ever wonder where all the sacajawea coins went?

life can be boring. the novelty and innocence of this place wears down and it just becomes what it is. a shithole. no one should have to live like this, but they do. so where does that leave me? i'm not going to change this country. i might make a difference in the lives of one or two people, but i'm not going to start a radical revolution. as i get more and more comfortable here, it can get boring from day to day, just going through the motions, so i try to look for the little things that separate this from my life in the states. last week i was walking through ajs and a boy named jefferson was frantically emptying water from the barrel in front of his house to another on the side of his house. his family had just paid to get clean drinking water and their barrel was leaking. a grabbed a bucket and started helping him, not even thinking twice about it. but after we finished it hit me: there's no way i'd ever have done, let alone seen, something like this in the states. i have running water in the states, i don't have to worry about getting a parasite from the water or wondering if i'll be thirsty because i can't afford to buy clean water. yesterday i took a group from santa clara university up to cinco de junio and 28 de agosto, and as always it shocks them. what gets me is that it still shocks me as well. driving down a dusty dirt road, it's like a photo out of a national geographic. cane housing, trash (trash everywhere you look), cows, terrible stench. it's the third world at its best. while the group worked with frank and marie at manos abiertas, i walked around with aracely, just talking to people and trying to build community relations for rostro de cristo in that neighborhood. yesterday we walked to a part of 28 that i had never been to before. we turned a corner and stumbled upon another trash site at 28, and the scene was surreal. in the midst of a few scattered cane houses, were an old woman, man and a little girl sorting through the trash. aracely with all her personality marched right up to them and started talking. "are you looking for trash to sell," she asked. "no," the woman replied. "i'm trying to clean up before the winter months hit and this is all water." there it was. hope in a place i had sworn off as hopeless. as we talked, we learned about the 66-year-old woman named elpidia and her life. there were periods of time during the conversation where i just stared off in the distance, taking in all that was around me. how do i put into words the scene i was in? am i really here? how did i end up in ecuador, standing in the middle of a field of trash talking to an old woman? and then it hit me. i'm going to learn more in a year in ecuador than i did in four years of college about what it means to be a journalist. if nothing else, i'm going to learn to talk and to listen to complete strangers this year. listen to them tell their stories of survival, struggle and life. after we left this area, we walked to another vast, open area in 28 and ended up talking to a man named roberto, who like his wife, was quicha. as the three of us sat in this field, conversing, teaching each other languages (quicha for me, english for roberto), it again hit me. man this is cool. i'm sitting in a field with a quicha man, with a mountain of dirt on one side of me, and a field of trash on the other, talking about what ever comes to mind. this is life. am i bored? yeah at times, but that is what poverty is. poverty isn't a line drawn in the sand, where this amount of money makes you poor and this amount doesn't. poverty is a lack of options, a lack of opportunity. so far, i'm very grateful for my options.