Date: 3rd november 2024
Hello dear reader,
7 years ago my mom realized that we had free space at home, because one of my siblings left for a year.
So when my mom was asked by a friend to take in a hockey player who is looking for a place to live in Fribourg she readily accepted.
Since then, we took some people every year and when my siblings left we took some more.
This year we took an Erasmus student from Ecuador. He was great.
We played soccer together every week. He invited us to Ecuador.
I went. Alone. I landed in Quito with his very generous family. They took me everywhere (almost).
It's mental. Quito, the capital, is surrounded by volcanoes and is on an altitude of 2850 meters or 9350 feet.
The family that surrounded me is religious and does not hold back on giving and good deeds.
For them giving is a gift. It's not a task or burden like for so many of us.
They recognize how fulfilled and rich giving can make one be even though rationally that doesn't make any sense.
Someday I talked to his mom, Katia.
She and her siblings are really well off compared to the rest of the country. So I asked her why?
Katia told me she was raised a full 24h bus ride away in Loja in the south of the country.
She loved home. Her parents worked a lot. Her dad was a farmer and her mom found ways to sell the stuff.
She's a businesswomen and so is her daughter.
But anyway. Her mom knew that there was no bright future in the region so she obliged her
7 children to go study at university in the capital of the country (Quito).
It didn't come easy to leave home to go to a city that far away, but they did it.
Katia studied chemistry and became a teacher soon after.
She started looking for other opportunities once she realized teaching didn't pay very well.
So she experimented with chemicals for the giant rose industry in Ecuador. She went by the farmers and gave them free samples.
Immediately after her income from this side hustle surpassed her teaching salary she quit teaching.
Today she has around 50 products that she sells to farmers and the oil production industry.
History does not repeat, but it does rhyme: What do her and her siblings kids do now? Most of the 3rd generation was sent by their parents to go study in Barcelona because living conditions were better there.