Let's Explore: I'm in Ecuador!

Hello people in America, I am currently in the country of Ecuador!!

I arrived in Quito yesterday evening and we were picked up and brought to our hostel grounds in Tumbaco, a suburb of Quito.

After settling in, we had dinner, chicken and veggies, juice of Moro (some type of berry) and watermelon! Then hung out and went to sleep.

Today we got up and had breakfast- I had eggs, bread, and juice! I tried this amazing fruit called Grenadilla! It's a semi hard shell you break with your nails and then slurp the gooo and seeds- so good!

After breakfast we had orientation- I finally learned more about what I'm doing here!! I'll be working with a group of women who make soap, a group of women who make bags, and a group of high school students who make shampoo! I'll be working on developing a business plan, and trying to create an associate that combines all three groups, making it easier to earn foundation money. I'll also be helping write grants proposals to get this money. I'll also be working on developing an operational system to determine how much soap they can currently make per week/month with their current resources, and how much the would be able to make with the new machine if they get the grant money.

I'll also take a look at quality control.

After orientation we took a city tour of Quito- we had lunch there. Then we went into a really cool church that was exteremly detailed in the carvings and all gold! It was called the compania de Jesus!

It's on the right and the banco central de ecuador is on the left!

We saw some neat plazas, plaza de independencia and Convento de San Francisco!

Convento de San Francisco

Then we went to a view point of the city where the Virgen de Quito statue is! You can see the entire city from up there, and it made me realize how HUGE Quito is! The city is very spread out- it's cool to see al the buildings and all the mountains from up there!