A Deed and an Opportunity for Someone

We left the Quito to get out of the city and go to the small town of Baños, Ecuador. It's actually a pretty cool town. After eating some breakfast we talked to the owner of the little cafe who told us that the closest thing they had to an orphanage was a city-run daycare for low income mothers. We weren't really excited about the prospects, but it seemed like an open door, so we tried to go through it. Unfortunately, several taxi drivers didn't know where the place was.

 

So, we thought about how in our conversation with the cafe owner had told us that she had given jobs to several moms with young children to help them out. We spent some time talking to the moms and found out a few of their needs. We were able to buy 100 diapers for each of the babies and some soccer balls for the older kids. It was actually pretty amazing but when we asked the moms what they wanted for their non-infant kids and they all said pretty emphatically that they wanted vitamins. They said that their kids were often sick because they couldn't get the nutrition they needed, so we were able to buy each of the kids a bottle of vitamins. I know that these aren't huge life-changing gifts, but they seemed to really make a difference to these women who were scraping by.

 

I think the most important thing was that we were able to share not only what we were doing, but why we do it.

 

Medical Need

I know that this is a long shot, but one of the boys who is 12 has a tumor and has had 8 surgeries so far requires catheters (1 every 3 days) and colostomy bags. These things are very expensive in Ecuador, so she has done her best to get them from the US. Her cost has been about $1000 per year (in a country where a GOOD middle class salary is $6000 per year.). We've taken a picture of the type of catheter he needs. If anyone knows anyone in the medical field that could get some of these donated, it would be awesome. To this point his mom has been trying to clean and sterilize them to keep the cost down as low as it is, but that has been causing kidney and bladder infections. Any help would be great.