My view this morning as I wrote this post. At first I was disappointed that the clouds were covering the sun as it rose, but they gave way to some spectacular spotlights that illuminated the water.
Hello from Placencia! I have no idea when I will have internet access to post this, but right now it is late Thursday night, early Friday rather, roughly 5am. I woke up about an hour ago and found my mind racing, rendering me incapable of falling back into much needed deep sleep. The sun should be rising in about an hour, so I decided to write down some of the things creating my mental race track and then walk the few steps to the chairs on the beach to take in the sunrise. As a left-coaster I haven’t had many opportunities to see the sun peek out over the ocean, as that is instead where I know it to settle each night. Placencia is about as close to paradise for me right now as I could imagine, minus my friends and family of course. The beach is clean and filled with coconut trees, the water is a perfect temperature and a beautiful deep blue/green, and the people here, despite high tourism, are still Belizean and very nice and hospitable. I have been trying for the last few weeks to have hudet (no idea how to spell it), a traditional Garifuna dish of mashed plantains and fish, and cow foot soup, a Belizean favorite that is exactly what it sounds like. A woman who owns the restaurant right next to the guesthouse I am staying at is making a special bowl of hudet for me this evening and a nice young lady I met on the street yesterday said at noon today I could come pick up a bowl of cow foot soup, made just for me, from her at the gas station she works at in town. This is the kind of Belizean hospitality I have gotten used to.
Me with most of the group I worked with in PG on a daily basis. From left to right: Bebiana, yours truly, Robert, Herminio, Luther, Andre, Jose, Charles, Candido, and Nana. Not pictured: Nelson, Nadia, Juan,Estevan, and Kevin. They are all wonderful people and I can’t wait to come back to see them.
The ten days or so since I last wrote have been a whirlwind of experiences and emotions, and I am so thankful to have these three days in Placencia to relax and organize it all. Most of last week was spent doing final family visits in the villages around PG. Checking in with families I had already worked with and saying goodbye to them was really nice, as was meeting new families and hearing their stories and their experiences with SHI to that point. I was also introduced to Belizean basketball, which I very wrongly assumed couldn’t be much different from the basketball I had played my entire life in the states. If a family here has a television, then they also have satellite cable straight from New York, which exposes them to all things American, including sports. They love the NBA, and from what I could make sense of in the disorganized and inconsistent games I played, it was their attempt at mimicking what they see from very talented and athletic NBA players on TV. A lot of Belizeans have the athleticism, but that seems to be where they stop. This is understandable though, as these guys have real life to tend to, unlike most kids in the US who are able to devote their young lives to a sport of their choice and receive personal attention from coaches who have done the same. I tried my best to not pass judgment on their style of play and just assimilate, but after four games I never did figure out the order of it all that they seemed to apply without thinking.
A goal being scored during a football marathon at Cemetery Park on my last day in PG. These kids were good, despite a beat up ball, no shoes or shin guards for most, and a muddy field with a few swampy spots that caught the ball and fell the kids whenever they tried to dribble through.
After that, I spent most of my remaining time in PG trying to organize and pack my things, meeting for a final time with people I knew I would not see for quite a while, and reflecting on my experiences of the past ten weeks. Some obvious highlights for me were Christmas in Guatemala, the dairy goat workshop and family visits in Honduras, the cacao workshop with friends from Seattle, and life on the farm with the Caliz family. Overall, the experience has taught me so much and given me perspective on life that I almost certainly would not have had otherwise. All the time I spent with the families was invaluable in my quest to understand life in a developing area, as was the many hours I spent talking and working with the extentionists. They all came from backgrounds similar to those of the members of the families we were working with, so getting their perspective after experiencing both sides was very powerful. The past ten weeks has given me so many more friends, a much healthier perspective on life, and a functional understanding of some of the people we strive to help lift out of poverty, and I really couldn’t ask for much more. I now, well in two days, turn my attention to the next place that I hope brings more of the same, in a much different way.
Me taking a big bite of a pineapple I just picked out at Mr. Sanchez’s farm in Stann Creek. Mr. Sanchez has a thirty acre farm producing pineapple, plantains, oranges, cabbage, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, etc. Before he worked with Juan, he only grew plantains for commercial sale.
Monday and Tuesday, I was so happy to work out a visit to the SHI programs in the Stann Creek district, just north of Toledo. While there, I visited a lot of different families with Juan, one of the extentionists for SHI-Belize and the leader of the Stann Creek programs. Seeing their work there, where most of the citrus and bananas come from in Belize, offered a better idea of how their programs work with families who have larger farms. Juan’s approach is to first make sure they are fruitful in their farms, forgive the very bad pun, before moving to projects in and around their homes. This is different than I had seen in Toledo, likely because most people in Stann Creek have more commercially productive farms than do people in Toledo. Juan says that he likes this approach for two reasons: one, because it gauges the family’s commitment to the program very well at a low money and energy cost before moving onto more expensive and time consuming projects; two, because a productive farm is the first step to self-sustainability. Once a family is able to produce food for themselves and an income by selling the excess, they are able to afford a progression of changes around their home. I was unsure of how I felt about this approach before I saw it in action, but after a couple days of discussing it with Juan and visiting with his participants, I believe it to be very effective under the right circumstances. The two nights I was there I stayed at Juan’s apartment, which is a very modest Belizean studio, meaning about 350 square feet with a hard tile floor, no furniture, and unreliable cold-water-only plumbing. I slept on that hard tile floor in a sheet, with a rolled up sweatshirt for a pillow, making sleeping for more than an hour at a time nearly impossible, but that was not my chief complaint. The first night, I woke up and found his computer screen still on, so I turned it off thinking I would save electricity and sleep better with less light. Big mistake. What I failed to think about in my middle-of-the-night lethargy was that cockroaches run rampant in Central America and love the dark. A little while later I woke up with an itchy face, and as I scratched it, I felt the itch jump off my face and heard it scurry across the floor to hide under some rubber boots near the door. I think I may have even ended up with one of its legs in my mouth, but that could have just been me exaggerating the situation. Needless to say, I was a little shaken the rest of that night and made sure to keep the monitor on the following night.
Diego and I making our move to get as many tilapia as possible, as Estevan coaches. The fish were taken from this hatchery to Mr. Cruz’s new fish pond on his farm. I was extremely unsuccessful on my own with the net. After seeing Estevan, Juan, and Diego have moderate success, I went in overconfident and caught only 7 fish in roughly 50 attempts.
As no situation, even one intentionally set aside to offer complete mental relaxation, is without its learning opportunities, I have the following thought from my final days in Belize to leave you with. Yesterday I went on a tour of Cockscomb Basin, the only jaguar preserve in the world. This tour consisted of a natural history and flora tour, a tubing trip down the South Stann Creek River, and a series of natural rock water slides. While on the tube I was overcome with the striking metaphor this trip down the river was for life itself. The more I fought against the mostly slow moving current to find my idea of the perfect route, free of rocks, sticks, and the river bank, the more I found myself running into rocks, sticks, and the river bank. Also, the more I concentrated on the current itself, the less I even noticed the breathtaking beauty of the dense, lush jungle surrounding me. The river became my life path, the current became the driving force of my life, and all the beauty surrounding me became, well it became all the beauty surrounding me in my life, being relationships, possessions, and vacations, to name a few. None of us will ever know where the river of life will take us, or where or how it will end, be it a dramatic waterfall or a peaceful entrance into the sea. We can identify the current, the driving force of our lives. For me it is God’s love, but we each have our own carrying us in a unique way. What we cannot know about the current is how fast or slow it will go throughout the river, or what route it will take us on. In other words we cannot know how the current will get us down the river. It may bounce us off a rock to get us back on course, run us through some mangroves to teach us a lesson, take us ashore for a little rest, or propel us carefree down the river to enjoy the peripheral beauty. The only thing we have any control over in this river of life is our outlook. With a trust of whatever our individual current may be and positive outlook, we will then be able to fully enjoy the journey itself and all the scenery around us. This will also allow us to not be troubled a great deal by the rocks and sticks of life. Once I took on this outlook in the river yesterday, I found myself much more relaxed, moving much more efficiently on a better route, and simply enjoying the beautiful journey. I probably shouldn’t tell you that I then became the only one in the group to pop my tube on a big stick in the middle of the river, forcing me to walk the short remaining length of the journey. At any rate, my final challenge from Belize for you all is to give some serious thought to what your driving force in life is and whether or not you can trust it. If you cannot, I would bet there is a trustworthy current in your life waiting to be given the opportunity to take you down the river. What is your outlook on life and what beauty is surrounding you that you do not appreciate or even notice? The irony of it all is, as I addressed above, that you must not think too hard. Just let it flow…
