Journal Entry # 48 - Habitat Conference

29 September 2002 - Laurie

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Habitat Resource Development Retreat Weekend

Our role at this retreat was to present to the group a little about ourselves, our experience with Habitat, to gather info for their website which Matt was creating, and to contribute to their understanding about how to better organize for Global Village work brigades coming primarily from North America and Europe.  Given how self-conscious I am about my Spanish these days, I cannot believe that I got up and spoke (read) in Spanish in front of 30 Ecuadorians. They were received us politely, however, and seemed forgiving of our multiple blunders.

I also had a chance to meet the South America Global Village Coordinator, Kelly Sumner, a very cool former Peace Corps worker from Miami, FL. She gave me excellent ideas about things to work on in developing the Habitat-GV program in Chile, and we had fun just hanging out, too.

It was nice to have another English speaking colleague to keep me company, because on the first night of the retreat, Matt came down with his horrible bug of some kind. Whatever it was (we’re still not sure), he was out of commission, in bed for 3 days straight, and didn’t feel up to par for several weeks afterwards. For those of you who know Matt, this is highly unusual, as he hardly ever gets sick. So, between attending seminars during the day, I nursed Matt with liquids (he’s stubborn about taking medicine), and the sweet little nuns at the Catholic retreat center helped by making him special herbal concoctions. Hugo Palacios, a minister and head of church relations for HFH Ecuador was very kind during all of this, and, because his wife worked in the administration at a decent clinic, he was able to get us through to a doctor that spoke English right away.  Good to have connections!

Party

On the second night, we built a bonfire on the retreat grounds, around which we sang and told mostly innocent jokes (I, of course, did a lot of courtesy laughs not catching some of the punch lines in Spanish)… until an Ecuadorian University theater arts group joined us with their drums, other instruments, and costumes and livened up the party with all kinds of rhythm and not-so–innocent jokes.

 

	We went from singing Kumbaya in Spanish to old 50’s rock–n-roll tunes in English like “The Twist.” And after passing around a bottle of straight hooch (don’t even know what kind) compliments of the students, we were making all kinds of racket and twisting and jerking around the fire! It was a bizarre, primal sort of experience.

One I’ll remember for sure. The fire against the silhouette of mountains and a clear starry night sky was a wonderment in itself.  The nuns didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, they either did not notice the hooch or looked the other way. Didn’t realize how loud we were until noticing that the window to mine and Matt’s room was right over the craziness. At about 11pm, I went to check on Matt and was surprised to find him sound asleep with ear plugs, no doubt.

The Retreat Center

The retreat center itself was worthy of a few shots...  It was very peaceful, very well cared for and was an obvious place for quiet reflection... except when that silly Habitat group was partying at night!