Aileen Friedman

31st December 2015
New Year’s Eve, we trust and pray that you and yours were safe and had a wonderful evening celebrating and seeing in the New Year.
We celebrated in true Ecuadorian style but first we were crazy busy throughout the day preparing for a large number of guests, as busy as we were it was all done with high spirits and a lot of fun. Before all this insanity ensued, a lovely visitor showed up in the Bougainvillea tree outside our room; he is the biggest Iguana we have seen at the Oceanic.

The hired a singer for the evening, and he sang very well – he did a couple of Sinatra numbers (in Spanish) that awarded him a great applause; old blue eye’s songs never fail regardless of the language country or creed.

Shortly before midnight everyone strolled outside to the beach with the lanterns given to us by our lovely hosts, we lit them and watched as they flew up into the clear evening skies. This experience was a first for me, and Ali and befittingly our lantern was the first to go up – yay! During the evening, we were all given a piece of paper to write anything we wish for on it, and it would go up with the lantern. Neither Ali nor I did this as we have Jesus to take care of all our wishes, sadly not many understood this significance.

As midnight approach, Junior (the owner of Oceanic) lit the dummies made of paper mache and threw crackers into the burning pile of paper bodies; a strange thing to do but it is their tradition. Again if you wrote something on a piece of paper that you wished to get rid of in your life, you could throw this piece of paper into the paper dummies. Neither Ali nor I did this either – Jesus takes cares of all our worries and yet again not many understood this great faith.

It was a fun evening and one that we will remember fondly.

Next year I will be reporting our evening from Canada but in the meantime we pray you will all have a safe and blessed 2016.
As always there are loads more photos on our Facebook page; https://www.facebook.com/AliandAileenMissions/