It's been a busy week at WIN. We start off each week with a Staff Meeting to inform each other what we are going to be doing that week, and coordinate our efforts, whenever possible. Florence took me to visit several of the organizations that are members of WIN and meet their staff, including the Belize Family Life Association, Belize Audubon Society, Alliance Against AIDS, Youth Enhancement Services (YES) and the YWCA. There are other Peace Corps workers at YES and the YWCA, so maybe I will have a chance to work with them occassionally as the year progresses. I've also been on a few more walking tours - on Wednesday we were in the opposite part of town when a down pour started and Florence and I got soaked before we could get a cab back to the office. In the photo is Minerva Varela, the Finance Officer; Shelmadine Coche, one of the Program Officers I will be working with, and Carolyn Reynolds, the Executive Director. (Florence was home changing out of her wet clothes!) Tonight is the "WINNERS" volunteer meeting and I am anxious to meet them and see what they do with WIN.
Then I head back to Belmopan on Saturday for the last week of training and swearing in. My roommate the first week we were here, Linda Crawford, is celebrating her birthday on Sunday and mine is on Monday (which is a National Holiday), so we are planning to have dinner with some other volunteers - and maybe even a glass of wine!

My First Day of Work

I just realized that I forgot to post an entry from May 4th. So go back and check out, "The Pigs and the Pots".
But since I'm writing, I'll just quickly tell you about the bus ride to work this morning. In case there was any doubt in anyone's mind, YES, I got lost! I found my way to the bus stop, got on the right bus and even got off at the correct stop, but it went downhill from there. I headed in the complete opposite direction, which I'm sure is causing my father to laugh as he reads this, remembering how I walked out the door of our house for the first day of junior high school and headed in the completely wrong direction. Unfortunately, in this case, the neighborhood is not quite the same as Oakwood, and as a wandered around, a policeman stopped me and said, "Mam, you don't want to be here." So, I walked back to the bus stop and called my dear counterpart, Florence, who immediately picked me up and we went over the route again. I'll try again tomorrow!!

I've Finally Made it to Belize City!

On Wednesday, the counterparts from our projects came to Belmopan for a day of training. Two women from my project, WIN-Belize, came and we had a wonderful day getting to know each other. Then they drove me back to Belize City and took me to my new host family's house.

I am living with Sylvia Flores in a two story house. Mrs. Flores lives upstairs with her 103 year old mother, and I have an apartment downstairs. The bedroom was just painted and she had a lovely wood floor installed. There is no one else in the apartment, so I have it pretty much to myself. The house is in a very safe neighborhood and only a block from the water, so I can take long walks by the sea. I also just found a place to take yoga that is about a block away and hope to start classes soon with one of my co-workers at WIN. However, it's not quite the Hilton, and even though I'm very lucky to have hot water, here's a picture of how the water is heated. So, if I get electrocuted, at least you'll know I was warm when it happened!

WIN-Belize is a fantastic organization and the people I work with have made me feel so much at home. WIN is a network of many women's organizations and tries to help them work together on like issues in order to make a greater impact. We visited several of them on Thursday. On Friday evening, my co-workers took me to a play called, "The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds." It was in Kriol, but I actually understood the gist of the play, and the acting was wonderful. On Saturday,WIN held a training for volunteers who want to become Mentors of girls. Fifteen volunteers attended and the training was a big success. There will be two more sessions, then the volunteers will be assigned a girl who is involved in one of the organizations that belongs to WIN.

My counterpart, Florence Goldson, took me on a great tour of the north side of the city on Friday. She also showed me where to get the bus from my house to go to work, so tomorrow I will venture out by myself. I warned them that I often have trouble finding my way out of a bag (an expression I had to explain to them) and told them to come looking for me if I wasn't in by 9am. I will continue my orientation this week, visiting other member organizations, and another staff person is going to show me around the downtown area.

Then I head back to Belmopan on Saturday for the last week of training, called Bridge to Service. It will be great to see everyone and hear about their sites and projects. We will be sworn in on May 28th, at the Governor General's house (the "GG", as he is called, is the Queen's representative). We have been invited to the Ambassador's house on Friday evening for dinner, and the next morning I'll head back to Belize City for the next two years! I can't believe training is almost over and I can finally begin what I came here to do.

The Mystery is Revealed!

Today, all of us gathered from throughout the country where we have been in our Community Based Training for the last six weeks, to find out what our projects will be and where we will be living for the next two years. We have been so anxious for the last few weeks, all us trying to pry the information from our trainers and making guesses about who would be going where. So since I had to wait for six weeks, I'm going to make you wait a little longer and tell you how the secrets were revealed.
When we got into the training room, a huge map of Belize had been drawn and on it were 37 pieces of colored paper that coordinated with our groups: yellow for Education, green for Youth, pink for Healthy Communities, and purple for the best group, Business & Organizational Development! Chairs were set up in our four groups and we were told that each group would take a turn sending up two people to play "Belize Tabu". One person gave their partner clues to a word that related to something about Belize or our training. If the person guessed the word in 15 seconds, they could go to the map and pick a piece of paper to uncover, under which was the name of one of the trainees, where they were going and the name of their project. Everyone tried to pick the place where they thought they were going, but many of us were surprised. It was so exciting and amazingly, it seems like everyone is thrilled with their new project and the place where they are going.
So, (drum roll) when the purple paper was pulled off Belize City, there was my picture and name! I couldn't be happier. Of all the 37 locations, it is where I wanted to go the most because the project is so awesome. The agency where I will be working is called WIN Belize - WIN stands for Women's Issues Network. It is a coalition of like-minded groups working together for the betterment of women in Belize. I will be networking with over 20 organizations, including the Belize Cancer Society, YWCA, youth and AIDS organizations, women's business co-ops, food banks, battered women's shelters, and environmental groups like the Audubon Society. My job will be to assist in volunteer recruitment, establish their advocacy programs, and strengthen their member organization's practices and policies by providing staff training in the areas of organizational skills, monitoring and evaluation of current projects, networking and fundraising. Our counterparts from the organizations will be coming to Belmopan for two days of training together, then they will take us back to our new homes on Wednesday.
I will be living in a very nice area of Belize City called Kings Park, with a lady who used to be the Peace Corps nurse, so I'm sure she will be very nice and a great place for me to stay while I look for my house and get it set up.
I am so excited about the fact that I will be in Belize City. Though it might not be as much of a cultural experience as living in a rural village, I'm thrilled to have electricity and running water! Belize City is the laragest city in Belize. It is centrally located on the coast, and only a water taxi away from all the beautiful Cayes! Also, the airport is located there, so when you come to visit, we can use my house as base camp and travel around from there.

Just a reminder about a few things on my Blog. First, I just figured out how you can view my photos in a slide presentation, which you can see at the top, or click on a picture and you will be linked to the album to see the pictures with captions. Also, there is a place for you to leave comments at teh end of each posting. I'd love to know who's reading and what you think about my posts, so please leave me a message!

The Pigs and the Pots

On Monday we went to San Antonio. No, not Texas! Our trainers wanted us to visit the village where the other half of our Business and Organizational Development Group (Bus Org, for short) is living. It is a completely different experience than we are having in Belmopan, and what a great day we had! The city has been trying to get water for almost 10 years and last weekend, in honor of Mother's Day, the women of San Antonio (and everyone else!) got running water! It was a huge event: school was closed and everyone in town was there for the ceremony and ribbon cutting, all dressed in their finest (despite the fact that it was over 100 degrees under the tent.) The leader of the Village Council had every mother come up and presented each one (including me) with a red rose. He knew every woman's name and announced it on the microphone as she received her flower. All the Council members gave speeches and the Prime Minister even came to give a speech, along with many dignataries from the government, the Mexican Ambassador and the representative from Tiawan, who helped fund the project.
But even more fun and amazing to me was seeing the Project that the Village Women's Group is doing. They are making pottery, but the process is genious! They purchased pigs - pigs to make pottery, you say? Well, the pigs had babies and now they have lots of pigs. All those pigs poop and they put the poop in a huge plastic bag mixed with water. The poop produces methane gas and they fire up the kilns with the methane! So with the money they made from the pottery, they bought some chickens. They fed the chickens 24 hours a day, which produced a lot of chicken poop, not to mention the fact that by being fed all the time, the chickens are ready to sell in 6 weeks. So they planted a garden above ground in boxes to keep the animals out of their vegetables, using shaff from the rice they hull and the chicken poop for soil. Oh, did I mention they use the water from the methane container to water the garden - the perfect natural fertilizer! The whole set-up is totally self sufficient - and as an added bonus to the pottery they sell, they also sell pigs, chickens and vegetables! So my question is, why are we here bringing development to third world countries?
Maybe it's so they can show us how it's done!

Our Fearless Leader Has Arrived

Our new Country Director, Nina Hernandez, arrived last week and spent some time with us on Friday. None of us wanted her to come because we love Brian Dwyer (who has been filling in for her) so much. Now we love them both! Nina was a PCV 10 years ago, and she told us a story - a story like every "RPCV" has (that's Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, though no one ever really thinks of themself as returned - once a PCV, always a PCV!) She was in the first group to go to South Africa and her village had no running water or electricity. When she arrived, she soon found out that the village couldn't afford to buy bread to feed the children in school. So, Nina met with them to try to help them figure out what they could do. They vascilitated between cutting the teacher's salary or cutting back on the bread the children got. Then Nina asked if any of them knew how to make bread and they all laughed at her until one woman said that she knew of a village nearby where the women baked bread. So off the women went, on a field trip to the village where the women baked bread. Most had never been out of their village, so the trip itself was a major deal, but they headed out and walked to the neighboring village. Armed with their new knowledge, they returned and built an oven out of clay and began to make their own bread.

Fast forward ten years. Nina is married to a former Safety for the Houston Oilers and wanted to take him to Africa to see "her" village. She prepared him on the way, explaining what the village was like. As they disembarked from the plane, she was overwhelmed to see that the villagers had ventured all the way to the city to meet them at the airport - a far cry from that first adventure to the new village. And when they arrived in the village (that now has running water, electricity AND internet!), Nina found that much of the progress that had been made was a result of the oven! Not only were they able to feed the children with the bread they made, but they began selling it to other villages to fund bringing water and electricity to the village. Most returned Peace Corps volunteers don't have the good fortune to re-visit the place where they spent their volunteer years, but I imagine that if they could, most would find that the village is better off because of their presence there. These are the stories that reinforce my presence here.