Life Skills Madness

The HFLE curriculum is all about life skills, and gaining life skills requires practice. And as a youth development volunteer who has had little actual interaction with youth over the course of my service, I decided I needed to get out into the schools to do some life skills practice with the older primary school kids. I approached my friend Anthony Morris, the vice principal at Faith Nazarene School, about the possibility of doing a weekly life skills group.

As it turned out, there was also a Belizean police officer/reproductive health educator named Omar Rodriguez shopping around a similar idea. So, we joined forces to design and implement what turned into a six-week life skills course for Standard 4-6 students at Faith Nazarene and Santa Elena Primary School. The teachers and principals selected the students they thought would benefit most from classes in self-esteem, communication, decision-making and HIV/AIDS awareness, and we got them once a week after school for an hour of games and activities. Good Lord, but we got more than we bargained for. Just try getting a room full of boisterous, troubled 10-12 year olds to talk about the importance of listening and respect after they’ve been sitting at their desks for 8 hours, and would much prefer to hit each other over the head. What exactly was it that made me think I was cut out for youth work?

But if you want to survive in this realm, you’ve got to measure your successes by the smallest of increments. And the one kid who opens up about his or her trouble at home is worth all the hours of what feels like glorified crowd control. I’ve got to trust that the information sinks in on some level and lodges itself in the back of their frenzied minds. And in the end, they didn’t want to see us go, so that’s got to say something, right?

HIV Village Outreach

As an honorary member of the Peace Corps Belize HIV/AIDS Committee, I recently took a trip down to the Stann Creek District to take part in some outreach activities in the villages around Dangriga. I met up with five other volunteers on a Friday in November, and we headed over to the POWA office in Dangriga to get our briefing. POWA consists of a group of boisterous, raunchy, straight-talking Garifuna ladies who have made it their business to educate their fellow Stann Creekers about the risks of HIV transmission and the need for empathy and compassion for those infected with the virus. We hopped on their “Bashment Bus” with Crystal, the condom-filled mannequin, and headed out of town as they sang and danced in the aisles. You just cannot keep a group of Garifuna ladies from dancing – it’s a physical impossibility.

I was paired up with a woman named Maria for the day. We stopped in three different villages, and each time Maria would grab her clipboard and holler for me before blazing through the village lanes hunting for anyone who looked like they had a free minute. She was fearless – it was amazing. We knocked on doors in Sarawee, crashed the pre-lunch crowd at a roadside barbecue joint in Silk Grass, and played transmission card games at a bar in Hopkins. Talking about HIV/AIDS has never been so much fun. Get ‘em laughing, and you can pass on all sorts of important information while they’re not even looking. My thanks to Maria for inviting me along on her mission of informational merriment.

The POWA ladies get their dance on

Merida

The end of October saw me celebrating the end of my GRE nightmare across the border in Mexico. Matt, Nikki and I bussed it from Corozal to Chetumal, and then across the Yucatan Peninsula to Merida, which is reputed to host some of the best Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. Unfortunately, heavy rains in Belize and flooding on the Northern Highway - our only route to Corozal and beyond - delayed our departure and we ended up missing the festivities. But our truncated vacation was still worth the 15 or so hours on the bus. Merida is a charming city, with a bustling, beautiful, colonial town center focused around the Plaza Mayor, which boasts a huge park, the city’s cathedral and main government building, outdoor cafes along a covered colonnade, and a juice bar where they squeeze your orange, melon or carrot juice right in front of your eyes.

The weekend market is an insanely crowded conglomeration of stalls selling everything from fresh produce and fish to shoes and the traditional Day of the Dead sugar skulls. Every few feet we encountered someone with a bundle of newspaper-wrapped flowers in the most brilliant combinations of colors, purchased for placing on family graves as part of the holiday celebrations. On “Sundays in Merida” the city blocks of a maze of streets in the center of the old town to make way for bike and pedestrian paths. Not far from our hostel we stumbled on a senior citizen dance party – a 10-piece band sharing a shaded stage with at least 20 elderly couples dancing every Latin step you can imagine. You could see from the way the couples greeted each other with relaxed waves and friendly jibes that this is a regular affair.

Just a couple blocks down the road, the Plaza Mayor hosts stalls selling churros and Panama hats, and another live band and packed dance floor, surrounded by spectators just taking in the view. Everywhere we went that weekend we found people dancing. And with such undisguised, relaxed joy. It was refreshing and restorative just to see the smiles on their faces. Not to mention the pleasure of air conditioned coach buses, handmade pasta, good, cheap wine and shrimp ceviche on a terrace overlooking the beach. And people who were more than happy to encourage you to practice your Spanish on them. Ah, sweet Mexico!

Bertie

Back in September, we lost a valued member of our Peace Corps family. Bertie Murphy, probably the most beloved member of our training crew, died in her sleep in her beach-side house in Hopkins village. In the year plus I knew her, I never heard a single person speak a word against her. A former bee-keeper from Virginia, she decided in her early 70’s to join the Peace Corps. She was a gentle soul, brimming with a long lifetime’s worth of wisdom that she shared willingly but without pretence or judgment. She laughed easily, and smiled often, typically with a glint of mischief in her eyes. I didn’t see her much once we got our assignments – not because she didn’t care to hang out with the rest of us, but because she was dedicated to becoming a member of the Hopkins community. And she was well loved there, as she was everywhere. They called her dunuru, Garifuna for “bird.”


In late October I traveled down to Hopkins to watch as the school where she worked dedicated their library to “Miss Bertie.” A fitting tribute to an extraordinary woman, who brought out the best in everyone she turned her beautiful smile to.

Tropical Depression?

It's been a soggy week in Belize. Unrelenting rains from Tropical Depression #16 have blanketed the country, causing widespread flooding. Even in the face of last year's Hurricanes Dean and Felix, where I live in the west we saw very little damage. This time, however, parts of San Ignacio town have been sitting under more than a foot of water since Friday. The fruit and vegetable market, recently constructed on the banks of the Macal River, is under water, and one of the two bridges that grant access to the Western Highway (and thus the rest of the country) is nowhere to be seen.


Many villages have been cut off due to road and bridge flooding, and people are being evacuated by the National Emergency Management Organization. School in the Cayo District has been canceled since Friday, and probably won't commence until at least this Friday, and businesses are losing out due to closures and a lack of travel and commerce. As the rivers out my way flow eastward to empty into the sea, the Belize District will continue to see rising water levels. On a personal note, my house has escaped the flood waters, though the water from my taps is now coming out brown. I'm thinking maybe it's time to spring for that 5-gallon jug of the bottled stuff.

Check out lovefm.com for more pictures.

Fun (?) With Cats

An excerpt from a letter recently written to my former down the street neighbor and fellow PCV Ashley:

So, I just buried one of my neighbor’s million and a half cats. I came home from work thinking, “Ah, its Friday. I have a three-day weekend laid out before me. Why not stretch out in the hammock with a stout and some Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and enjoy the moment?” So, I cracked open a Belikin (OK, not cracked, it was a glass bottle) and walked out to find... a dead cat in the storm drain directly outside my patio. No sign of a violent death, but attracting enough flies to have me worried about how long it had been there. I stood over it for a few minutes, cursing and wondering what the fuck to do, before decided that I at least owed it to the venerable cat lady to let her know that one of her brood had passed on. But the woman’s 92, after all. I’m not even sure she understood what I was trying to tell her. So I trekked over to DePaz’s son’s vet clinic, only to find that he was down in Stann Creek and wouldn’t be back for a few hours. What the hell does one do in this sort of situation? Next stop – Linda and Gustavo’s jewelry stand. They’ll know whether there’s a Friday night emergency dead cat pickup service, right? Mmm…. consensus is I’m going to have to take care of this myself. But Gustavo, bless his heart, decided to lend me a hand. I led him back to my place and handed him the fork my mom purchased for our nonexistent garden (which has been completely yanked up, by the way). I proceeded to wrap my hands in plastic bags and extract the deceased feline from my gutter. Not 15 minutes later and the job was done. I thanked Gustavo with one of the two stouts I’d bought anticipating a nice, quiet Friday night, and proceeded to get into a conversation with him about homosexuality. What a random start to this Pan American/Columbus Day weekend. And now there’s a dead cat under my backyard.



Sidenote: this is Linda and Gustavo's daughter Fabiola, who is in no way related to this story, but is adorable, and thus needs to have her picture posted.

September Celebrations

OK, I realize I’m a little behind, but I thought I’d wish Belize a happy birthday! September is a month of celebrations countrywide. It’s kicked off with Carnival, a slightly scaled down version of the festivities found in many Caribbean countries, and is followed up with parades, fireworks and various other festivities celebrating St. George’s Caye Day (September 10th) and Independence Day (September 21st). 2008 marks Belize’s 27th anniversary as an independent nation, so independence fever runs strong.

I started the month’s celebrations at Carnival, in Belize City, trying not to get run over by floats or poked in the eye with feathers from the variety of outlandish costumes. Here's the Peace Corps Carnival crew hanging out on the median in the middle of the street, waiting for the parade to arrive. Unlike in the States, where people start showing up HOURS in advance to get prime seats, we were practically the only people around when we arrived an hour or so before the parade was supposed to start. Who knows when it actually started, but several hours later, when it did actually arrive, there was a packed crowd to welcome it. They call it Belizean time... But it was well worth the wait.



The next day I sat on the sidelines to cheer on my more masochistic fellow PCV’s, some of whom decided to brave the punishing tropical sun and filthy Belize City shoreline to participate in the Lionman triathlon.

A week and a half to rest up, and then I headed north to Corozal to ring in Independence Day with Matt, Rebecca, Jackie, Marcel and Rebecca’s sister Katie at a dance party by the sea wall. A good month was had by all.