Pageant Time!

It’s Christmas pageant time, and the students at Faith Nazarene didn’t disappoint. I went over last week for an afternoon of mimed carols and Christmas-themed skits. Here are some of the results…

The little drummer boys of Infant 1

Shepherds and such












And by far my favorite, the 3 Kriol Ladies in a skit about the importance of showing kindness to the less fortunate. Two of these fine, buxom ladies are from our life skills group.

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.