Update time

Well, I figured it was about time that I added an update so that the first thing you saw on my blog wouldnt be the title of my last entry about hating ants :)
Overall things have been going pretty well here. Things have been difficult lately because I have really wanted to be with family-my great aunt Lorraine passed away this past monday and I really wish I could be there for my family and to mourne her death with others who loved her so deeply. Please keep the family in your prayers- especially my great uncle Ed and my grandma.
This past week was a big week at work because at the clinic Tracy and I were asked to do a presentation on HIV for kids at the school right next to the clinic. So we worked hard all week to put together an interesting and interactive presentation on HIV and living healthy lives. The day of our presentation was thursday and we were super excited because we put together this really sweet game where we had a bunch o f cards with myths and facts on them-the kids had to decide as a group whether something was a myth or a fact and then put the card under the correct area on the board. The other super cool thing we put together was a demonstratin of the progression of HIV in the body... we had sweet props to stick onto a person that represented white blood cells, bacteria and HIV. When we practiced the presentation for the director of the school she said we should be teachers because it was really creative (but we couldnt take all the credit for that because we got the ideas for the activities from resources that our incountry director Megan had-Gracias Megan!)
So the big day came and we even got candies for the kids that helped during the presentation. We found out thursday morning taht we were going to do 2 presentations instead of one which we were just fine with. The difficult part came when we saw the age of the kids that entered the room for this added presentation. They were kids in 2nd-4th grade and we had planned our presentation for kids in7-10th grade. Before starting the presentation tracy and i cut some stuff out that just wouldnt be undersdtood by this group... and after starting we had new difficulties added to the list... first, all of the teachers of these kids left the room...yikes! 40 kids without the people they see as authority figures! Then groups of kids had to leave to go present their projects for the values fair that was going on. Well, when this group got up and left so did other kids and then the mass chaos started. kids were running in and out of the room talking and a whole lot of chaos filled the room. Tracy and I ended the presentation early with the group and took a breather before the next one came
We were SUPER DUPER grateful to see that the next group was actually the correct age group and things went much better the second time around.
Heres the other funny part of this whole ordeal. So there are three ways HIV can be transmitted. By blood, by sexual relations, and from mother to child. Well the school director told us during our practice that we couldnt say sexual relations and that instead we needed to say ¨lack of chastity¨tracy and I tried to explain our point that the kids at this age would be able to hear those words an that the new wording may lead to some confusting .... but our words didnt convince her. So just as we had predicted, during the presentation someone raises their hand and asks... well what is chastity? Tracy and i took a quick second to laugh inside ... a bit of a ¨see we told you¨. Luckily the teacher had told us that if necesary we could say HIV can be transmitted by ¨being¨with someone ... so we pulled out this new wording and after repeating it about 4 times and moving our fingers to emphasis the quotations around ¨being¨I think the kid understood that lack of chastity or being with someone is related to sexual relations....oh boy.
So after a draining experience with the presentations we went home and just said.... ¨welcome to Ecuador¨.
Overall it was super awesome though and we are excited to do other presentations... we just learned that we will have to adapt