Ciao from the Gringo Gang

COUNTRY: Ecuador
PROGRAM: GapBreak
PROJECT: Teaching & Care Work
WRITTEN BY: Clare Baxter

When you're stuck at home in a full-time job desperately saving up for a gap year adventure like this, three months seems the longest time in the world. You cross days off your calendar like you're in a montage in a cheesy teen drama. I found myself in my office at work highlighting sentences in my Lonely Planet, and staring at maps of Quito. "I'm going to know these streets," I thought, and it was surreal. "I'm going to know them and walk in them and drink coffee in them and know them like the back of my hand."

Now we do. Street names that once seemed so foreign are as familiar as George Street or Parramatta Road. And, although I feel like a walking cliche saying this, I'm a little in love with this city.

There's something about the 4000-odd metre high mountains around us that's comforting, safe. I still catch my breath seeing them whilst walking home from volunteer placement in the afternoons. The coloured buildings that splash up the valleys are casually, quaintly beautiful. The cobbled streets and colonial buildings of the Old Town make you feel as though you've stepped off the Ecovia bus hundreds of years in the past and the cafes and bakeries of the new town are our home away from home. When people mistake us for tourists we reply defensively and proudly, "¡Vivimos aqui!" - we live here.

It's been a crazy life, too. I've done things that I never could have imagined doing, from all of our adventure sports (tubing, canyoning, banana-boating, paragliding, zip-lining, white-water rafting and I can't even finish this list), to all of the general adventures we had just being together and being us, the Gringo Gang (really hipster dinners in Guápulo, ticking things off DFAT lists, Montañita, and plastic bags in El Safari). I could never have imagined, either, how wonderful it would feel to volunteer to teach English to disadvantaged children. There's that utter sense of elation when you walk into a classroom to kids cheering, how you can't stop smiling when you sing "We want to wish you a Merry Christmas" with your students, and how close you get to the little ones. It aches to think about leaving them.

Some of the international volunteers are finishing our gap year adventures here, and some are travelling on a lot longer. But wherever we get off our planes I know (and our farewell brunch today proved this) we'll have the same sense of sadness to know we're not going to be spending the next weekend on an eight-hour bus trip to some place new together. Okay, I doubt we'll miss the bus trips. But I personally can't believe how close our volunteering group has become. I know so much about you guys, sometimes a little too much ...

I know wherever we get off our planes, we're going to be babbling. No amount of words, conversations, all-night d&ms - even divided by 12 people - could ever come close to describing what we've seen and done here. The food we loved (encebolla) and hated (foot bread), the views we took 12-person selfies in front of, the music we came to know so well ... "Manos arriba, cintura sola, una media revuelta, danza kaduro," and of course, "¡Yo no quiero agua!"

I know wherever we get off our planes, we'll be changed people. You may not recognise us, and not just because of our Ecuatorial tans or the five kilos we put on at Marcelo's house. It's because you can't experience something like this and be the same person you were before. For better of worse (definitely worse for our bank balances), we've become Explorers. We've become Global Citizens, as my junior school geography teachers would have put it. We've become Quiteños, Adventurers, Next-Trip Planners, and pretty darn good Friends. And we're so lucky to have had these experiences. So thank you to everyone who had supported us, for all you've done for us this past year or so.

So that's it mis amigos, I suppose. Thanks for everything; the communal showers, the hilarious anecdotes, the diarrhea advice, the afternoons at DiSerggio's, the bus trips to placement. Thanks for teaching me the lyrics to Drop It Like It's Hot, for sunscreen-application on the coast, for putting up with my singing and headaches, for lending me your clothes, for watching Skins together, and for saving my life those times. Hope I could return the favour.

There's something Marcelo said to us at dinner one time that kinda stuck with me. "You are the biggest bullshitters ever!" He said proudly. "You just live life like hell."

And I wouldn't have had it any other way.