The first week of the month I try to pay all our house-hold bills. Which here in Ecuador means that you have to go to all the various utilities and stand in super long lines to wait your turn to pay in cash. No such thing as putting a check in the mail. So that is what you would have found me doing today. Thankfully there is a paying service company where we can stand in one line and pay most of our bills at once . . . they do charge a small fee for this service (usually around 30 cents per bill), but I think for this service alone, I'd be happy to pay a large fee! There's nothing worse than standing in a long line here - especially when often it's finally your turn at the window and they close it for lunch or some other silly excuse - the favorite one seems to be "no hay sistema" - the computer system is down!
My other errand included a stop at the local pharmacy. As part of our ministry with the elderly residents at the Hogar Betania (Bethany Home) on Sundays, we try to help them with some of their needs for medicines. Last Sunday when we were there, I asked if they had a list of medicines that they needed. Jaime, the care-taker there, pulled a list out of his pocket! I told him I'd try to have the supplies to bring back with us this Sunday.
So yesterday I stopped at the pharmacy to drop off the list which included everything from Tylenol to gauzes to stomach medicines to antibiotics to other things that I can't even pronounce let alone know what it is. The unique thing about this is that I didn't need a prescription to purchase all this stuff. Pharmacies here are a whole lot different than the ones the in US - usually you can walk in and buy just about anything you want without a prescription. I have heard that you need a prescription to get meds like Valium - but thankfully things have never gotten so bad where I felt like I needed Valium! Smiles!
Anyways, I walked out of the Pharmacy with a box full of meds which we will be taking out to the Hogar Betania on Sunday. Pray for us as we are without our usual song-leader who is in the US at the moment. None of us (Santi, me, Lois and Roger) are what we would call "musically talented" - we tried to find someone to come and help us with music this week but everyone had other obligations! So it's just us and the residents! Should make for an interesting choir this week!
By the way, we are able to purchase medicines for the residents through donations that are given to us specifically for this need. If you are interested in helping with this need, let us know - we can give you the information needed to send your donation to Extreme Response International.
Below are a couple of photos from a few weeks ago at the Hogar! Pray for us this week!
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