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El paro means strike or stoppage, and it comes from the verb parar, to stop. It began on Thursday October 3rd, the day after President Lenin Moreno announced a “paquetazo” that stopped gasoline subsidies, cut government workers’ vacation in half & cut their pay as well. The paquetazo was created to comply with the International… Read more

Tomu and Jade had an end of the year celebration at the Pumapungo Museum. Jade was overjoyed to wear the white dress they required, and was bummed that we only rented it. We found out in July that their school was closing because of a lack of funding from the Ministry of Education, so we… Read more

I guess part of the expat life is making new friends, saying goodbye to them, and then making new friends again. Of course our Cuencano friends are still here, luckily! 🙂 June was a rough month for us, as first our Alaskan buddies moved back home on June 10th, and then our friends Steph &… Read more

It’s our one year anniversary in Cuenca and I wake up in the hospital. Quite different than our planned celebratory dinner as a family because as we all know…shit happens. There was no regular path to this moment, instead a series of accidents and bad luck. The good news is the surgery is behind me… Read more

In English: summer camps.  Tomu and Jade had July & August off from school, and after about one week, we were ready for them to go back to school! 🙂 So we looked into some summer camps to get them out of the house for some time each day. The first one was on a… Read more

We went on a quick 5 day trip to Quito & Mindo, which is a 2 hour bus ride west of Quito. We opted to fly to Quito rather than do the 8-10 hour bus ride. Riki had visited Quito in 2007, but the kids and I hadn’t been yet. We figured it was worth… Read more