteban. we chatted for a while - andy ventured out 5 minutes before the meeting was to start and came back 40 minutes in which made for a bunch of wild stabs in spanish as to what the meeting was called for. i'm assuming things are on the right track but we really won't know until we're picking up the pieces on monday.

today we go to fertiza, the poorer part of our pilot project. as i might have mentioned we are supposed to work with three different ecoclubs in guayaquil, a college (santi esteban high school), a middle class neighbourhood (las acacias) and a poorer neighbourhood (fertiza).

ah... it's the time of day when our maid's daughter, who just turned one, decides to scream at the top of her lungs for no apparent reason. the "ignore the behaviour and it will go away" tactic employed by her mom has yet, after weeks of use, seemed to make a dent on the child's behaviour, but we'll see...