The BEST Chocolate Chip Cookie Ever!!!

That's right. Kroppf's Bakery, Belize: absolutely the best chocolate chip cookies we've ever tasted. So far in training, Scott has lost 12 pounds, and I've lost 7. About the cookies, we don't know if this is our conclusion simply because we're hungry, or because they are truly light, crispy yet slightly chewy, cinnamon-y sweet morsels of perfection. No offense, Mom.

Muy Amable

Meet our new host family! Demetrio y Ruth Soto, y Brian, Ronald, Ludin, y Keylin. They are so sweet and caring. They have been hosting our fellow trainee Alejandro and are graciously accepting us for a couple of months after he moves to nearby Trio. They are from Guatemala. These pictures are from dinner preparations one night during which Ruth taught us to make tortillas, Scott cut chicken from the bone for fajitas, and I taught Ruth to bake peanut butter cookies. It was exhausting and hot, but a lot of fun.

Which Brazil?

These are our Brazilian friends, Denise and Bruno. As part of a different humanitarian organization, they are living in Bella Vista for 4 months and are involved currently with health projects similar to what we hope to have. They also travel to several communities near the banana farms, promote HIV/AIDS prevention, teach English classes, and lead meetings about organic gardening in this area. They hope the gardens families begin to plant in Bella Vista will not only improve nutritional intake, but benefit budgets as well. With the price of food similar to America, it is nearly impossible to make ends meet on the amount of money a person makes working on the farms. Most workers make $2.50 an hour, which is $1.25 US.

A gardening resource for Peace Corps Volunteers is a book called How to Grow More Vegetables and is a result of the research and practices of an organization based in California called Ecology Action and its program GROW BIOINTENSIVE. They propose working toward sustainability by returning to small-scale farming to meet each person’s caloric needs, taking care in turn to grow crops in a way that replenishes nutrients in the soil up to 99%. The GROW BIOINTENSIVE mini-farm model is proportioned as 60% grains and other high-carbon crops, 30% high-calorie root crops, and 10% vegetable crops (Jeavons 28). A percentage of the vegetable crops can be grown as income crops. A living project called Biosphere II, which used Ecology Action agricultural techniques, proved that a complete year’s diet for one person could be raised on the equivalent of 3,403 square feet (Jeavons 30). By contrast, commercial agriculture uses 15,000 to 30,000 square feet to produce all the food for one person for one year, 16,000 in the developing world. These Biointensive methods are used as nutrition intervention in Mexico and are spreading throughout Latin America.

We hope to build on the interest in family gardens here in the coming months.

Jeavons, John. How to Grow More Vegetables* (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) *than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine: A Primer on the Life-Giving Sustainable GROW BIOINTENSIVE Method of Organic Horticulture. Ecology Action of the Midpeninsula. Willits, California: 2002.

http://www.growbiointensive.org/

A Beautiful View

This is a rad picture of Bella Vista, the “beautiful view.” Scott took it when we were walking after language class late one afternoon, and I took a similar shot that did not turn out nearly as rad. We had reached the edge of town to the northeast, toward the sea, and a storm was brewing. The clouds were moving east to west, which can throw someone off when that someone is from the west coast of the United States.

I am infatuated with the clouds above this country. They never sit still. They shift, sifting light, and heave, and toss themselves into great heaps of color and robustness; they float softly, then swiftly, darkening and sweeping the sky with curtains of rain.

It is the rainy season, and this week has been proof of that. Our moods have mirrored the weather in some ways. It rains torrentially like a good thunderstorm in Alabama, sudden and surprising, except that the surprising thing to us is it continues at that rate for hours on end. A thousand tiny hammer-blows on the zinc roof. We have to repeat ourselves to hear each other over the roar. The improvised bridge between the sites in the south and Belmopan flooded, I suppose a fairly common occurrence considering it consists of a pile of stones and planks a scant 5 feet above the river at its normal level.

Despite it all, our training team, a group of 11 assigned to promote Healthy Communities, has built a latrine together and planted gardens at three different sites. The other two community training sites are Maya Mopan-speaking and are called Maya Mopan and San Roman. A helter-skelter fence, made of random boards, some wire screening, a gate, and the rusted hood of a car from the dump, guards our garden from the many chickens that peck and scratch about as they please.

Healthy Communities training is led by the world’s best cheerleader, Jamie. As Peace Corps Volunteers, one of the most important roles we can fill is that of cheerleader, or change agent, or advocate, in our communities. Jamie is pictured below wearing the t-shirt proclaiming, “Everything is possible,” which is indicative of the way she lives her life. She is sort of my hero. She is just too happy to be a realistic role model for my personality, but I admire her very much and would like to emulate at least some aspects of her character and sunny disposition. She describes herself as having a big heart for people, which is true. Somehow she is able to overlook all of the annoying, petty obstacles that stand in the way of helping and encouraging people, without being naive, and in the end, community goals are realized. And she smiles all the way through it.

La Cueva

One afternoon last weekend, we had welcome relief from the adjustment to the oppressive heat and climate. A friend of our host family took us to property owned by relatives several miles distant from Bella Vista, toward the mountains and the rocky cliffs covered in thick jungle in view to the west. We were to visit a cave. Una cueva.

Scott and I piled into a little pickup with four others, all men. As dark clouds gathered over the mountains, one man decided to wait for another day and hopped out. There is not a paved road where we live, except for the Southern Highway, which slices through the outer edge of town and separates the bulk of the town from the banana farms. We took this highway west at surprising speed, the wind in our faces and a storm ahead.

Large drops fell during most of our drive along a heavily rutted dirt road, but hesitated long enough for us to walk among towering cornstalks at the roadside to pick a few cobs to roast over the fire at the farm hut. A young woman lives at the hut with her husband, who is a kind of caretaker. She cooks and paints. She is from Guatemala, and she has no legs. I am not sure if she was born this way, or if she had a terrible accident. Either way, she has one of the brightest dispositions I have seen and is more optimistic than I ever could imagine being in her position. When we met her, she proudly showed us a stack of paintings of different scenes on cardboard, each one featuring a smiling woman with beautiful legs.

It was pleasant in the thatch-roofed hut, with an open fire over which to cook (the woman was pressing tortillas to bake over the fire when we arrived). It was in the middle of an open meadow, surrounded by lush vegetation, a stream on one side, neat gardens, many chickens, and a pheasant or two. They grow tomatoes, chile dulce, green beans, beans, squash, pumpkins, okra, and cucumbers.

The nearest rocky mound was roughly a half-mile away, and our friends led us up to the entrance to the cave, cutting vines and undergrowth with their machetes on the path. The holds on the rock face were awesome. Very nice pockets. Scott kept saying, “Sweet,” and gesturing to the others about climbing. They just smiled, crazy Americans.

Ducking into the cave’s mouth at waist level, dozens of bats whizzed past my head. I could feel the wind of their passing on my ears, their tiny wings seeming to brush my forehead. Scott took many pictures, one of a huge beetle the length of his finger and twice as thick. The following pictures scarcely capture the vast interior of the cave or the intricacy of its features. Some of them were like gigantic curtains and enormous chandeliers in an underground castle. Our friends had walked for more than an hour and a half straight into it on a previous occasion. The rooms varied little in depth, and the air was dank with the smell of bats and was exceedingly humid. We also saw an example of broken pottery from a Mayan vessel for carrying water.

Out of Site

Our community-based training site is a village called Bella Vista, which is largely Spanish-speaking. We have begun settling into our host home and village; our host family is very amiable and was one of the first to live in this location, near sprawling banana farms. Most families are originally from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. We will stay in Bella Vista for the following two months for training and will have little Internet access. Most Fridays we will attend additional classes in the capital, Belmopan.

Even so, people can write us sweet letters and send awesome packages at any time to:

P. O. Box 492
Belmopan, Belize
CENTRAL AMERICA

There is Another Melting Pot

First of all, we really feel like we are melting in this picture. Secondly, it is paradise. It is dreadfully hot, but we see so many people, girls in school uniforms, policemen, young men with tobogans on their heads, walking along as if it is not hot that we pretend like we do not notice the heat either. That is, until we crowd onto the school buses that are used for public transport here and gulp from the rapidly cooling water bottles provided by Peace Corps staff.

While we have noticed how people carry themselves in this climate and how they dress, the most striking of my first impressions is the different, sometimes unexpected, words that come out of their mouths. Belizeans in general speak at least four or five languages, including English, which is taught in schools and is the official language, Kriol, Spanish, Garifuna, from a people group exiled from St. Vincent, and two Mayan languages called Kekchi and Mopan. Where we have begun training in the capital of Belmopan, the most commonly spoken language in public is Kriol. I am tempted to say, "Buenos dias," when I see a woman who looks like one of the women I knew in Mexico, but she may speak Mayan and is only in the capital to sell produce at the market. Or she may speak Spanish but greet people on the street with, "Maanin," like everyone else.

Kriol is such a lively language. We are receiving a handful of lessons in survival Kriol. It is a lot of fun. Recently, a dictionary was published to standardize the spellings of Kriol words, but largely it is not written, only spoken. One of the instructors who lived in Jamaica before coming here urges us to "step up to it," or "stand up and put some rhythm in it." It is as if it takes all of your powers of expression and body language to do it justice. The following is a poem/song in Kriol on behalf of Peace Corps Belize. You probably need to sound it out audibly to recognize the words.

Gud maanin

We da pees koar

We kom da bileez

Wid wahn speshal goal

Fi shayr wi talens;

Shoa wee da gud nayba

Ahn fu enjai unu food

An unu eksaitin kolcha

Over the weekend, our training group took a field trip to Dangriga for an introduction to Garifuna or Garinagu culture. We visited a museum, where we were told the stories of their ancestors and their combined heritage from Africa, represented by a group that was shipwrecked on St. Vincent and escaped slavery at that time, and from the Orinoco Basin of South America. We saw drum-making and cassava bread-baking demonstrations. We ate snapper in coconut milk soup, bones and eyes and all, and plaintain dumplings. The day was finished with a presentation of traditional dancing, as seen above.