Tuesday, July 24, 2007

garnachas

Yolanda taught me how to make garnachas on Sunday night. a tasty, crunchy, salty treat...

- fry pre-cooked corn tortillas in vegetable oil until crunchy (just a couple minutes) and drain on a paper towel
- spoon on top: refried beans, finely shredded cabbage (tossed with white vinegar and salt to taste), finely diced onion (treated the same way) and finely grated cheese (Yolanda used a semi-hard Dutch cheese, but pick your favorite)


if you're feeling adventurous, you can make your own refried beans like so...

- sort through dried black beans to remove stones
- rinse until water runs clear
- boil until tender
- add sliced onion, chopped tomato and salt to taste. cook until onion is tender.
- you can eat these beans with rice and chicken (or whatever kind of meat you like). they're called stew beans. Yolanda told me that in order to keep them from going bad over the next few days, people used to cook them a little more each night, and each night the sauce would get a little thicker. once it's thickened considerably, you can...
- throw them in a blender and blend on high speed
- pass blended beans through a fine mesh strainer into a small cast iron pan. this will remove the skins. you'll need to stir them up with a spoon to get them to pass through the mesh. add water to get the stubborn bit at the end to go through. repeat if necessary. add water to the pan to achieve the consistency you like.
- heat on the stovetop
- just as the beans begin to bubble, add a small amount of vegetable oil
- once they start to boil, remove from heat

ta-dah!

hallways and matrices and fans...



home sweet home. this is the hallway outside our classroom at St. Peter's Anglican school. this is where we have Spanish class and all of our planning sessions. 50 or so hours a week in one room can make you mighty antsy...



the crew showing off our very first priority matrix! it's a tool used to help a group come to consensus about its top priorities. we used it with our Youth For the Future group to decide on a project to devote ourselves to over the next month. they settled on doing a youth march through town. we were so proud!



easily my favorite household appliance. i fear i may be rapidly developing a dependent relationship. but i do have the excuse of a recent heat wave to blame it on, right? its been 95 and humid for the past week, you know...

Monday, July 23, 2007

sisters and helmets and pickups, oh my!



this is one of my host sisters, Yolanda, lounging on my bed. she works part time as a radio announcer, has taken me out a few times to the local club to dance reggaeton, is teaching me to cook Belizean foods, and keeps avoiding coming to yoga class with me. oh, and she's trying valiantly to teach me Spanish. we'll see how that goes...



we peace corps volunteers are SO lucky. we get to wear these every time we get on a bike. as if we don't stick out enough, we're the ONLY people in Belize wearing bike helmets. even the Mormon missionaries don't have to wear them.



Kyle, yours truly, and Rebecca hitching a ride in the back of a pickup truck. on our way back to Orange Walk from Carmelita Village, where we're working with a group of 25 or so youth, doing life skills activities. kinda hard when the kids are so timid you can barely get them to speak. but we'll wear 'em down if it's the last thing we do...

Saturday, July 21, 2007

coconut rice

i've found a new culinary love, and it's name is coconut rice. why didn't i ever think to make my white rice with coconut milk instead of water? i mean really! my host family does it with fresh coconut milk (you crack open a fresh coconut, hack or grind out the flesh and soak it in water till you get enough liquid to make however much rice you're planning to cook). or you can buy packets of powdered coconut milk, and just mix it with water. SOOO good! really yummy with chicken curry.

we've completed our second week of community based training. in addition to oodles of spanish class, we've now met with the four different groups of youth that we'll be working with for the next four weeks. one is a reading program for younger kids held at the Orange Walk library. a PC volunteer, Jenny, is in charge, and we're serving as her helpers, assessing the kids' reading abilities, and reading stories aloud to them.

the second group is in the neighboring village of Carmelita. the kids there have very few organized activities to keep them occupied, and drugs are apparently a huge problem. a woman from the OW Human Development Department is running a parenting class at the same time that we're doing life skills activities with their kids. i've never met a group of kids who were so timid. it was like pulling teeth to even get some of them to speak out loud in front of the group!

the third activity is split into two classes. Matt and Kyle are running a computer class with older youth, while Rebecca and I do art activities with the younger kids. we'd planned for a one hour session this week, only to find out that we have the kids for two. so, we had to do some improvising. luckily, Rebecca had brought along her handy packet of icebreakers, so we had some easy activities to keep them happy.

our final project is a youth leadership class with older teens. we spent our first meeting brainstorming possible projects the youth might like to work on, and settled on doing a youth march through the center of town. none of them had ever even heard of the concept of a march, so it will be an entirely new experience for them. this is the project we were most nervous about, since we had very little structure going into it, but it's the one that left us feeling the most energized after our first meeting. the youth seem pretty excited by the concept. we'll see what comes of it...

Monday, July 16, 2007

a Kriol dinner in San Pablo village

my host family and i just returned from a wonderful dinner in Donna's home village of San Pablo. it's a village of just over 900 people, about a 20 minute drive from Orange Walk Town. her parents have a big spread there, where a whole passel of their kids and grandkids are gathered at all times. it's impossible to tell who lives there and who's visiting. it's just a mass of people, dogs, kittens, chickens, rabbits, rats and birds running amok. and i've never seen so many fruit-bearing trees in my life. Donna's father climbed up an enormous avocado tree to knock some down for us to take home. Donna's husband Ismael and a bunch of the cousins attacked the waya (ginip?) tree, while Yolanda went for the mangoes. the quantity of fresh fruit was overwhelming. i kept myself busy eating waya (you pop the little green fruit open with your teeth and suck on the flesh surrounding the seed. they'd be way better than peeled grapes to simulate eyeballs at halloween.) while trying to avoid Donna's brother John, who kept telling me my eyes were so beautiful that he wanted to take them. yikes.

Donna's father demonstrated how to crack open a brown coconut with a machete, and grind out the flesh. you can then dry out the husks in the sun, chop them into smaller bits and use them on a fire to add flavor to your barbecue. but the real reason for busting them open was to get at the milk, which Donna used to make a delicious Kriol dinner of fried fresh barracuda in a cocunut milk broth with garlic, onions, tomatoes and plantain. it was a gourmet meal cooked over a wood fire, eaten in an outdoor kitchen surrounded by lots of lively company and a couple kittens trying to get in on the fishy action (reminded me of Felicity at the dinner table). i tried to watch the preparations carefully from beginning to end, but i won't guarantee that i'll be able to replicate it. i was a bit distracted by the thousands of mosquito bites i was in the process of obtaining. all in all, a highly enjoyable evening.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

week one

i've been in Orange Walk for a week now. i'm slowly learning the lay of the land. we've found some good stores, a fantastic bakery, stopped in at a few different community development agencies, danced like fools at an outdoor rock concert, and spent a minimum of four hours a day studying Spanish.

yesterday, the Business Development folks who are training in Santa Martha came into town to check their email and buy some essentials (everyone needs a yoga mat!). we had a fantastic barbecue lunch at the home of their language trainer, Efrain. Belizeans love a good barbecue, and any weekend serves as an excuse. we've already been invited to his niece's baptism next weekend, with opportunity for more good food. the only downside to the day - Nadov managed to get bitten by a dog. a nasty German Shepard on a chain long enough to give him easy access. tore his shorts into pieces, but he got out of it largely intact. there are way more dogs running around Belize than i'm comfortable with, but i've managed to remain unmolested so far.

night before last there was an outdoor rock concert in the market square. six Belizean bands doing mostly cover songs. can't say i ever anticipated hearing Belizeans doing Bon Jovi songs, but it was fantastic. Kyle entertained all by doing his version of an anti-rain dance (apparently he's got powers, because it actually worked) and headbanging with the locals. my host sister Yolanda works for the local radio station, and she joined us for the fun.

all the Youth Development folks drove four hours south to Hopkins on Thursday for a teacher trainer workshop on the new Belizean Health and Family Life Education curriculum that they'll be implementing in schools this year. as an HIV/AIDS volunteer, i'll be working with it a lot. the teacher trainers are a feisty and fun group. it's likely that my future work counterpart was in that room, but since i don't know where i'm going yet, who can say? the training was at a beautiful resort not ten feet from the Caribbean shore. made it kind of difficult to listen to the presentations when the ocean breezes were blowing through the room... i can't believe Maya was stationed there. spoiled brat! i will most definitely be taking a beach vacation when she arrives in August!

.....



one of the trillion ice breakers we've played since our arrival. why do so many of them involve blindfolds, anyway?



Mr. Pop runs his own little bus service from Armenia to Belmopan. we kept him busy during our time there! i believe our record was fitting 32 people on his 15 passenger van. this is Danny and Nadov on the happy bus back from La Cabana, where there was much sampling of Belize's very own beer, Belikin.



Matt & Rebecca, two of my fellow Youth Development trainees. just to confirm what a little bitty world it is - Matt and I lived not far from each other in Boulder a few years ago and never crossed paths. he's also friends with a whole crew of Syracusans that i went to elementary and high school with. and it just keeps getting smaller...

3 at a time...



a map of all the Community Based Training sites. there are trainees in Education, Youth Development, Business & Organizational Development and Healthy Communities. we're scattered all over the country, learning Spanish, Kriol, Garifuna and Maya K'ekchi. my site is the post-it on the far top left.



Rachel overcoming her fear of birds with our family's pet parrot



Shelly, Lizette and friends playing some random game of their own design with Ashli's Uno deck

wireless!

i just discovered there's a wireless network out there for me! apparently someone around my house has one, and it ain't password protected. this could be dangerous...

so, it's picture time!



here's my first host family, in their kitchen in Armenia. L-R: Cesar, Ronny, Shelly, Dora, Lizette, Maira. this is where all the action takes place. Lizette and Shelly are the daughters, and Ronny and Maira are their cousins, who came from Guatemala to live with the family. Ronny goes to school and Maira helps Dora out around the house and running the store.



Dora taught Rachel and I to make flour tortillas on the stovetop. first try, and they came out beautifully!



our first glance of the Peace Corps office in Belmopan, from the window of an old school bus. ain't it grand?

Friday, July 13, 2007

more pix...

a few more images from the last week or so...



here's Shelly, one of our lovely host sisters from Armenia. if she'd had her way, we would have spent the entire two and half weeks watching her on the monkey bars.



Mitchell, Rachel, Clare, Kyle, me and Eric on Caye Caulker. we had one day to go exploring before heading out to our Community Based Training sites. this is us on the pier waiting for the water taxi to take us back to Belize City.



...and on the retaining wall where we'd spent some time sunbathing. can you believe there are actually two PC volunteers stationed here? so unfair! alas, no one from our training group will be so lucky. :(

Monday, July 9, 2007

training, phase 2

i write today from an internet cafe in Orange Walk Town, which is where i'll be for the next 6 weeks, doing community based training. it's in the far northwest of the country, not far from the Mexican border. which, unsurprisingly, means that i'll be studying Spanish. :) slightly more useful in the long run than Kriol (which i was kinda intrigued to learn). it's a town of 15,000 or so, with a bustling town center focused around several outdoor plazas and a fruit and vegetable market. i'm here with 3 other youth development trainees, doing four hours a day of Spanish class. we'll also be running a number of activites for a few different groups of youth (ages 8-25), centered around literacy, life skills development, art and computers.

i'm living with a multilingual family of four. mom Donna is a professional cook with a wonderful laugh. her husband Ismael works in electronics and is a walking encyclopedia of pretty much every kind of fact available. 21 year old Yolanda just graduated from college and is working at the local radio station. she's psyched to have someone in the house to take dancing with her. i'll report back on the state of the clubs in Orange Walk in case anyone's interested. :) and 6 year old Zoe is a ball of energy and sharp as a tack. she's going to be a handful, i can tell already. they all speak english beautifully, and my spanish is ridiculous, so it's been easy to default to the language we are all proficient at. i'll have to exercise some serious discipline to make this happen... but i've moved on from bucket baths to an honest to god shower, which is pretty sweet. AND they have a washing machine! and more mango trees in the backyard... if i can wrap my brain around the language, things should work out just fine.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

the kitchen

so, it seems that the kitchen is the place to be in cultures all over the world. my host family is certainly no exception. they seem to spend the majority of their time there, and i've taken to hanging out with them in the evening when things are at their busiest. Dora and Cesar run a little shop out of their kitchen, selling snacks and sodas and Dora's fabulous chichen burritos and empanadas. Cesar stays out front, taking orders and watching soccer on the TV they've put out front for the whole villag to gather around. It's Copa America time, and the guys are out every night following the games. Dora bustles around the kitchen, frying an endless supply of flour tortillas on the stovetop. her older daughter Lizette, and niece Maira assist by filling hot tortillas with refried beans (made in the blender), chicken and coleslaw. it's a family affair, and everyone has their job, though there's plenty of time for silliness. the villagers poke their heads in the window to place orders or say hello, and there's always an absurdly adorable child rinning around on loan from his or her mother.

dora makes her own soy milk from scratch, soaking, blending and cooking the beans. can't say i've ever realy been a fan, but this stuff is GOOD! it tastes like it's sppiced with cinnamon, but Cesar assures me it's pure unadulterated soy bean. oh, and for salad dressing try just a splash of fresh lime juice and a sprinkling of salt. fantastic and refreshing!

tomorrow we find out where we'll be heading for the rest of training. we're splitting up into smaller groups, and i'll either be in Orange Walk Town, learning Spanish near the Mexican border, or in the tiny village of Lucky Strike trying (feebly, i'm sure) to speak Kriol.

Pix

OK, I realize it's taken me a while, but here are a couple pix from the past couple weeks...



me with bird. there seem to be a lot of pet parrots around here...



the Mayan ruins at Cahal Pech, just outside San Ignacio



Ashli's magical haircut by flashlight.