A Wedding and hopes for the future!

On Saturday evening, April 24th, my host mother, Ann Lopez, married Michael Uyi at the Belmopan Baptist Church. It was such an honor to be included in their ceremony - and a wonderful experience to attend my first Belizean wedding! Michael moved here from Nigeria three years ago and is a high school teacher here in Belmopan. Among the guests, were Michael's two sisters, Helen (left) and Joy (right) and Ann's son, Shea (and me.) Michael wore a traditional African buba and shokoto. Ann's aunt, Carolyn, and her husband, Marlon, invited us back to their house after the ceremony for a little celebration. I hope their future brings many years of love and happiness!

Training is starting to wind down, with our site assignements being announced next Friday. Everyone is very excited and the anticipation is really building as we all try to guess where we will be living for the next two years.

Remember a few blogs ago when I mentioned the Cohune palm tree? Well, on Thursday we went on a field trip to a village called Flowers Bank, about an hour northeast of Belmopan. It is a small village where the women there have been making oil from the Cahune Palm for hundreds of years through an extremely difficult process. The seeds are collected from the ground and dried. The shell is removed by pounding it with a rock, then the seed inside is mashed and cooked until oil boils to the top of the water. The oil is skimmed off and cooked some more until all the water is boiled off - and voila, after many hours and much hot and hard work, a small amount of oil is obtained. (Think about that the next time you pour the Wesson into your skillet.) Enter the Peace Corps! Last year, the village asked a volunteer to help them apply for a grant to buy a press so they would no longer have to pound the seeds with a mortar and pestle. Instead, they applied for and received a grant for $200,000 from the United Nations Development Program and three other agencies to build a oil producing plant! The plant is much smaller than your perception of a plant would be in the U.S. It consists of an open building with no walls about 20 feet square where the seeds will be dried in an oven. Then the seeds will move to the main building, which is about 40 feet by 20 feet, where the shell will be cracked, the seeds pressed and the oil will be boiled and bottled right there. The building will be finished in two weeks and production should begin by the end of this month. It was so amazing to see how these women have applied for and received all the licensing from the government, developed their own label, researched the type of bottle to use, and approached businesses to use and sell their product. They currently have orders from several grocery stores in the area, a group in another village that produces soap, and the Radisson that will sell the oil in their gift shop. Their chefs are even considering using the oil in their cooking. So another hope for their success in the future!

An especially wonderful feature is that the production will leave no environmental footprint, and provide work for people from all over the area who will collect the seeds and sell them to the women. The seeds are collected from the ground, not cut from the trees, the shell is used as the fuel to dry the seeds, and the ground up seeds are used as feed for chickens and pigs after the oil is extracted. But the best thing was to see the pride the women have in their accomplishment and the hope the whole village has that their new plant will make life better for everyone in their community. So be on the lookout for Cohune oil, coming to a store near you!

Tracy in San Miguel

Friday started out great when the U.S. Ambassador to Belize, Vinai Thummalapally, came to the Peace Corps office to talk to us. He was a fascinating man, who came from the private sector as a developer of CD's in the early 80's in California. He inspired all of us.

Then, after a full day of training, all 38 of us Peace Corps trainees fanned out around the country to visit current volunteers to learn about how they live and work in their villages. Since my training is in the rather large city of Belmopan, I went to a small village to visit a volunteer who I have been communicating with since Christmas. Her name is Tracy Hodson and when I sent out a note with my Christmas card telling everyone that I was going to Belize, a friend of mine who had moved to Jupiter last year, called me to say that her next door neighbor was in the Peace Corps in Belize. Tracy and I began emailing and she helped me so much in preparing to come here, so I was so excited to meet her and spend time with her.
We all left after training and went to the bus terminal where everyone got into different lines of people pushing to get a seat depending on what bus we would be taking. About 10 of us headed to Punta Gorda, a southern town on the coast. It took almost 5 hours to travel the 80 miles because the bus stops frequently along the way to pick up people who flag it down along the road and drop off others who are just going from one village to another. Tracy and the other volunteers were waiting for us when the bus arrived and we all went to dinner to get acquainted. Since Tracy lives in the very small village of San Miguel, we were not able to get a bus that late, so we stayed in Punta Gorda. The next morning, we had breakfast with the other volunteers, walked around Punta Gorda and went to the market to get food for dinner before taking the bus to San Miguel. Another hours' bus ride found us arriving in Tracy's village and we walked the short path to her house with another PC volunteer couple and their trainee.
After re-hydrating, we all headed off to the Myan ruins in Lubaantun. I'm ashamed to say that many years ago an American came here and blew up all the ruins trying to find treasure. You can see the pile of rubble that was left and archeologists are currently working at the site to put the village back together. You can see at the bottom of the pile where the stones are meticulously being replaced. Several of the mounds like the one on the left have been reconstructed. An open market has also been reconstructed, and a field that was used to play an ancient type of basketball has been unearthed. The big difference being that the winner was honored by being sacrificed! It is a huge job and as the dig continues more pieces of pottery and artifacts are being found like the ones on the right.

On Sunday, Tracy and I met with her community counterpart who is the Principal of the school (and her landlord.) We talked with him for several hours about the village, the school, his concerns and the progress he and Tracy have made in getting a speed bump put in in front of the school, re-opening the internet lab and they just broke ground for a playground.

Tracy and I went to dinner at her host family's home that evening and had a wonderful Myan experience. The dinner was wonderful - completely made from food that they grow and chickens that they raise. They are incredible people. They live in three seperate buildings - a thatched hut for cooking and eating, a grain and food storage building and a thatched hut for sleeping. They both work so hard, Mr. Pops raises chickens, ducks and pigs and has a huge farm where everyone works to grow and harvest all their own food. Mrs Pops takes care of the four children who still live at home, makes all their clothes and washes them in the river. Cooking involves a lot more than taking something out of the refrigerator (for one thing, they don't have one!) she grinds the maise and makes tortillas, kills the chicken and cuts the vegetables for the stews. She even collects tamarind pods from their trees to make the juice that they drink. It was a great evening!

Tracy is absolutely amazing herself! She had to dig a 4 foot deep hole, pour a concrete slab over the hole and build a shed around it to make her latrine. There was a spicket outside her house, so she bought PVC pipe and ran it into the house to bring running water to her kitchen and then make a shower. She took the bus into town, bought 42 concrete blocks, loaded them one at a time into the bus, unloaded them - one at a time - and carried them down the hill to her house to built the shower. You know how I love to build, so I instantly loved her when I saw what she had done. However, let me say this without further delay, it was a great place to visit, but I don't think I could live in such a rural community. Heck, I get panicked when my internet goes out! When Tracy moved into her house, Blackie came with it. She maintains that he's not her dog, but he absolutely is, not to mention, he's the only dog in town who's allowed in a home and all the other villagers think she's nuts! He's the neatest mangy dog I've ever seen and he would absolutely defend Tracy to the death. He never leaves her side and followed us the entire 7 mile walk back to the bus on Monday, defending us against the other dogs all along the way. They make a pretty neat team and I had a wonderful time visitng both of them!

Tracy and Blackie

The Blue Hole

Last Saturday our Bus Org (that's short for Business and Organizational Development) Group went to the Blue Hole. It is a beautiful National Park in the middle of the country - different from the Blue Hole on the top of my Blog that is close to Half Moon Cay. This natural beauty was formed when a cave collapsed and filled with water. There are other caves around the area that visitors can explore, and trails through the jungle, but some of us decided to just swim and cool off in the beautiful water. We heard two very interesting rangers tell us about the caves and the wildlife, as well as the challenges they face in trying to keep the land from being destroyed. The opportunities that ecotourism
offers to Belize is almost unlimited, but the human footprint has already greatly damaged some of the caves. People are cutting down palm trees at an alarming rate to get the valuable frawns, birds are captured to be sold on the black market and the waters are being threatened by pollution. Many International environmental organizations are stepping in to try to help balance the public's desire to see these beautiful areas and keep them as pristine as possible for future generations to enjoy, but it is a challenge with the
limited funds available.
I finally lost my battle with a cold on Tuesday and went to see the Peace Corp nurse. Turns out it wasn't a cold but a sinus infection, and after starting on some antibiotics I felt almost back to normal by Thursday, but missed two days of training - one of which was when the group went to the open market and bought food, then went to our trainers home and cooked "boil up"! I missed all the fun stuff but two of the people in my group brought me the delicious meal that they made.
Today all 38 of us trainees are heading out to visit volunteers who have been here for a year or more. I am very excited because I am visiting Tracy Hodson in San Miguel, a very rural village in the Toledo District, which is in the southern part of Belize. I began communicating with Tracy through email when a mutual friend told me that Tracy was in Belize after getting my Christmas note saying that I was going to Belize in the Peace Corps. I have been so anxious to meet Tracy and am really looking forward to seeing a Myan village, so stay tuned!

Week Two - Community Based Training Begins

It was a very busy week that started with a wonderful trip to Hopkins on the Caribbean. It was great to travel the Hummingbird Highway, which goes southeast from Belmopan to the Southern Highway, and see some of the beautiful countryside of Belize. The Cohune palm grows wild in the rain forest and reaches amost 100 feet tall. It is used for everything from thatching with the enormous frawns - at least 20 feet in length - to making oil from the seeds, and eating the seeds, which have the same texture and taste a little like coconut, to eating the heart, which is delicious. Even the bark is used to feed their pigs.
Hopkins was beautiful and our house was not more than 50 feet from the Caribbean, with only cocounut palms between us and the turquoise water. The houses are mostly on about 5 foot stilts and are made of wood, some with thatched roofs, but mostly with metal roofs (which sounded great when it rained on Saturday night!) Our house was very simple and functional. About 20 foot square, divided in half. The front had a kitchen and living/dining area and the back half had two bedrooms. It was painted a beautiful caribbean blue and is called "Blu Hevan" by the owners, who are from Colorado, and lived there for two years with their two small sons before moving back to the states. We had a wonderful restful time, swimming in the water, lying in the hammock and, of course, LOTS of eating!
It was back to Belmopan on Monday evening and training began at 8 am on Tuesday morning with Kriol language classes. Our teacher announced that she would only be speaking Kriol, but she is speaking at about half the normal speed, so we are able to understand pretty much of what she is saying, but boy when she gets going, I can't understand a word! We also take about an hour a day to walk around town, to the open market, meetings with NGO's (non-governmental organizations) and we met with the assistant to the Prime Minister on Thursday. In the afternoons, we have technical training on building relationships, assessment tools and organizational development that we can use in the village where we are permanently placed. On Friday all 38 of us in our group came back to the Peace Corps off ice for more training. It was so good to see everyone and hear about their host families and their new villages.
Tomorrow we are going on a field trip to the Blue Hole. Nex taim den!

One week Down, 112 to go!

Greetings,

A lot has happened since my last post. On Wednesday we finished our training at the Peace Corps office and received our assignments for our Community Based Training, which will last for 5 weeks. I feel I was extremely lucky that I was assigned to stay in Belmopan with five other volunteers in the Business Development program. Many volunteers were sent to very remote locations with people who speak no English and have no electricity, no running water, and no internet or phone service in their village! I don't know if I would have done very well in that environment.

My host mother, Ann Lopez, is very nice. She has a 16 year old son, Shea (named after Shea Staduim). She is a school teacher and has lived in Chicago, Houston and Seattle, so she is extremely familiar with American culture and speaks perfect English - another lucky break! Also, she has had other Peace Corps volunteers who have all been men, so I think she is enjoying talking to me, as much as I am to her.

Easter is the biggest holiday of the year here in Belize. All the stores closed on Thursday night and won't re-open unti lTuesday because they also celebrate Easter Monday. Ninety five percent of the country is Catholic, but Ann is a Baptist, so we cleaned the church on Thursday evening. I was right in my element, grabbing the mop and bucket and digging in. This morning we went back to church becasue Ann had bell practice and this afternoon we went to Good Friday services. No lightning bolts hit the church, so all is well!

Ann's aunt is the principal of the school here and she also has a Peace Corps volunteer from my group. They are going to Hopkins, which is a beautiful city on the Caribbean, and we have been invited to go with them. They have rented a cottage owned by Americans right on the beach. When I called my Peace Corps supervisor to ask her if I could go (which we do for safety purposes, so they always know where we are), she advised me not to tell the other members of our group where Brooke and I are going because they would be very jealous, since it is one of the most beautiful places in the country! Whenever good things happened to Mom she would always say it was Cruea luck (her maiden name) because my Grandfather was always lucky. Maybe she has transferred a little to me! We will leave Saturday morning after the 160 mile bicycle race that goes across the country. It is a very big event with lots of international riders. Ann's brother e has come from Houston to race tomorrow on the Belcal team (Belieze California).

Ah si yu layta and have a blessed Easter!