Feeling Like Charlie Brown and Drinking Gasoline

Well I tried my darndest to get a photo onto this post but what worked two nights ago, just won't work tonight. I even got my very capable husband to help me and he gave up as well. So here I am, feeling like the Charlie Brown of bloggers...everyone else has cool photos and graphics on their blog...I probably won't get any Valentine cards either!

While in Ecuador, we drank only bottled water. We brushed our teeth only with bottled water. We didn't have ice in our drinks, because it might not have been made with bottled water. We were very careful. We were told to bring our water bottle to the church each day and there would be very large bottles of water to refill our individual ones. That first work day, after draining my bottle as I sanded desktops, I spied three very large water bottles across the courtyard. I set down my sander and walked over to refill my bottle. I thought it was not very good that the large bottles had sawdust on them, but as the first part of our team mantra was "Be Flexible", I was certainly not going to complain about a little sawdust. So I sat down on the courtyard steps, set my own bottle between my legs and began pouring from the very large bottle. Pleased that I'd only spilled a little, I recapped my bottle, stood up, and took a swig.

The second I had it in my mouth, I knew this was NOT water! I gracefully spewed out my mouthful and sputtered, "What is this?!?" I think it was my daughter who told me, rather horrified at what I'd done, that the bottles had been filled with gasoline! In a bit of a panic, I ran into the kitchen, where the REAL large water bottles were. I explained to the ladies, in my limited Spanish, what I had done. After they were through showing concern and realized I appeared to be fine, they began to laugh.

The next thing I did was rather practical--maybe gasoline fumes agreed with me--I grabbed my sharpie marker and labeled each of the very large bottles in the courtyard, "gasolina". It ended up being a good thing I did, because my husband started to fill his water bottle about five minutes later. He'd seen me filling mine and thought that was a good idea.

As I said above, we drank a lot of bottled water in Ecuador. You can buy carbonated or non-carbonated, or as they said on our Ecuador bottles, "gas" or "sin gas"--for me, that had an entirely different meaning! One thing I must say though in defense of my odd drinking habits, I was quite healthy for most of the week--maybe the gasolina (it was actually paint thinner we were told later) killed some of that harmful stuff. Also, I gave the ladies in the kitchen a running joke to tease me about all week! That can be a very helpful thing when a language barrier limits the extent of normal conversation--by the end of the week when I was having my picture taken with one of the ladies, she told me to smile and say, "gasolina".