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.

I Can't Sleep

Thus ends the first day we are a part of the Peace Corps family: my mind simply will not stop. For once it is not due to stress or anxiety. Quite simply, I am thrilled and finally can allow myself to feel so. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world! That is what I used to tell Scott when we first got together. Cheesy, I know, but I am so happy and literally cannot stop smiling and thinking about how lucky we are to be going to Belize and to be going together. It is proving to be worth the wait, already.

Our Staging Director, in charge of our general introduction to the organization, told our training group of forty-five people we hit the jackpot in the Peace Corps lottery with Belize. Tropical paradise. The scary bugs are there only so we will have stories to tell people back at home.

We were prompted to create lists related to our anxieties and aspirations, with illustrations. I drew a scorpion at the request of someone in my group. Scott, in a different group, wrote about being able to use what he learned in school. Other examples were language learning, outhouses, malaria, host families, lack of vegetables, usefulness, the job, playing with children, gender roles, creative projects, acceptance, integration.

We talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how the bottom of the pyramid consists of the most basic needs, which is the survival level and the place at which most people the Peace Corps serve exist. From there, in general, people graduate to increasing levels of awareness. Once the basic need for food is satisfied, people in turn try to satisfy the need for security, like shelter and bodily protection, and then the need for love, or belonging and becoming a part of a community, and then the need for dignity and self-respect, relating to the ego.

Finally, when all of the other needs have been satisfied, people can attain the top triangle of the pyramid which is self-actualization. The director asserted that each of us had reached the point of self-actualization by persevering in the process of becoming a Peace Corps trainee, but that each of us in the next few weeks would probably spring up and down among the levels of the hierarchy of needs. Reasons for this may vary from getting enough food to eat in a country unfamiliar to us to beginning meaningful and lasting personal relationships with hosts very different from us in custom and manner.

These are ideas and realities I discussed in college with classmates and experienced to some degree while working for a nonprofit and traveling a bit overseas. Even so, it is exciting to think of living with them as a reality in daily life again. Change can be exhilarating, as can challenges, especially when bolstered by lofty ideals. I can understand what our director means by this term self-actualization in that something as seemingly intangible and ethereal as reaching outside oneself to help someone else can be realized by something as simple as committing to learn and share. How elemental is that! It is something we did in kindergarten, learning and sharing with others, and yet it can contribute to the betterment of societies. I also can understand that an important facet of self-actualization is that it makes you feel good, and not just about yourself.

No Good at Good-bye

This is one of the first pictures I saw of Logan, Utah, where I have lived with Scott for almost two years now. It does not capture the open views of Cache Valley and surrounding mountains, but still I like it. These are simple, uncluttered days for us, so we have had time to reflect and prepare for Peace Corps. This week we have been taking care of last minute details for our upcoming itinerant life and seeing friends when we can.


The picture is of Scott and Andrew, the son of our friends Scott and Liz, and it was taken near Brian's house. Brian is the good friend with whom we are staying until we leave for Miami. I am thankful we have friends like him. I have learned a lot from Brian; I think Scott and I both have.


Brian lives in a rustic house north of Logan, where there are more hayfields and open land compared to where we lived this year a block from downtown. It is refreshing and peaceful. After Scott sold our car on Friday and our remaining unclaimed possessions were littering Brian's driveway, Brian and I talked about how attached people can become to material things. I felt it was freeing to be rid of so much stuff, but the process was somewhat awkward and humiliating, finding people who wanted some of our stuff and then seeing in the end what was left on the ground like trash. How can we be strapped to so many things?


Brian told me about meeting a guy who saw his house and asked about his ambitions, if he eventually wanted one of the sprawling houses of the well-to-do on the mountainside. Brian said no without hesitation. I guess the guy thought that having excess wealth would guarantee him friends and an exciting life. I agreed with Brian that it is best to have only what you need and to be content with fewer things rather than always wanting more. It seems like such a fair and sustainable way to live. I am glad we are going to a different world, in a sense, with Peace Corps, where money is not so handy and priorities are sometimes upside down to the American way of accumulating extraneous possessions.

Brian is unassuming and has a generous personality, not only in giving of material things like sharing his house with us, but in his evenness of temper. I think he could get along with almost anyone. He can see other people's points-of-view, or at least agrees to try. At the same time, he is ready to admit his limitations as a human being. We all have limitations, but I do not think he has very many. Brian was a very strong climber before I knew what climbing was. This is a picture of Brian climbing a 5.13b route in Logan Canyon, and below is a picture of Brian mountain biking with us in Green Canyon.

One week to go!

We have one more week before leaving for Belize, via Miami. The last two weeks have been filled with fun and adventure. Instead of describing everything I'll just make a list in chronological order starting on July 30:

July 30

We cleaned our apartment out and left for California to see my parents (with a car load of crap we wanted to keep) at 10:30 pm.

July 31

Slept in the car around 4 am in central Nevada.

Met my parents in Nice California around 3 pm, hung out and threw the frisbee after dinner.

Aug 1

Spent a whole day near Mendocino California kayaking in a bay that has sea caves and blow-holes and lots of seaweed and divers getting Abalone and April even saw a seal!

Ate dinner at a fancy 'organic' restaraunt and drove back to Nice.

Aug 2

Went wine sampling nearby my parents hotel and even bought two cases of Rose' wine that is delicious and only cost $26 for both cases (the wine was made by the winery we went to for another company that was targeted towards the gay community, it is called Butch Blush and has a half naked farm-boy on the label).

Unpacked our car and loaded down my parents van.

Said goodbye to my parents.

Aug 3

Left Nice and headed towards the Bay Area, we got ourselves a really nice campsite at China Camp State Park near San Rafael Ca which is about 15 miles north of San Francisco.

The camping area had really nice mountain bike trails, so April and I rode them on our single-speeds, mine is a mountain bike but hers is a road bike. It was a lot of fun passing guys on $6,000 (I mean that) bikes with my thrift store find, some people spend too much time at work and not enough on their bicycles.

Had a good campfire and smores.

Aug 4

Packed up our camping gear and drove to San Francisco. We parked near the warf and rode our bikes down the Embarcadero, up Market Street and to the Castro District. We walke around the Castro and stopped at a specialty cheese store that I recognized from the television show 30 Days where they sent a middle American boy that believes homosexuality is a sin to live with a gay man in Castro, they had the guy get a job at the cheese store we went to. Next we went to Hot Cookie to get some of the best cookies I have ever had.

We rode our bikes to Haight Street and checked our Email at a coffee shop that had free wifi and I looked for a pair of adidas I wanted at a few of the trendy shoe stores there. Then we went back to the car and drove to Berkeley so I could check out the guide book for Lover's Leap near Tahoe at the Marmot Mountain Works.

We drove to Angel's Camp and stayed at a Hotel sort of thing that my dad got us for the night, with intentions to go to Yosemite the next day.

Aug 5

We got up late and dinked around the hotel room till check out time and decided to forgo Yosemite and headed towards Tahoe.

We stopped for lunch at Kirkwood ski resort and payed too much for lunch meat and cheese, but it was a good place to stop.

We stopped in Tahoe for some supplies and went to Lover's Leap to set up camp.

Lover's leap is gorgeous, a quiet campground with wonderful rock.

Aug 6

We got up early so we could try to do two big routes in one day, but after the first route we decided to hang out at this single pitch crag that had some really fun crack climbs that we could top rope after climbing this fun 5.9.

we arrived back at camp around 4 pm ate some food and went down to the river and sat in the cold waters, it felt great.

Aug 7

We got up packed up our camping gear, ate breakfast and headed back up to the wall to do Corrugation Corner, probably the best 5.7 anywhere! We decided to do the first pitch of Travellers Buttress to get us up onto the ledge that Corrugation Corner starts on, it was a fun but kinda burly 5.8. We climbed Corrugation Corner in three long pitches and hiked down to the car and headed towards Utah.

We stopped in Tahoe to eat some dinner and then drove straight through with stops for bathrooms and gas arriving back in Logan around 7 am on Aug 8.

So now we are crashing at my friend Brians house for the week. We sold our car on Friday, I posted it on Craigslist and had it sold within 3 hours of the post. I should have asked for more, but I thought we would have a hard time getting what we owed on it, but I under-valued what a Honda Civic in crappy condition would sell for. So now we both still have our bikes to get around town, no big debt to worry about and just a few bags of food and the two bags each we are taking to Belize.

here are some pictures we took on our trip: