The Prospect of Peacefulness

Dear readers,

We just thought it would be a good idea to send out another update. Thursday was a pretty crazy night. One of our friends, Jessica, texted us and said it was pretty bad about five blocks away from our apartments. Needless to say, we didn't go anywhere. Michael was with me in my apartment during the evening and we just kind of hung tight. I ended up finding a TV channel that I could watch online about what was going on. It made me feel a little better that we had an idea of where things were happening. The very surreal thing about watching the TV was that they actually had a camera man outside of the hospital and you could see everything. The army had come into the city and were taking over the police. The president was still stuck in the hospital so the army was trying to get him out and bring him back to his home in Centro Historico. Because of this there was shooting going on between the police and the army - all of which I was watching online. Not only that, but I could hear the gun shots out my window as well... very scary. The hospital is about 10 minutes driving from our apartments. The hospital is in the lower left hand corner. It says "Hospital de la Policia" and our apartments are directly to the right in the upper right hand corner on "Calle Antonio Granda Centeno" next to the green park area. You just need to move the map straight east.. hope you can find it! haha

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So because of the way things were going we were going to take my mattress and put it in Michael's apartment for the night so that I wouldn't need to sleep on the street side of our building just in case anything happened. However, after the army rescued Correa from the hospital and brought him back to his home everything went back to normal so we didn't have to move my mattress and we both slept safely in our own apartments. The government had closed school for Friday so I didn't have to go... poor Michael did. But now it's Saturday and things are just about as normal as they get here in Quito. Thank you all for your prayers!

Love, AnnMarie & Michael