Baby Anne!

I get to help babysit my adorable 7-month old niece this week while her parents are away.

She is such a sweetheart! We are having a great time.

She is already a little musician in the making.

Going for a walk and picking flowers. Does life get any better?

Last Week of EFY :(

This was one of the most exciting moments of my week.

This kid let me take out his stitches! I felt very official.

Saying goodbye to all of my wonderful new friends. This was a sad day.

A Week off from EFY Spent with My Wonderful Family!

The beach was seriously freezing.

But it was so beautiful! Gotta love the Oregon coast.

I found a cute new boyfriend.

We have cute feet.

Tillamook!

We spent two weeks in Tacoma and then came back to Forest Grove yesterday. Some of us decided to spend our afternoon off at the beach. We went to the Tillamook cheese factory and then went to the beach to play for the afternoon. It was a great Saturday.

I Love to See the Temple!

After our first session of EFY, our leaders challenged us to spend a few minutes on the grounds of the Portland temple on our way from Forest Grove to Tacoma. I could feel the amazing Spirit that surrounds the house of the Lord as soon as I entered the gates. This temple is so beautiful! I've decided that I would really like to get married in the Portland temple.

Dehydration Never Was Happiness

One of our great purposes in life as health counselors is to try to convince the participants to drink water so that they don't end up dehydrated. We motivate them by offering stickers to anyone we see drinking water. As a result, people randomly start drinking water around me all the time. I was talking to a friend at the dance on Friday when I was suddenly surrounded by boys sipping water. I thought it was hilarious. Way to be hydrated, boys. This picture is also an excellent display of how unflattering my wonderful red polo shirts are.

The Most Official Part of My Week

Meet my partner, Lynn. They say that a picture is worth 1000 words. This one captures Lynn perfectly. Participant check-in is one of our favorite times of the week because we feel like we are doing something really organized and official. We go through all of the kids' records and then talk to them at check-in if there are any medical concerns. We get to meet lots of awesome kids and parents this way. Notice the sweater. It always manages to be freezing during check-in, even last week when it was super hot all of the other days.

On to New Adventures!

I have spent the last three weeks at home relaxing and recovering from my exhaustingly great time in Ecuador. My R&R time ran out this weekend. I drove down to Portland last night so that I could start my job as an EFY health counselor today. It took some convincing to get Mom to let me drive down here by myself, but I made it just fine. I stayed with Aunt Kerri and Uncle Sherwood last night. I spent this afternoon in a training meeting, and the real work starts tomorrow and Monday. The next few weeks are going to be great! I got to know a few of the awesome people I am going to be working with tonight by spending the evening at Toy Story 3, which is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. I would highly recommend it.

Last Day Teaching in Ecuador :(

I finally caved and tried the guinea pig. It tasted like chewy, fatty, dark chicken meat.

The last school we taught nutrition at was full of adorable kids.

I became very popular when I let them take pictures with my camera.

I love little Ecuadorian children!

The drive to get to this school was long and bumpy up a little mountain road,

but who cares when you get to look at this all the way!

Church and Tourist Fun in Otavalo and Quito

On top of the world! We rode a tram up the mountain above Quito, and the view was amazing! We could see the city stretching out as far as we could see in every direction, and the mountains were gorgeous. The elevation here was over 4100 meters, which is about 13,400 ft!

Straddling the equator! It was bizarre to see the different science experiments you could do on either side of the line. You literally only have to move a couple of feet, and the water spins the opposite direction. Weird!

Sometimes, things get lost in translation. Creeps, anyone?

These are some of the awesome ladies we met at church in Otavalo. The lady right next to me was kind enough to a couple of us hang out in primary instead of staying in Relief Society. We sang primary songs with them, and it was so much fun!

Our whole group of students in front of our church building in Otavalo. Check out the fun colors! I think Ecuador rubbed off on all of us.

They have the most amazing assortment of fruits here. We have been brave and tried a few of them. This one looks like a hairy strawberry, but I believe it is actually called an achutilla. You pop it open and slurp out the insides, which look kind of like a big, skinned grape with a big seed in the middle. They were actually really good.

From the Coast to the Mountains

I left Guayaquil, which is on the coast of Ecuador, on Saturday and flew to Quito, which is about 10,000 feet up in the Andes mountains. It is a huge change from Guayaquil. It is much cooler and less humid here. I am loving it. And it is so beautiful! More pictures of the gorgeous mountains to come.

New Friends from Ecuador

Our new friends, Jonathan and Steven, who we met at church, gave us a tour of the Malecon last Sunday. It was really fun to walk around the city with people our age who are from here. Yay for new friends!

My Fun Activities in the Community

We spent the last 2 1/2 weeks in elementary schools in the poor communities measuring kids. My job is basically to make small children cry. I'm pretty good at it. This is Beth, Shea, Natalie, and I getting set up to poke fingers and test the kids for anemia.
After we took all the measurements, we had to spend FOREVER putting together all of the data so that Cassidy could present it this week. We were all very glad to have this project done.
I didn't make any kids cry on this day. That was kind of refreshing. I checked heights, weights, teeth and hair. I got to see my first real live lice nits! I was a little bit itchy afterwards.
Say Ah! You wouldn't believe the state of these kids' teeth. Some of them are literally rotted down to the gums. I am definitely not tough enough to be a poor Ecuadorian child.

Cuenca!

Yesterday, we drove about 10,000 feet up into the mountains to a city called Cuenca. It is a city with a lot of European influence, so it is very different from Guayaquil. The scenery was some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Definitely a day I will never forget.

Yes, those are guinea pigs. Here they call it Qui, and we walked all over Cuenca trying to find some. It wasn't so much the idea of eating guinea pig that grossed me out as the very unsanitary conditions it was cooked in. I didn't actually eat any, but I did watch how they get these things onto the spits so they can cook them over the fire. Seriously disgusting.

The flower market was amazing! They have gorgeous flowers in Ecuador, which is one of the biggest flower exporters in the world. I was pretty much in heaven. Look at the adorable Ecuadorian lady!

This photo is of Incapirga, the ruins of one of the main centers of the Incan empire. The ruins are a couple of hours from Cuenca.

We did a service project on Friday and helped build a house for this family. We, along with the help of some skilled Ecuadorian workers, built this whole house in just a few hours. I helped haul materials through the sharp, scratchy, scorpion-infested grass. After that was done, my most important functions were handing people things and playing with the adorable little boys who were going to live in the house.

This is my friend, Kaila, who is a third grader at one of the schools I visited to do health screenings this week. She took it on herself to be my nurse's assistant. She would bring the kids in, sit them down, and explain to them in Spanish what they needed to do. Then she would make them turn their head away while I poked their finger. At the end, she gave them a piece of candy. She was so cute!

A little Sunday afternoon stroll...

View from the top! Sorry this story is backwards, but I can't seem to get the pictures in the right order. Sometimes I am technologically challenged.

At the end of the Malecon, there are 444 individually numbered stairs that lead to a lighthouse at the top. For some silly reason, we chose to make the climb during the hottest part of the afternoon. This is us at the halfway point.