January 27, 2007 by will.krzy.

I just finished with my course here in Quito that was put on by Wheaton Graduate school. It was called principles of development and was taught by Dr. Steven H… who is currently a missionary doctor in rural Bolivia. The course was attended by about 45 people involved with HCJB’s Community Development program and two christian Ecuadorian government development workers. It was extremely valuable material and I’m very glad for taking the course. It was taught in Spanish but there was an English translator. I did join spanish speaking discussion groups which was about 30% of our time so I did have some practice speaking and learned some new vocabulary relating to development.
The course was based on the book “Walking with the poor,” by Bryant Myers which called for a more holistic approach to development. It criticized the common approach to development as a means to solve the poor’s lack of material possessions and education. It promoted an approach that sought to understand the human being as multi-dimensional person, attempting to make people realize that the spiritual aspect of humans can’t be ignored.

It had many other much finer points that are worth mentioning. He calls for a redeeming of relationships as a kingdom response to the powerlessness of the poor. A redeeming of our relationship with the poor, a redemption of the poor’s relationship with God, with themselves, with their community (direct community, and authoritative community - meaning hierarchy of power and the rich). This biblical model of justice really struck me as very important. It makes me seriously question our countries view of justice. But anyway… there is a lot more to the book.

The Harrison family was kind enough to let me use the internet connection here at their house. I took some pictures of their house to show what a typical quito house looks like. It is very typical because it reminded me of many of the houses that I lived in while I was here.

So long for now. I hope to do another update soon. Love you all.

Will

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January 19, 2007 by will.krzy.

Hello every one. I recently returned from a trip to the Quechian village of Lirio San Glorizado in the Chimborazo district. Chimborazo is the highest mountain in Ecuador at something like 6,300 meters or so. The village was at about 3,400 meters (aprox. 11,500 ft - nearly the peak of mt. taylor). We were there to do some hygiene observations and survey some of the land. It was a wonderful experience, the people were very loving, accepting, and very generous. I fell in love with the terrain and being with the people in it. It is very interesting watching people interact with the landscape. You wouldn’t think of it but gringo’s and ecuadorians from the city look very different walking through the hills and the tall grass than the quechians do. Hopefully some of the images capture that. It was a incredible experience, eating qui (guinea pig), working with fantastic people (co-workers and the people of the village), and sleeping on the floor in -10 C.

I’m reading a book right now for a class I’ll be taking through Wheaton College here in Quito called “Walking with he poor.” Its very interesting. It has some neat insight to how to live and work among the poor as a development worker. I’m posting a few pictures… I won’t post to many since it’ll probably slow down your browser. You can click on one of them and it’ll take you to my flickr account and you can view my other images. Some of the images might bleed of the page, just wanted you to get the full panoramic scene.

I’m having a tough time with my spanish. I have forgotten pretty much everything I learned during my wonderful summer studies at UNM. That happened to be the same summer that I met Sarah.

Using the internet has turned into a hassle. I have grown accustomed to highspeed internet, and am usually able to accomplish alot in a short time, but here its taken me a while to do everything I wanted to do. I told gustavo, my host parent, that I would be off close to an hour ago, and I still haven’t been able to finish all my image loading and email replies. I might have to re-evaluate my priorities. Anyhow, hope you visit my flickr page, and enjoy the images. Its flickr.com, or you can just click on an image.

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January 12, 2007 by will.krzy.

I arrived in ecuador the night before last. I was pretty bummed having to leave Sarah behind me, but as soon as the plane took me over quito, giving me a long panoramic look of the city scape at night, an excitement came over me that was to great to let me be down. Everything I experience gives me that excitement. I guess most new places are like that, especially returning to a childhood home.

I live with the estrella family, the father is a professor, the mother a non-practicing nurse, and the son diego is studing political science at Universidad San Fransisco, same university his father teaches at. The family is extremely sociable and used to teach spanish at a language school, perfect conditions for learning spanish and building friendships. The apartment I live in is absolutely beautiful. I was not expecting such nice living conditions. Tonight is diego’s birthday so we are having a fiesta! I went to his soccer game last night, and all I wanted to do was play! They have a foriegn exchange student from North Carolina living with them for the semester as well. He is a timid math student, and very nice.

Work is going to be exciting. They are very open to alot of things. I think it fits that I enjoy exploring everything. Right now I’m going to learn how to use some new survey equipment that they just got and hopefully teach the older engineers who don’t quite have the time to learn it all. Its a computerized system that stores all the cordinates and imputs them into CAD. I’m a little nervous, but I usually catch onto things like that fairly quickly, plus they are very willing to teach me the basics of surveying.

I’m also starting to work on some presentations, mostly power point, but if we decide to get ambitious, we’ll do a flash presentation (internet animation) and hopefully a video. I think there’ll be some really neat oportunities to create beautiful presentations that really express the beauty of the land and the people HCJB Community Development gets to work with.

Thats all for now. Oh yeah… I tried uploading images… I’ll have to see how this works out.

You can also subscribe to this blog to recieve an e-mail when I make an update. Hit the subscribe botton at the top.

God bless,

Will Krzymowski

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January 9, 2007 by will.krzy.

I’m leaving to go to Ecuador tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. I took my fiancée, Sarah Boyd, to the airport this morning as she is spending the semester in Cairo. I’m having second thoughts whether spending 4 months apart was the best idea. Nonetheless I’m very excited for what the Lord has in store for us in the coming months.

I will be uploading images to my flickr account which is open to the public and can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/wilbo/. I enjoy photography, experimenting with it from time to time, so if you see something that doesn’t make any sense, try and enjoy the abstractness of it. I upload all my images to this site, so there will be stuff there other than my Ecuador trip.

This may function like a blog, possibly a newsletter, maybe just a space to express my thoughts in writing. Who knows. In general its for others. Thanks for visiting.

Will

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