5 Uno

By the middle of Day 2, I seriously needed a break from the intensity that was Arts and Crafts. Someone was headed into town and I asked to tag along.

A few salient facts missing from the brochure for this particular errand:

First, we ride in the back of an open fruit truck.  Ecuadorians stand up in the back and lean against the iron bar surrounding the bed of the truck when they ride in the truck.  Ecuadorians also have a much lower center of gravity that isn't susceptible to the first deep pothole. Furthermore, Ecuadorians have bit more resistance to a colossal sunburn. My fellow passengers must have thought I was massively carsick lying flat on the bed of the truck when I was just trying to stay on the right side of the wheel wells and in the shadow of my fellow passengers.

Second, the "store run" ended up including an errand to deliver some medicine to a patient who had come in the day before. Only problem, we didn't know where she lived. I mean, it's not like you can just google map your way to the "1st street past the house with four windows on the side."  So our strategy seemed to be to offer rides to enough people that someone would eventually know her. And by "offer rides", I mean - don't push anyone off the flatbed when they jump on it, uninvited. There was no discussion, no introductions, just two new women or three new men on the back of the truck whenever you seemed to be headed the same direction as they needed.  At one point, the flat bed census includes 7 folks from the village, my fellow missionary (who spoke fluent Spanish and therefore looked like he might belong there) and an increasingly sunburned tall Irish girl trying to remember the last time she rode somewhere without her seat belt on.  Eventually, a 65 yr old wrinkled little woman told us where the patient lived and stayed on the truck to direct us there - with a few passenger departures and arrivals along the way.  Having completed our mission, we gave our direction-giver a ride home and offered to buy her a drink.  Coca-cola Senora?  "Cerveza!" She replied. And here I was afraid I wasn't fitting in. 

The last fact someone forgot to mention was that the driver on our errands only had one leg.  (I couldn't help wondering if he lost his leg in a car accident?). My fellow missionary later said "we call him Uno".  Wait - does HE know we call him Uno?????     And while I've been known to embellish before, I have hand on the Bible when I tell you.....the truck is a stick shift. Go ahead, you do the math on that one.  I think one of his crutches was somehow involved, but decided the less I knew about this operation, the better.  I eventually started getting comfortable with his driving, but then I saw him send a text in between gear shifts and decided it was time to just cover my eyes and work on the prayer for the evening's reflection. 

I never left Arts and Crafts again.