.....

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?

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. :(

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.

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.