...and the sickness never stops!

I love this country.  Ecuador is a fantastic place to live, and I think it's awesome that we will get to raise our children here.
But, if I had a penny for every time I've had a stomach bug since arriving in this country...

I'd most likely have only like $1.50, but still, that's a lot of pennies!

It seems like EVERYTHING poses a threat to my weak American system, and getting sick is just an unfortunate aspect of living here.   First, there's the tap water...or should I say river water.  Basically our water comes straight from the river, pumped into a reservoir (so it can get enough pressure to be distributed to the town), and then directed straight to our house.  There is no treatment, filtration, or anything that could be related to cleaning involved in processing our water.   To top it all off, whenever there's a strong rain the water gets extraordinarily muddy. Did I mention that we live in the RAINforest?

I've literally had worms, covered in mud, come out of my faucet.  I wish I was joking.

So, basically, the water is a cesspool of nastiness...to put it lightly.
Then there's the food.  If you don't soak all fruit and vegetables in an anti-bacterial solution (or plunge them in hot boiling water), you're in for a nasty case of amoebas or other parasites that want to make friends with you. So I end up cooking all my veggies, and rarely eat fresh fruit.  I may have a case of the lazies, but soaking fruit that ends up tasting like chemicals gets a little old.

Lastly, there's the inevitable parasite or food poisoning that comes from eating in a restaurant.  Some places are super careful and you're almost never going to have a problem. But, then there's that chinese place down the street that serves up some questionable shrimp-fried-rice, and BAM! you're holed up in your bedroom for a minimum of 24 hours with a nasty case of dysentery.  
Thank God my dear husband was willing and able to hang out with our toddler all day yesterday because the bed was my best friend from morning til night!

I thank God that he gave me parasites to deal with instead of poisonous creepy crawlies in my house all the time.  I'd much rather have bugs that I can't see than ones that I can.  The occasional tarantula is about all I can handle!

driver's license drama

Today we begin the process of getting our Ecuadorian driver's licenses.  We've had a car for about 3 months now, so I imagine it's a good idea to have a valid license, but we've managed to get by without one thus far.... so I haven't been in any major rush to do it.  Supposedly you're allowed to drive on a valid American license indefinitely, which is what we've been doing, but Andy's worried that if we got into an accident or something we'd be more likely to get into major trouble. Here accidents are a BIG deal.  Tiny fender bender? Jail time.  Most of the time if people have an accident, they are quick to resolve it without anyone calling the police because if the cops get involved, you're going directly to jail or you're paying a huge bribe.  Needless to say, if gringos (white, non-ecuadorians) got in an accident with no Ecuadorian license, it would cost us a fortune.   Thus, it's license time.

It seems like this country makes electricity or something from paper because it's the life-blood of the government.  They want papers and copies of every document you could possibly imagine.  The more papers and stamps and seals you have, the more official it is.  We Americans have a saying about the Ecuadorian way of doing things... "Solo un papel mas!"  "Just one more paper!"
But, hopefully we have all our papers in order because we'll take them to the transit authority today, and they will send the papers to Quito (6 hrs away), where they'll take about 3 weeks to determine if we need more copies, etc. before we can take the written driving test.  If anything is lacking from our mountain of documents it will take another three weeks to get it approved, and so on.  The downside of this process is that every individual working for the government has a different idea of what documents you actually need because the laws change so frequently here. To top it all off, this can change based on whether or not they're having a bad day, or if they simply don't like you. So, you can imagine this could be a very long process.

Basically, pray for us! We're going to need it...