Actually, he said it in Spanish ("No me hables en inglés!") with a stomp of his three-and-a-half-year-old foot. While in Australia, we had spoken only Spanish to our son, because if we stayed there, he would learn English quickly, in school and with friends. We didn't want him to grow up not knowing Spanish.
But now it was the other way around. Here in Ecuador he was surrounded by Spanish, and (as we thought then, anyway) he'd go to school in Spanish. When I talked to him in English, he was really upset. (Other people could, but not me!)
Meanwhile, we were trying to adapt to being back in Quito. We had a piece of land here, so we sold half of it, and started building a house. It was hard for Germán to find a job until the Wycliffe mission here hired him to keep their vehicles in good shape (he was a trained mechanic) and also work in public relations. But it was only part-time. So here we were, a little disoriented, with a little boy who wouldn't let me teach him English! (Though we did find a good church.)
At one point Germán said to me, "Let's go back to Australia". Back then, if one returned within three years, there was no need of getting a new visa. You may be thinking, "But didn't God call them back to Ecuador?" Yes, He did. So this idea wasn't very smart, was it? But I figured I'd put out a "fleece". (Note that I have used "fleeces" on several occasions, but do so with utmost care and not flippantly; the idea is simply to ask for confirmation, like Gideon did in the Bible.)
So I decided I'd write to a number of friends in Australia, none of whom had wanted us to leave. I figured they'd surely answer right away, saying "Please do come back!" So I asked God to take the situation in hand: if our friends answered, we'd go back. This seemed so much more likely (which was why I chose it - since a "no" from God would be rather dramatic and obvious, going as it would against our logic). If they didn't, we'd know we should stay in Ecuador.
We waited...and waited...and waited. NO ONE wrote back! Finally, after a really long time, one friend wrote and said, "I don't know why you want to come back here" and told us about prices going way up and other problems in the country. We really shouldn't have even considered going back, but God knew we were struggling and searching, and with His abundant grace went against all probabilities and set us straight. (Sometimes I wonder if our friends even got the letters; maybe they got lost in the mail...on purpose!)
That's not to say everything was great from then on! (Our major problems were still ahead.) We dealt with "little" problems...like when one Sunday we returned from church and saw our typewriter in the front yard! In the house things were scattered all over the place. We don't know what the thief was looking for, because he didn't steal anything really valuable. He grabbed some of my sister's cheap jewelry, but not her pearls. Do you know what else he took? My Australian driver's license! He didn't even take the money we had. What good an Australian driver's license would do him here in Quito was beyond us!
Another "small" problem was when Dan disappeared! He loved to stand on our front wall and say hello to everyone who went by. When he was out there, I always kept an eye on him, but somehow he seemed to vanish into thin air. I was SOOO scared. He was such a beautiful little boy, and there have been so many cases of children being kidnapped. I stayed at the house while Germán went out to canvass the neighborhood. I couldn't concentrate on finishing supper; the chicken just lay cold in the pan. The prospect of anything happening to our precious little one was one of the worst things a parent can imagine. Finally Germán came back...with Dan in tow! Some of our teenage neighbors had decided to take him home with them, and hadn't bothered to inform us!
We put Dan into a little school a few blocks away when he was four years old.. He was technically in pre-kinder, but was in with all the kindergarteners. He ended up being quite a ringleader! When the school year finished, the teacher said that since Dan had done so well, if we left him in their school, he could go straight to first grade. If we put him elsewhere, he'd have to wait until he was six. So, since he was ahead, we put him in the Alliance Academy (the American school here where my siblings and I studied) to do kindergarten again, but in English. By the end of the year he was fluent.
So we were back in Quito, finally living in our almost-finished house, with me pregnant (I told you about that in one of the earliest posts - go back and check it out) and we asked ourselves...What next?
One option was to go to a seminary in the States, where one can study in Spanish. So I put out another "fleece", and asked that if we were NOT to go there, our application would be turned down, but for a really stupid reason. It had to be a reason that didn't make sense. I couldn't imagine that happening, but I knew that God doesn't play around with us, and knew He'd use this to let us know what He had in mind.
We got the application back, and....join me next time to find out what the answer was!
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