Front page news

This is rather old news but kind of interesting. For those of you who read Spanish, I've included scans of the national paper El Comercio from July 20, 2005.

A co-worker had asked if I would agree to being interviewed for a piece his cousin was doing for one of the national papers. The main theme is why foreigners come and stay in Ecuador.

What had not been expected was to see my face on the front page above the fold. The headline reads, "More foreigners make the country their second home."

The section where the story ran is called "Daily Life" and the heading of the article says, "Business and tourism are the magnets".

The tendency is that even though immigration doesn't count statistics from resident foreigners, in the previous five years the number of people entering the country is growing.

Here is the translation of what they wrote for me.

The Canadian Barry Hamm (43 years) on the other hand, arrived in Ecuador in 1995 to visit some friends. "Really, I fell in love with the country, I liked the people, the views, here there is everything, desert, land and ocean." After this first view, he didn't give it another thought and has been living in Quito a little more than six years.

His career as a missionary brought him to work with HCJB Radio as Director of Information Systems. Here he married an Ecuadorian and today they have a baby 14 months old. His first visa was a missionary visa, renewable every two years and currently he says that he has a spousal visa. "I'll be here until God takes us to another home," he adds with enthusiasm.

Our photos on-line

After thinking that people could see our photo albums, a friend asked me if we had more photos. I then realized that we hadn't put up a link in the blog for our photos. So, here it is.

Now don't go expecting a vast quantity of photos, but slowly we are putting some up so you can see what's up.

Enjoy.

We have a new home

This is our new place...from the outside. We love it as it is considerably larger than the other apartment we had and has a nice yard for the boys to play in. Hardwood floors are a lot easier to keep clean than carpet, especially in the dining room.

We have a nice fireplace in the living room and even a laundry room. Although we are still in the process of putting up shelves and hanging pictures, it feels like home. Granted, it isn't as warm as where we were, but it isn't cold either.

Now, we are even closer to the compound and more importantly, we don't need to cross America Avenue which was quite interesting at times.

Global IT Meetings

Over the past couple of days we (Information Technology staff) have been meeting virtually via a phone conference to review what we have been able to accomplish over the past year and plan out we need to do and like to do over the coming year.

We were 27 people calling in from 8 locations around the world in 7 timezones. Early on the west coast of the U.S. to very late in Singapore. Logistically, everything went quite smoothly, with basically no hiccups in the technology that we used make the meeting happen.

It was good to be able to pray with and for each other and get to see faces (pictures, really) of people whom we only had names for.

The big problem is to figure out now how to do the projects that we have on our list.

It's all in how you interpret it

Kids have their own view of things. We were at the food court a while back grabbing a quick bite to eat when one of Joshua's fries fell onto the floor. Being a person who likes things tidy, Joshua got down from his chair to pick up the fry. Marlene told him to leave it, that there were people who came to clean up the table and floor.

Joshua walked a little bit from the table and began saying something quite loudly. I wasn't really paying too much attention as he is now into talking, a lot. He kept wandering back and forth saying something.

All of a sudden, I caught what he was saying and began to laugh. Joshua was wandering back and forth saying, "Dirty, dirty." He wanted someone to come clean up the fry that he had dropped!

Joshua turns 3!

April 19, Joshua turned three years old. We threw a small party for him and he thoroughly enjoyed it, even singing, "Happy birthday to me."

If you want to see some pictures of the event, jump over to the web album. (Click here.)

Joel as Mr. Cool

For his birthday Joshua received a gift from Personnel. He could chose from a few things that they had in the office. He chose the sunglasses.

Somewheee between the Personnel office and my office, Joel got hold of the sunglasses. He enjoyed wearing them, exactly why I'm not sure.

Although Joshua liked wearing my old frames. It might have had something to do with, what daddy does, he wanted to do as well.

I suspect Joel is very similar.