Fall clean up

As the Northern Hemisphere wraps up spring and heads into summer, we here in Ecuador are doing our fall clean up. The river swelled and brought tons of debris down to the ocean, which then churned it up and spat it out all along the coast. Look back a couple of posts to the "we thought we walked into a war zone" and you'll see what I mean. We knew from experience the province we live in Manabi would send trucks and crews to clean up, it was just a matter of when, well it was last week. We were at our friends house on Sunday, celebrating Mike's birthday and saw first hand what a great job the clean up crews did.

Just a few piles remain, but the over all effort was amazing, it was almost impossible to get from the shore to our friends house the other day, beach goers would have had nowhere to sit...here's one just a couple days before the clean up.

So much treasure, but unsightly and pretty dangerous. Now it's all cleaned up, good job Manabi! 

Meanwhile down at our house, the rock mover came in and started moving rocks around. It started on the other side of the White  house, reinforcing the sea wall, then came to our beach and took the rocks from the sand infront and added them to the the sea wall.

Some men had been working in the lot next door, burning the brush and trash, pretty sure they were clearing it out to make boat parking easy if high tide should threaten. They got the rock mover to move the big yellow bouy and after all the rocks were unearthed, they had the sand filled in and made flat. So much parking now! 

They worked til sunset and then the earthmover came back a second day, and moved some more rocks around, not as many spectators on day two, but these little guys came to see the commotion...we lovingly call them the "urchins".

I think the older boys name is Daniel, but I can't hardly understand them, not only their spanish, but they speak another language I don't speak, "Children". They show up in the morning fully dressed, go about their adventure, and by the end of the day they've stripped down to saggy undies and are playing in the ocean. They scramble up the rocks, climb over boats, and as you can see on our fence. I'm not sure who they belong to, but we've seen a couple of the fishermen scold them or tell them to quit bugging us, it takes a village...I love the life they are living, foot loose and fancy free, no Nintendo, or Play station, just sun and fresh air adventures!

Our adventure continues too, so stay tuned!!