It's getting late and I am tired and thus my creative juices aren't flowing as freely as they do, say when I first wake up and have just finished my second cup of coffee. However, I committed to this 31 days of writing thing, and in some ways I think I've become a bit of a better writer because of it already (or maybe at least a more consistent writer), so I am not going to quit now. With that being said, I don't really have anything all that in-depth to share tonight....no ponderings about my Christian faith, no worries or concerns about my day. So instead....tonight I bring you...tales from my life of clumsiness (or at least the hilarity that ensued from me being me in Oñakapak this week)!
So every week, we (me and my bosses and usually at least one friend) travel from Cuenca to Saraguro in order to help run a weekly children's program that my teammates and I started over a year ago in one of the local villages. This week my boss had other meetings to attend to, so me, his wife our Cuenca neighbor and my friend from Saraguro travelled by bus over the mountains down to the village. After the program ended, we had to leave pretty quickly in order to catch a van back to central Saraguro, in time to buy tickets for our bus back to Cuenca (because apparently you can't buy them any earlier than an hour before whatever bus you want leaves).
Well as we are walking to the "van stop", we see the van pull up and it's quite obvious that this driver is in quite a bit of a hurry. So being the person that I am, I run over to the bus to get in, in order to notify the driver that there were three of us. Of course, as I am trying to get into the van, I noticed that the sliding door was only half open and considering that I am not a skinny girl, I knew I needed to open it a bit more. Unfortunately, when I put my hand on the door, something happened where instead of pushing the door, I pulled it and the whole thing came right off the hinges!
I literally stood there frozen for one minute, half in the van and half out, with one hand on each side of the door frame...and for a brief second I thought to myself, "Maybe nobody noticed!". Of course, they did, and I discovered that pretty quickly when out of the corner of my eye I could see the horrified look of the van drivers face.... not to mention the cackling laughter of my friends traveling with me that I could hear!
Pretty quickly after that I forced myself into the van and into a seat, praying to God that the bus driver could fix the door, all the while wondering to myself, "How much does a new van door cost?!". Thankfully the driver was able to get the door back on it's hinges, and I think as he drove us back to Central Saraguro I even saw him crack a smile over my red face and the laughter of those all around me!
I am sure this story is probably funnier to those of us who were there and I was told over and over again that my face made the story (if only I could carry a mirror around to see these faces that I apparently make all the time), but if you could have been there you would have laughed! The thing is, this is totally normal for me! I am the queen of doing stupid things! Maybe it's God's way of keeping me humble...or maybe it's just my subconscious way of breaking the ice, when it needs to be! Who knows! All I know, is I have probably experienced more embarrassing moments in the past two years than anyone else on this team, but I also probably have the most funniest stories, so I'll take it! If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?!?!
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