Barbecue at Yoli's

First job was to unload the pick-up and the Montero from the night before. There were piles of stuff. There’s a room in the hospital which Tom and Lucy used when they first arrived (last year) and this will now be a play-room. It’s big and Julia enjoyed putting together the jigsaw play mat and all the soft play. Other items are being stored in the workshop below the apartment. They have piles of furniture in houses from Thorney, to Syston to Ambato.

Lucy does look tired. They’re off to Quito on Sunday, so she may get more of a rest there.

We had been invited to a barbecue at Yoli’s (Yolanda, Jenny’s sister) house in Ambato. It’s 25 years since Jenny started working with FAC, so that milestone was being celebrated. Jenny does dental care and Yoli is also a dentist.

Yoli has twin sons, Pancho and Alexander. They look alike, although Alexander is a little bigger than Pancho. Tom remembers which is which by thinking of Alexander the Great and that seems like a pretty good method.

Yoli’s house is in it’s own fairly large walled complex covering a corner of a block. There’s the usual Ecuadorian security – high walls topped with wire, but she has a lovely garden with roses, geraniums, pelargoniums and begonia sempiflorum, which we’d recognise in an English garden. Of course, here, there’s never a frost, so they form quite big clumps.

There were also lots of amaryllis flowers planted in the garden, especially around trees and they look quite spectacular to my eyes. I explained (as best I could) that we grow amaryllis inside the house at Christmas time.

The garden also contains a second, older house, which was Jenny and Yoli’s mum’s. Mum is 94 and now lives with Yoli, but her house is still there across the garden and is used when there are family get-togethers. I asked if mum could remember the great Ambato earthquake and, of course, she could. She would have been 24 and she said they were very frightened, the house shook violently and they all ran outside. Their house was well-built, with a wooden frame, so it didn’t collapse. I can’t imagine what it would be like to see your whole city destroyed in such a catastrophe.

Like all professionals in Ecuador, Yoli has a maid, who was busy getting the food ready. Carlos and Tom took charge of the cooking and there was a mountain of meat. It was quite warm in the garden, although the Ecuadorians were complaining that it was a little cold.

Yoli has a dog that lives on the roof of the house (which is quite normal here). It was a collie/Labrador shape and coloured like a yellow lab. It peeped over the side of the house at the food and had the occasional treat thrown up. It also barked furiously if anyone went past.

In Ambato, and I guess in other cities in Ecuador, there a public address system in each barrio where a car drives around giving information. Tom says it might be a warning that thieves are about, a missing person or news of a fiesta or a community event. I hear them quite often from the hospital and one went past Yoli’s house while I was there. I asked what the message was and it was “buy a box of oranges for a dollar.”

Once we were home, disaster struck. Tom fell down the last couple of steps up to the apartment and sprained his ankle. Carlos, Jenny, Camila, Lucy and the children were in the apartment giving advice when the carpenter and his assistant (his wife, I think) arrived to fix the four-poster bed Lucy has had made. She’d shown him some pictures and asked him to make a four-poster from some wood that was surplus, and he’s done a really nice job. However, he should have made the bed to fit a super-king mattress and he’d made it the same size, so the mattress wouldn’t quite fit in the slot. He had to do exactly what I did with the bed we bought at home and raise the mattress slot, so it sat on the bed and overhangs a small amount. He had my sympathy, but Lucy had given him a telling off and so here he was at 8pm, fixing the bed while Tom had his ankle treated with ice, ibruprofen, anti-inflammatories, diazepam and rum – not the best combination.