Tidbits...

• Sorry for the lack of info this week. I have had computer troubles and have been trying to solve them. Due to some unknown reasons, I lost all of my pictures on my laptop and I cannot seem to dig them out. Luckily I had backed up everything just after we arrived here in Shell, so I won't be losing everything, just about 5-6 weeks worth.
• My pilots licensing drama continues. We have once again turned everything in to the DAC and we may know something in the near future. Hopefully some time next week we will know if they will give me a license or not. Hurry up and wait!
• Tommorow we (MAF) have a guest from Holland coming to visit us for 3 weeks. He just graduated from high school and is thinking about being a missionary pilot. So it will be my job to show him around and teach him everything I can for the next few weeks. It should be fun. We are having him over for dinner tommorow night.
• For those of you that don't know, the FIFA World Cup of Soccer is happening right now in Germany. It happens every 4 years and is probably bigger and carries more prestige than the Olympics. Ecuador is doing very well at this point having won their first 2 games. Even in the sleepy little town of Shell, Ecuador, the passion and excitment is fun to see over a bunch of soccer (fútbol) games. By the way, the Americans aren't doing too good. I think they play again tommorow after having lost their first game to the Czech Republic 0-3.
• This morning at about 5 as Becca and I were sitting around drinking our coffee and talking we began to hear a really funny/wierd chant. What we thought was a tribal procession turned out to just be the new army recruits running through town doing just what our new army recruits do. It was pretty funny to hear it in Spanish, albeit a little un-nerving at first until we realized what it was.
• We have also been working on our drivers licenses this week. In order to do that here you talk to the chief of police. The particular guy here that we talked to earlier this week is very nice, and since we have arrived here about 6 weeks ago the rules and regulations for obtaining a drivers license have already changed. Becca and I got all that we needed the other day except for one requirement. It basically states that as foreigners we have to have our Colorado licenses verified and certified by Colorado and then by the US Consulate here in Ecuador and show it to the government of Ecuador and they will validate it (does that make sense?). I explained to the police chief how our American government is set up, and how the 50 states are all sovereign and independent from the national government and how we cannot ask the national government (in this case the US Consulate) to verify something that a state government has done. They don't have the power or interest in doing that. So, long story short, the ploice chief told us to come back in a week and he would try to have something worked out for us. He is a very nice guy and really trying to follow the Ecuadorian law and fix the ones that don't work. We definetly got the inmpression that he is on our side and want to help us. I guess we will see next week.