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!