An Action Packed Week!

This week was so busy that I hardly had time to breath! Monday and Tuesday a volunteer group came to visit Holy Cross from YWAM (Youth with a Mission), a Christian organization that has a campus north of San Pedro. Eight 17-25 year olds came as a part of their outreach program. With Miss Francis and Mr. Vernon out of town, I was in charge of showing them around and finding activities to do with the students. Easier said than done. It's really hard to find ways to help for a couple hours and still have the volunteers feel like their are getting their time's worth. I ended up breaking them up into groups of 2 and assigning them to different classes. On top of that, the school had a weird schedule this week. Friday was Children's Cultural Day (more on that later) but the classes were preparing for that in the afternoon and having regular classes.

The students from YWAM invited me up to their campus Monday night, so I took the island ferry North to visit (there are no cars that can go North of school). I got a lovely tour of the place (a former resort) while the mosquitos were feasting all around. After a classic dinner of grilled cheese with tomato soup (yum), I took the ferry back to San Pedro. I don't know how those drivers can drive at night with no moon out. It was sort of scary, especially since 2 boats had collided the night before resulting in one death.

Wednesday was the big multiplication test for the Standard V class. Their hard work paid off! So far, everyone who has taken the test has scored higher than the 85% cutoff! There were so many 95+% scores that I could hardly keep a straight face walking back in with their tests after lunch! So Monday afternoon will be the infamous ice cream party.

Wednesday was Miss Francis' big 60 birthday! The students put on quite the celebration. Each class or division got a small gift for her and sang some sort of song to her! Miss Francis got everything from a Caribbean jewelry set to a light up Jesus picture to nail polish. Some songs were cute and others were tear jerkers. That night I had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant on the north part of the island with the Wilsons and others!

After dinner a few of us took the boat all the way back to Central Park to check out the Garifuna Settlement Day celebrations.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garifuna). There was supposed to be drumming all night leading up to the big day. There were a bunch of people in the park, but not so much in the way of dancing and drumming. Many people said that the celebrations were supposed to pick up later at night but as of 11pm is was still a lot of standing around. There was no school on Thursday for the holiday. I had a lazy morning and then went back to central park to see the celebrations. There was a band and people selling food, but it was still sort of a disappointment. I'm sure Dangriga has a bigger party.

Friday. Finally. Childrens Cultural Day. The classes broke up into four groups to each represent one of the main cultures in Belize: Creole, Mestizo, Maya and Garifuna. Each group spent all week preparing posters, food, and music to represent the each culture. Friday we had a fair where students all dressed up and took part in the different cultural activities. There was even a reenactment of the Garifuna landing in Belize!

This morning, Saturday, I was back at school to help out with an English as a Second Language class for about 10 students. Now, I patiently await my fathers arrival in San Pedro this afternoon...

The Daily Grind

My stay here in Belize is half over already; time sure flies! I feel pretty settled into the daily grind of life here. A typical day starts with a 6:45am alarm. After some morning yoga, I get dressed and head off to school. Sometimes I’ll make an egg burrito at home or I’ll pick of a stuffed fry jack on my way to school. A fry jack is fried dough, much like a sopapilla. The first morning I ever woke up in Belize (2004), I had a fry jack with fresh jam and honey in Crooked Tree and I have loved them ever since. Since moving here, I’ve discovered the stuffed fry jack, which usually comes with beans and either eggs or chicken. I have tried lots of different fry jacks on the island in search for my favorite. Café Maya, conveniently located on my way to school, has the best stuffed fry jack for a whopping $1.50. It’s hard to beat that value here.

I get to school around 7:30am to check my email and prepare for the day to come. First class of the day is language arts, which is when I work with my two remedial reading students. They have made good progress in the past couple weeks but unfortunately have a long way to go. We work on flash cards for the first 20-30 minutes and then spend the remainder of the hour reading books, such as Dr. Seuss. Oh, how I love Dr. Seuss. The school library has a great collection with close to 50 of his books.

Next up is math. At the start of the math class I administer the day’s multiplication time test. The kids are still enthusiastically working towards their ice cream party. They look forward to my returning the quizzes after lunch, all hoping to see their score go up. It’s hard for the teachers to give feedback to each student with 35 in a class, so I think the students really like to have the immediate and consistent feedback of the quizzes. One of the standard V boys had a recent epiphany and has started studying hard. He said that he used to skip school to watch TV but now realizes how foolish it was and is working extra hard to catch up. He stayed after school on Thursday to make up a math quiz that he missed because he was working with an English tutor. One of my reading students has also started to take initiative learning to read. She asked me the other day to help her pick out a good Dr. Seuss book to check out. It is events like this that make my day!

After the multiplication quiz, I stay in Miss Laura’s class to help the students with math. As they work on problems, I walk around and help check the students’ work. With a divide-and-conquer method, Miss Laura and I are able to give more students personal attention. Occasionally, I’ll pull students out individually who need some extra one-on-one work to understand the concepts. We’re still working on the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is pointless to move onto fractions, decimals and exponents if the basics are not yet mastered.

Once math is over, I usually head back to the office to grade their quizzes and have some lunch. Lunch at the school is wonderful and usually my main meal of the day. The kitchen ladies cook traditional Belizean food like rice and beans with stew chicken, chicken soup, or ground beef. Last week someone brought coolers of fresh fish in so we had fish fry. Yum! Once a week is either hot dogs or bologna sandwiches, not my favorite but it suffices.

Lately, I’ve been spending the next couple hours in the office working on a grant proposal to build a sea wall on the property and to restore mangroves. Even though I’ve been working on it 3-4 hours a day for the past 2 weeks, it is so easy to get distracted in the hustle and bustle of the office. There are always students coming in and out with every problem you can imagine. Linda, the office manager, is there all afternoon and we have a grand ol' time. Often I get pulled out to do something else like substitute or help out in other classes. On Friday there was an outbreak of head lice and the school had to send about 40 kids home with some lice shampoo. I took some home to wash my hair with just in case.

By 4 in the afternoon, my brain is usually fried and I stop doing work for the day and use the remaining hour that the office is open to catch up with family and friends online. I have been begrudgingly starting the inevitable job search to find a chemical engineering job to start this spring. In between chatting online, I’ve been updating my resume, searching job listings and writing cover letters.

At 5 o’clock the school closes and I head home during rush hour. Rush hour here is a stream of bicycles and golf carts that leave the resorts north of town and stream over the footbridge back into town. While it doesn’t compare to bumper to bumper traffic, it does get a little chaotic to navigate the sand streets covered with water-filled pot-holes and pot-"ditches". When the road gets wet here, as it so often does, the surface becomes the consistency and color of freshly mixed plaster. (Luckily I haven’t slipped yet.)

Now comes the big question of the day, should I cook at home or pick up food on the way home. I cook 3-4 days a week. The problem is that I don’t have a refrigerator and it is really hard to cook a meal for one and not have any leftovers.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are few and far between, so most food comes in cans packaged for more than 1 person. Therefore, my cooking is limited to rice and beans (see picture), Campbell’s soup (very expensive here), eggs, macaroni and cheese (carefully using only part of the box), or pasta with some canned vegetable. So… it is a lot more convenient to stop at a place like Vern’s Kitchen (my favorite) and get stewed chicken with rice and beans, coleslaw, cucumber and fried plantains (if I’m lucky) for $4.50. I get a balanced meal with just the right quantity for a killer price. It’s hard to beat.

By the time I get home, I’ve got about 4 hours to entertain myself with books, movies, and solitaire on my little netbook before I’m ready for bed. Occasionally I’ll hang outside and chat with two of my neighbors. I don’t go out at night by myself here. Living in a very male-dominated society, it is not safe for me to venture out to bars or clubs alone. I don’t want to take the chance of crossing paths with the wrong person at the wrong time. I don’t have much of a social life outside of the school down here, but I knew that would be the case before coming down here.

Halloween, Lots of Rain and an Eye Infection

Friday was the school’s annual Halloween Fair. Most primary schools in Belize throw a fundraiser fair for Halloween with food, games and raffles. Each class was responsible for running a booth or activity at the school. Miss Laura’s Standard V class had a lollipop game. Pay $0.50 to pick a lollipop decorated like a ghost, if there’s a piece of paper wrapped inside then you win a prize, otherwise you just get a lollipop. I tried 4 times and never won a prize. Now I have 4 very blue lollipops that make your whole mouth bright blue. There was a bake sale, dance hall, haunted house, dart games, games of chance and lots of food! The school had a BBQ chicken with rice, beans and coleslaw (a very traditional meal here) for $2.50 a plate. Mr. Freddie and Mr. Jason manned the grills all morning. Some kids dressed up, but most came in “rags,” or regular street clothes. Unfortunately, Mr. Vernon wouldn’t let the Std. V kids wear a costume or rags, so they were all in uniform.

The weather almost put a damper on the festivities. With a rising tide and strong on-shore wind, much of the property was flooded, and many booths were moved up onto the verandas as a result. The fair lasted a couple hours in the morning and was over by noon. In the end, the school raised about $1500. For a community that can barely put food on the table every day, this is a sizable amount. As Miss Francis always says, “Little drops of water, tiny grains of sand.” Unfortunately, this amount won’t even cover this month’s electric bill at the school. Everything is super expensive down here in such a remote location.

When I woke up Saturday morning, my right eye was swollen and I looked like Disney’s Hunch Back of Notre Dame, without the hunch-back part. (Photo available upon request only.) Living a town with virtually no pavement, strong winds mean there is lots of sand, dust and other debris flying around. I think something got lodged in my eye and got infected.

This is the only time I wished I had a working cell phone. Originally, I was going to get a local SIM card, but after a couple weeks I realized that I really have no need for one. Besides, they are really expensive ($0.25 per minute). Anyways, I paid for some minutes on a neighbor’s phone and got in touch with Miss Linda, the school office manager, to find a doctor to go see on a Saturday. 45 minutes later I was at Dr. Lerida Rodriguez’s office south of San Pedro.

I was pretty impressed with her office. It is simple but well-equipped with two patient rooms and a small pharmacy. I think the back room was a baby delivery room. She checked my eye out for any more bits of dust and gave me two antibiotics, one in drop-form for my eye and the other an ointment for the lid and tear duct. In the end, my office visit and 2 prescriptions cost me $75. While this is a bargain on US standards, it’s still more than one week’s pay for most residents here. There is a free clinic (donation requested) but it’s only open on weekdays (8-4:30) and usually only has a limited availability of medications.

The rest of my weekend has been pretty dull. My swollen eye hurts and is making my right eye strain to focus, which has caused a persistent headache. I have to keep sunglasses on while I’m outside to keep more debris from getting in it. Also, I don’t really want to walk in any stores where I have to take my glasses off to reveal my ogre-looking eye, so I’ve been reading books and watching old James Bond movies.

At first, I was a little bummed out that I was going to miss all the hoopla of Halloween. Then it started to rain. When it rains here, it RAINS. It can downpour for hours. Locals call it Nortes, referring to the North-easterly winds that bring persistent rain and wind. Every time I woke up Saturday night it was raining. I’m curious to find out if people still went out to celebrate that night. If it rains in the morning, attendance plummets at the schools because the locals think that if they go to school in the rain, then it will make them sick. I wonder if that applies to parties and bars too.

Luckily the rain brought cool weather with it. Then, it’s at least tolerable to stay inside during the hottest parts of the day. The sea side of the island always has a nice breeze. Although Ambergris is only about 250 yards wide where I live, I don’t get any breeze off the water living on the lagoon side of the island.  During the middle part of the day, it gets so hot that I have to sit right in front of my fan to be remotely comfortable.  I’m writing this at 1pm in the afternoon and it’s quite pleasant lounging in my hammock with the fan on low. As a side note, I think my hammock was the best $35 I could have spent on this island. It beats sitting in a plastic patio chair all the time.