Wow.

When I started The Cuenca Dispatch a little over nine years ago, I never imagined we’d still be reporting Ecuador’s news all these years later. And yet, here we are—Volume 10, Issue 1.

If you’ve been in Cuenca a long time, you may remember those first few months when the paper was called The Vegetable dis-Patch. It was a four-page handout we left on the tables at The Vegetable Bar so people could read something positive instead of scrolling through doom and disaster on their phones while eating our food.

But, as these things do, it took on a life of its own. People wanted to advertise. We wanted something that looked like a real newspaper. Customers—and plenty of non-customers—wanted to find it in other places. And just like that, The Cuenca Dispatch was born.

Before long, it had become a full-fledged weekly newspaper, 2,500 copies strong, distributed across the city at four Supermaxi locations and a handful of favorite expat hangouts.

Then came COVID-19. After years of being a printed publication, we suddenly had no choice but to move online—the printers were shut down, and the world stopped spinning for a while. But to our surprise, hundreds and hundreds of you followed us here, to The Cuenca Dispatch online.

That wasn’t the only change. Our approach to the news evolved too. In the beginning, I only wanted good news. I wanted happy people eating our food. But over time, as readers responded to the tougher stories we started adding, we realized we’d become something more than a cheerful distraction—we’d become a critical source of information for many of you.

So, we changed again. Instead of “only good news,” we became the place where expats could find the news that actually mattered to them. That wasn’t an easy editorial decision. We didn’t want to lose readers—or become just another website tossing out half-baked blurbs.

Our mission became clear: to give you the information you need as an expat in Ecuador, whether it’s rosy or not, and to give it to you with enough depth and detail that you can truly understand what’s going on.

And that’s where we are now. Many of you have told us we’re your primary source for what’s happening in Ecuador—and that makes us proud.

Our hope is that someday, instead of hundreds and hundreds of subscribers, we’ll have thousands and thousands. We want to be the news source for expat communities across Ecuador.

So if you can, tell a friend about us—maybe the person you’re having coffee with who’s still arguing from half the facts. Send them our way. It won’t cost them anything to take a look. Maybe they’ll like what they see. Maybe they won’t. And that’s okay too.

Because after nine years, we’re pretty sure we’ve grown into more than just something to read while you eat. We’ve become a habit, a connection, a shared conversation about the place we all call home—however long we’ve been here or plan to stay.

And if the next nine years are anything like the last, I have a feeling we’ll keep finding new stories to tell, new voices to include, and new reasons to keep showing up every week.

Thank you for all your support through the years.