Felix, a cousin, and a pile of textbooks

it's been over three weeks since my last post, and i'm not entirely sure how that happened. in that time i lost my camera, consolidated in Belmopan a second time to wait out yet another hurricane, reunited with my cousin and spent a lazy weekend with her in her Belizean hometown of Hopkins, spent countless hours stamping primary school textbooks, co-facilitated my first HFLE workshop and came to an understanding of just how small this country really is.

Hurricane Felix was initially projected to make landfall smack in the middle of Belize, as a Category 5. luckily for us (though not for Honduras) he changed his mind and his trajectory at the last minute. we spent another soggy night in Belmopan, suffering only 10 minutes or so of strong winds. the upside of this latest trip to Belize's capital was that i got to spend some quality lockdown time with my cousin Maya, who had arrived in Belize just two days earlier and was looking for a safe place to wait out Felix.

the following weekend i took the bus to visit her in Hopkins, where she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1999-2001) and is now conducting research for her dissertation on language transmission as it relates specifically to the Garifuna people. she showed me around the village, a majority Garifuna community of roughly 1700 residents, located on the Caribbean shore just south of Dangriga. (the Garifuna are descended from West African slaves who migrated to Belize and Honduras from St. Lucia in the Caribbean. their numbers are relatively small, and fewer and fewer of their children are learning to speak Garifuna. but there has been a recent call to revive the teaching of the language, and they're even now printing Garifuna-English dictionaries.) Hopkins is a pretty sleepy beach community, though the resort industry has taken hold over the past several years, and is on its way to doubling the human population of the area. it's been six years since she completed her service, but everyone in Hopkins still greets Maya by name. she introduced me around town, and we got our kicks off the eyebrows that are inevitably raised when we assure people that we Ravindranaths and MacKays are indeed related by blood.

back in San Ignacio, i spent the majority of my first full week at work helping to prepare textbooks for distribution to all the primary schools in the Cayo district. until this year, individual schools had the responsibility of deciding which textbooks to use, and parents would buy copies for their children's use. this year the Belizean government decided to standardize all primary school texts and provide them free of cost. it's an enormous logistical undertaking. with the start of school delayed by a week due to Felix, district education centers around the country were still scrambling to get books to all the schools by the start of classes. hasn't quite happened yet...