Pah-ree-ya-duh?

It's true what they say, the more you occupy your time, the happier you'll be. And I have been highly occupied! School is pretty fun, very very different but in some very good ways. I remain with the same group of studets all day except for English and French classes, where we're divided up by our capabilities. I'm also learning a lot; in my National Reality class [I love the name!], we talked about the classes in Ecuador. 51% of the population is what's known as sub-employed. These are the kids who beg for money on the street, the men with the Squeegies and windex, the women with bags of strawberries that wait at stoplights and pray for someone to roll down their window. There are also some mothers who rent their children out to beg for money, and the person who rents them collects every coin they make, so we are strongly discouraged from giving them anything.


Yesterday was a big Rotary shindig, called a Parillada, which means BBQ. I arrived in the neighborhood of 11:00, and Ayla, Kourtney, and I waited by the front door and gave new arrivals the rundown: where to buy food, what's available for purchase, where the bathrooms are, etc. Around 2, we sat down and ate, and after that we sold raffle tickets to the guests, $1 a piece for a drawing for a gold bracelet. I very proudly sold nearly 30 tickets!

We also had some special guests at the parillada: the cadidates for Queen of Guayaquil! They came up onstage and did their catwalks and then just hung out in the VIP room a lot but it felt like seeing famous people! Later there was live music and all the exchange students were in the middle dancing together when someone decided we should go dance with the little kids onstage. We agreed on one condition: Julio, our counselor, had to come up with us! We nudged each other into shaking, rattling, and rolling our way through a few songs, including Aretha Franklin's "I Will Survive". Lots of pictures, which I'll upload tomorrow, since my camera is charging.

That's pretty much all for now, so I guess I'll close this off with a HUGE congratulations to my oldest brother Justin and the lovely Jamie on their engagement today! Best of luck!