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Monday: The Succotz Library I woke up Monday morning to the sound of screeching parrots in the nearby trees. After a shower, I went upstairs at 7 a.m. and ate breakfast with our group. I couldn’t remember the last time I had worn shorts and a t-shirt on a February morning but I liked the concept. This was something I could definitely get used to.
ProBelize, our sponsoring agency, had lined up two separate and very different work sites for us that week. In the village of San Jose de Succotz, a half-hour from San Ignacio and near the Guatemalan border, we needed to lay the foundation for a library that would double as the town's hurricane shelter. And in the remote village of San Antonio, about 10 miles south of San Ignacio, we needed to shore up the walls and build a sidewalk at an elementary school.
There were 23 in our crew and Cecelia split us up into different workgroups each day, making sure each person visited both sites during the week. I worked at Succotz on Monday and Tuesday and at San Antonio on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, we were planning to work in the morning and visit a Mayan temple in the afternoon, our reward for a hard week’s work – assuming we survived!
After a great pancake breakfast on Monday morning, my Succotz group bundled into a van driven by Adrian, an amiable ProBelize staffer, and headed down the bumpy highway, briefly stopping at a Taiwanese-run grocery store to pick up some drinking water. Belize is a quirky country and a real ethnic melting pot, partly because the Belizean government sells passports to Taiwanese citizens. The Taiwanese get a chance to start a business, the Belizean government makes a hefty bundle, and everyone’s happy. Well, except for some of the locals, who resent the incursion of the Taiwanese. But in general, everyone in Belize gets along pretty well from what the ProBelize staff told us.
Speaking of the Taiwanese, that evening Cecelia told me a funny story about her experience in a Chinese grocery store that still cracks me up. She wanted to get some bananas for her work crews, so she walked into a Chinese grocery store in San Ignacio Monday evening and asked if they had bananas. Something like the old song, “Yes, we have no bananas,” the Chinese woman at the checkout counter got upset at Cecelia and said, “Bananas? No, we don’t have any bananas! This is a GROCERY store!”
Um, O.K. – so where are you supposed to buy bananas in Belize, I wondered? I still laugh when I think about it.
Above left: Belize's currency is worth one-half of American currency. In the stores, you can use either Belize dollars, American dollars or a mix. Yes, that's Queen Elizabeth, a holdover from the British Honduras days. Above center: Our rooms at Chiclero Camp were basic but comfortable. We even had cable TV and, like a lot of the Belizeans, watched CNN's coverage of the Wisconsin primary. Above right: My roommate, Bernie, used to deal blackjack in the Vegas casinos and now does a lot of volunteer work. Bernie, you can be my roommate any day!
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