What Happened to the Dry Season?

When December hits Southern Belize, the sun is supposed to come with it and stay for the next six months. The sun has been nowhere to be found almost this entire week. Today feels much more like Seattle than it does Belize, and it has rendered me bored and frustrated while hiding inside. You see, everything here seems to be set up for outdoor activities, which is appropriate most of the time, but when it rains relentlessly like this there is little to do. Couple that with me being sick all week and it is not hard to imagine that I have not had one of my best weeks here. I caught a fever over last weekend, and was feeling better by Wednesday, when I apparently ate something bad. Let's just say Wednesday night I spent nearly as much time with the toilet as I did with my pillow. Thursday and Friday I didn't work because I was not able to hold down much, but today (Saturday) I am feeling almost back to normal. I sure hope the rain stops soon so I can get back outside and feel alive again, not to mention get back to work in the field.

With all that said, as you can imagine, there is not much to update you on. I did go work out in the field on Tuesday. I helped construct the base for a stove and oven for a young widow who recently moved to a new home. This was actually pretty fun, as my job that day mainly consisted of carrying very heavy sand and concrete bags on my shoulder from the truck to the home, which was about 200 yards away. What made it even more fun was that the trail to get back there was narrow, uneven, muddy, and filled with very excitable pigs. I think the extentionists I was working with have a skewed view, or maybe rather accurate view of gringos and our work ethic. They all seemed to be so concerned about me carrying the bags and cement blocks, and were very quick and persistent in assuring me that I did not need to carry anything. I was having a blast, and those of you who know me know that I love picking up heavy things and challenging myself in that way. It could be argued, rather easily, that that is how I ended up with a back surgery at the age of 19, but we won’t go down that road.

I wish I had some exciting updates for you, or even a philosophical thought, but I’m afraid all the lost nourishment has left me without any brain power. I am going to Honduras the end of next week, so I am excited about that. When I come back from there, I will really only have about two weeks left at the office before I start making my way up the coast to Belize City, where I will start my long journey to Nairobi. I have to concentrate on focusing on this next week, otherwise I get a little frantic that I only have a couple weeks left. Hopefully the weather and my body will return to normal and I will get to go out in the field next week, before leaving for Honduras. I can’t wait to update you on that once I get back. I’m sure it will give me plenty of information and experiences to send your way. Sorry there is not much to tell you this week, but I suppose this is a good lesson that not every week can be filled with nonstop excitement.

The first photo is of me carrying the final sand bag to the home on Tuesday. You can see how dirty and maybe how exhausted I was by this point. Lifting those things up to my shoulder, and then balancing them there for a couple minutes while I walked along the trail was very difficult. The next one is of a HUGE bug that was on the landing of my friend’s apartment building. It was there for almost 24 hours, which worried me that it was plotting something against me and was going to attack when I least expected it. The third photo is of a cloudy sunset that I thought was just beautiful. It reminded me a lot of the really bright and colorful sunsets in the Northwest. That white building on the right is just about the biggest building in Punta Gorda at a skyscraping two stories. Finally, this is a sign for the Belizian beer, Belikin, posted on a tree on the bank of the Moho River. People here really only drink Belikin, Guiness, and Red Stripe, and rum of course. That’s all I have for you this week, I look forward to giving you a lot more to chew on next time I write. Be good to yourselves.

Home is where the Heart is

Today marks about the halfway point of my work in Central America. That statement probably doesn’t hit you quite the same way it hits me, does it? In approximately five weeks I have done, seen, and learned more than perhaps any other five week period of my life, but I remain focused on what this place has left to teach me, even through my reflection. I will be spending a week in Honduras to get involved in the programs at the largest S.H.I. field office. While there, I mainly hope to learn about their approach to microfinance, as well as join a small group for a dairy goat workshop for a couple days. I am very interested to see the differences between the country programs, whether those differences are due to culture, materials and resources, or simply experience level. Another thing I will do in the next five weeks is a home stay with a local farmer. This experience will be crucial to me actually understanding the life of a farmer in this area, as to know how current programs are helping and could be improved. Outside of those two small journeys, I will make sure to learn about organic pesticides, composting, and irrigation practices. Those are the few areas that S.H.I. is heavily involved in, with which I have yet to gain any understanding of concept and implementation.

So now that I have talked about what is coming up for me, how about we discuss the last week? The Smaller World Chocolate Tour group made it here for about a week, and I was fortunate enough to join them in their activities most of the time. We did and learned so much over a seven day period, including building a solar latrine and wood conservation stove, touring a couple different organic farms, making delicious chocolate by hand from freshly picked and roasted cacao beans, touring a local Mayan ruin, visiting a waterfall, and swimming through a huge cave system. Sounds just like every week of your life, right? Outside of all of that action, the best part for me about having the group here was the opportunity to connect and process with other Americans. They stayed at Cotton Tree Lodge, which is a wonderful natural and environmentally friendly lodge with cabanas right on the Moho River. That is where we decompressed and processed each evening. The people in the group had so many questions for me that greatly helped me understand my experiences thus far, and also helped them take more away from theirs, I hope. Also, hearing all of their reactions to, and personal insights on life here really helped to challenge and shape my own. I value tremendously my personal reflection time, but this helped me realize the importance of verbally processing my experiences if I am to fully understand them.

Yesterday, as the group raced by me on the airstrip in a tiny airplane heading to Belize City, and onto their lives in the states, I waved goodbye and had a strange feeling of returning to real life myself. Having them here, especially the Stein family, was like a vacation for me, and as they left I felt that, just as they soon would be, I too was now home. It was that instant that I realized that “home” has changed dramatically for me in the past few months. I have never understood the phrase, “Home is where the heart is” quite like I did at that second. My heart is out here with these people, with their struggle, and with my small role in helping and empowering them in their fight against that struggle. And so I am home. Frederick Buechner’s character, Cuthbert, in his book, Godric, puts it this way – “When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. It’s the same with a place a man is going to, only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead.” I am no longer living in Seattle, LA, or Salem, not right now, though a scrap of my heart rests in each place. Right now I am at home in Belize, and soon I will be at home in Kenya, followed by Europe and eventually India. Each one of those places represents a home to me because they represent a group of people with a struggle for survival, and an opportunity for me, all of us, to be involved in their victory and triumph against that struggle.

The top photo is of the group at Rio Blanco Falls, where we went on Thursday afternoon and got a chance to explore and swim. On Wednesday, I went with a few of the extentionists to Boom Creek to help put up a thatch roof, made of cahun palm leaves, on an observation deck at the research center. It was a lot more complex and difficult than I imagined it would have been, and you can tell from the photo that I was up in the air a bit trying to figure this thatching process. I have been surprised to find out how much people here followed the U.S. presidential race, but what wasn’t surprising about it was which candidate the overwhelming majority of people supported. This photo is an example of the way people campaign here - nothing official; just all homemade signs showing support for the candidate of their choice. I love it. For those of you who know me, the next photo might surprise you. At Rio Blanco Falls, from the very spot we all stood for the group photo, I jumped about 30 feet down into the water. I know that doesn’t sound like much to a lot of you, but I get terrified of jumping any more than about ten feet, so after about 20 minutes of trying to convince myself to jump, I finally did. It was really important to me to have documentation of this jump. The last photo is just because I am really cheesy. This is a coconut, picked fresh from a tree at the research center, that I chopped open, drank the water inside, and then dove into the flesh of the fruit. It was delicious, and I took this photo because it perfectly illustrates what I was talking about in the above paragraph. The coconut is my whole heart, which is with me now in Belize, but you can see that the right side of it has some “scraps” missing, which are the scraps I have left behind and sent ahead. I know, I know, I need to quit being so sentimental dramatic. It is a piece of fruit, for crying out loud, but just let me have my moments. Have a great week, everyone, and give some thought to where the scraps of your heart are, and if you truly are at home where you are right now.

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2009! I hope you all were able to celebrate Christmas and New Years with those you love. A lot has happened that I need to catch you up on. First of all, I spent 8 days, including Christmas, in Guatemala with my friend from the office in Belize, Kevin. On Christmas Eve we got Samac, a village in the mountains outside of Coban, where we met up with Kevin’s friend Jonathon and his wife, Concepcion, who is from Samac. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect since I had never been to Guatemala and all I knew was that we were going to see some of Kevin’s friends in a rural village in the mountains of the middle of the country. It turned out to be so much fun and such a great learning experience. We stayed there four nights and during that time we attended a midnight Christmas Mass, ate about forty tamales each at four different homes, explored a huge cave system and 19^th century hydroelectric power plant ruins, played soccer in the dark with the kids, and spent hours upon hours hanging out with the wonderful people there. Most people in the village spoke at least a little Spanish, although their native language is Q’eqchi’, but no English, which left me completely unable to communicate verbally the whole time. This was a little frustrating at times, but for the most part we were able to communicate appropriately, although very limited, through body language, namely smiles.

Despite the lack of verbal communication, they were still able to teach me so much. I was constantly observing their way of life and trying to get into it as much as possible myself. They have very limited electricity, no running water, an elevated fire pit for a stove, and a diet limited to corn, beans, and occasionally a little meat or vegetables. Hearing it put that way makes it sound like a miserable existence, and like I would not have enjoyed my time there. But they seem to have something there that a lot of people in the developed world do not have – contentedness. They seemed so genuinely happy and at peace with their lives, with who they were, with what they have, and with the people they spend each day with. Extended families representing many generations live together on the same land, sometimes sleeping 6-8 people in a small, dirt-floored room with a thatch roof that may also serve as the kitchen, dining room, and living room. The women spend nearly all day in the kitchen cooking, cleaning, and preparing to cook again, and the men spend all day working on the farm, if they are lucky enough to have land of their own. They have a couple toys for their children, who usually just end up sitting on the dirt playing with a stick or rock or empty corn cob, or running around playing with the animals. Through all of this, the very little they have seems like so much more than all the excess we have in the states. I have always considered relationships to be the most valuable possessions in this world, as many of you do, and they were living confirmation of that, and also living motivation to follow their example.

On my way back to Belize, I stopped in Flores for a couple days so I could visit Tikal, a huge collection of Mayan ruins that everyone here had recommended I visit. What an amazing place! There are hundreds of structures that were built well over 1,000 years ago by hand. I joined a group with a guide so I could have some structure, otherwise I knew I would just end up running around in amazement and not actually learning a whole lot. We left at 4:30am so we could get there for sunrise, which ended up being clouded over, but I’m glad we got an early start anyway because it was cool most of the day and not very crowded until we were leaving. It was so amazing to climb some of these structures and know that I was standing where kings and others stood thousands of years ago when the city of Tikal was a thriving regional center. When I got back to Flores, I spent the afternoon speaking very broken Spanish, reading, eating tacos, and preparing for the undoubtedly long journey back to Punta Gorda the next day.

Now that I am back, I’m excited to get back to work in the villages around P.G. On Saturday the 3^rd, a group of visitors will be in town for a week for the Smaller World Chocolate Tour, which I get to be involved in daily to offer any assistance and insights that I can. This is so exciting, especially since a family I got to know in Seattle will be joining the group. Next week I also hope to learn how to build a thatch roof and help put it on at the research center we are currently building in a village near the office. In the coming weeks, I will be spending a few days and nights with a farmer in one of the villages in an effort to personally understand the life of a poor farmer in Southern Belize. This is something I am really looking forward to because it will not only give me a chance to experience his life, but also to talk to him and get answers to many questions I have, that I would like to have answered by someone in his position. I know time will fly, so I want to take full advantage of the time I have here and walk away with the best and most complete understanding of life here, as well as sustainable agriculture practices and programs.

The top photo is of me holding a baby in Samac, Concepcion’s niece and Goddaughter. She was so adorable, and she made me think a lot about Lilli. Apparently most men in their village don’t get too excited about holding babies, because they laughed every time I asked to hold her. The next one is of the scene in the kitchen while all the ladies were making special Christmas tamales, which went on for literally the entire day on Christmas Eve. They had to have made at least 200 of them, it was incredible. While I was eating dinner at the little restaurant next to my hotel in Flores with some friends from New Zealand that I met along the way, I suddenly felt little claws on my head. The lady who was cooking all the meat put her pet parrot on my head, it was such a nice bird, and a great extra companion while I ate my tacos. Next is Temple II at Tikal. It is in the plaza, which was the center of town and where all the entertainment was. The little door opening at the top is the place where the King sat to watch the sports and other entertainment below. Finally, this is me standing in front of Temple V, the tallest (and scariest to climb) in Tikal.

I hope 2009 is a great year for you all, let’s work to make it the year that the world saw love and compassion lead the way to positive change. My new year’s resolution is to learn Spanish and participate in the first race for Team ERACE.