So I would like to apologize for being so late on posting, but I had a lot to post! Projects I was lucky to be able to do a large range of things while I was there I learned a ton and had so much fun doing it. Here is the list of all the things I did....
Worked in the Old People home
helped with physical therapy
also helped deliver meals to people who were home bound
Volunteered at Faith Nazzarine Primary school
helped the teachers in classroom and grading papers while school was in session
help run a three week reading camp after school ended, taught Standard Two which was ages 7-9
Worked on St. Ignatius School
Learned how to make and do concrete, built a walkway and a ramp
painted over 200 desks
Beautify St. Andrews Primary School
painted 20 window shutters
Volunteered at Kings Orphanage in Belmopan
helped with the sports camp we were holding there
Here is the things that were being done by other volunteers
Helping put up a map and make a brochure to increase tourism in a small town called Sucotzz
Two week computer classes at the George Price center in Belmopan, taught about 40 kids computer basics
put on a benefit dinner and raised over 2000$ for Mary Open Doors a shelter for battered women
Piano and guitar lessons for local kids who were interested
Peace camp at Mary Open Doors
Volunteering at Marla's a girls home in Belmopan
Health presentations at the school we worked at during the reading camps
There is also additional projects and things that were done before got there and after I left, this is just a general summary of what we spent our time doing while I was there.
My favorite project by far was the reading camp, it was such a challenge but so rewarding I absolutely loved working with the kids. The only language barrier I ran into was trying to teach them how to rhyme, due to there accents and such a mix of languages rhyming is something they truly just do not understand. There was such a wide range of skill level, understanding and speed that sometimes it became difficult, but I hope and I think they learned something or at least improved skills they already had. If not they will definitely remember the summer they had a white girl from the states trying to teach them english. There were several teachers and we spent 7:30-12 teaching and usually the afternoon or night planning the lesson for the next day, or working on other projects, it definitely wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be, but like I said it was so rewarding and I learned a lot from it. I was so glad I got to do a wide range of things. I absolutely loved this experience, I loved the people I got the opportunity to live with, they are all incredible and I learned so much from them and had so much fun with them. I fell in love with the country it has such a unique and beautiful culture and was amazing to be able to live there for 6 weeks. I was lucky I was able to do such a wide range of things and work so closely with the people of the country. It truly makes me think twice about how incredibly blessed we are to even just live in the country we live in. We have so many opportunities here and living away from it all truly puts things in perspective. Thank you everybody who followed along on my weak attempt to keep up with what I did and for your patience on my slow posting. Also a special thank you to everybody who helped make this possible, I really appreciate it, it was truly an opportunity of a lifetime. I love you all!
Being taught how to mix concrete.
The ziplining picture from earlier
Helping Keizia with classwork. I miss all my students!
Painting windows at Saint Andrews
More window painting Im all the way in the back, it was this blue oil paint that was impossible to get off and basically got all over us I pretty much turned into a smurf and it didnt come off until I had been home for a week.
Fun day!! Me and Jez in the back of a truck.
Some of the 200 desks we painted. I think I posted this picture earlier sorry for the repeat.
Cementing the walkway! We also did a couple ramps on other parts of the campus.
My class!! None of the kids there smile for pictures and I'm not sure why.
"Crazy" picture, finally got them to smile..kind of
All of the teachers from the reading camp!!
Kids from class, Daniel and Dulce.
More kids, Kezia, Christopher and Chirs
More concrete...
Tearing up grass
Everyone in the house the night before I left! With mama K of course. I love them and miss them all so much!
Sunset...seems like a good closure picture. Sorry I dont have pictures from all our projects! There is also more project pictures in an earlier post. Love you All!
I am dedicating this post to a typical Belizian day, or at least
aspects of life that are unique to Belize such as the mushrooms that
grew from the floor of the bathroom and the wall of the shower....
They
were lovely, yes that is real life and it happened on three separate
occasions. The three that grew from the floor were particularly bad as
me and my friend Andi (the one I shared the bottom bunk with, we became
really close as you would imagine) cleaned them up at 1 in the morning
because we both had to go to shower and the mushrooms were giving
us a headache.
Washing clothes, which usually happened
once every other week, luckily for me because I brought a lot of things,
too much in my parents opinion but hey I only had one suitcase and it
was 50 lbs.
So
basically you had to fill up buckets of water from outside, dump them
in with the clothes and soap, usually it took about two buckets and then
there was a 15 minute wash cycle and then we would drain the water
through a hose onto the front porch and then get more water and do it
again, to get the soap out. That part of the washing machine fit a
surprising amount of clothes, the spinner part however, not so much and
it was only 5 minutes long so then they would have to hang outside, or
one of the makeshift clothes lines in the room to finish drying.
FOOD FOOD FOOD
DINNER
TIME! We always went and picked up dinner from mama K's house (that's
what we called our cook) every Sunday thru Thursday at 5pm it was about a
ten minute walk and it always came in nice little Styrofoam boxes.
Sometimes we all ate together, but usually a group of us would go pick
up dinner, go running in the park (because by then it was semi cool) and
then ate dinner, and then a couple times a week would go get ice cream
at this place across the street.
OH and this place was called sweet ting located on top of this HUGE hill but it had really good cake and baked goods and they sold legit American candy so everyone went there for their chocolate cravings.
This is a video I took going to pick up dinner at Mama K's one evening, the reason it gets all crazy when I walk into the house is because Mama K does not like being on camera that much, so I was trying to film without her noticing. Sorry its so shaky, if you listen closely you can hear her talking and its a pretty good example of the creole accent.
Mama K in her kitchen, showing us her shoes that were twice the size of her foot.
Walking back for dinner! Sometimes she would come and eat with us at the house, that was always really fun. You can see in my hand I have two of the dinners in the bag.
Cleaning the kitchen one day and I found this lovely surprise...I think it was bread at one point. But it was so green and moldy we couldn't really tell, but hey at least I was cleaning..?
Ice cream at Vivians! After we work out of course, because whats better then ice cream after a run. This would usually happen a couple times a week.
The grocery store, well one of the three that we frequented. Fun fact, they are all owned by Asians, every single supermarket is run by Asians. At some point a country in Asia came over a assisted the Belizian people and so that how they ended up in Belize.
Because everyone loves warm box milk...yes this was the milk.
This house, is just one of many that sells food from there front door, but this one is near and dear to my heart because it sold choco bananas! for 25 US cents and I basically got one at least every other day. Most of the food, if we went out to buy food, we bought off the street from various shacks, especially for lunch. Belize is one of few countries, where it is clean enough to get street food and not be asking for food poisoning.
Typical Belizian meal, bbq chick, rice and beans, fried plantain and cole slaw. Eaten out of a Styrofoam box of course. Oh and they love mayonnaise they put it on EVERYTHING.
Me, Bri and Jez making lunch one day at the house. Eggs, cheese, onions and zucchini. We all would make it together because we usually ended up making 20+ eggs. And I cant even count how many times I burned myself trying to light the gas stove with a match.
The market! This is where we got all of our fruit, and we ate a lot of fruit. Bananas were 20 for 1 USD and they were the best bananas ever, and the pineapple, you can eat the whole thing, there is no core you just cut off the spiky things and that is by far the best pineapple I have ever had.
Purified water, crucial necessity of course.
The park! Where we would run laps on the "track" some people would play basketball, or we would play with the kids when they were waiting for their bus home from school.
That blue thing is his hair, or dreadlocks, which were EVERYWHERE. The culture has huge Caribbean and Rastafarian influence.
Church on sundays, in front of the english branch which is a house and the the spanish branch has a building, which is second.
Just your average wildlife. This tarantula and well whatever the other
thing is where found at the old peoples home we worked out. But never
fear we also had a tarantula that size that lived in what would be the
chicken coops under the door of our house, we discovered him one day
while we were working out in the yard. And there was also always a
various amount of geckos that lived in the house.
Our lovely house, well just a part of it, the sheets were put up to create another room when we ran out of space. We also always had a massive pile of shoes by the door.
The local department store and night club which we are 99% sure was a brothel.
Meeting time! We had meetings every sunday and Wednesday night to discuss projects and schedules. Amanda is the country director in green and Hilary is the one with the Ukulele. You can see our lovely calender and then weekly days.
Graveyards, where everyone is buried above ground.
Mayan calendars and other mayan things where sold everywhere, if you can read the little cartoon it is pretty funny.
Random house, thought it looked cool, definitely one of the nicer houses.
Cooling off at the pool after a long day! There was a resort by us on top of a huge hill of course but we would go in and use there pool and it would feel awesome.
That is probably what I would classify this weekend as since everything we did was very touristy but very fun. We only get 30
day visas so in order to renew them we simply leave the country and come back
in and bam new visas. We went and visited Tikal in Guatemala, we only live
about a 15 minute drive from the boarder and then just walked across which was
a cool experience. Despite the rain at the beginning it ended up just being
slightly overcast which was nice kept the temperature down. This is the fourth
Mayan ruin I have visited and was definitely the most impressive second being
Tulum in Mexico. But Tikal is just huge they have a couple thousand structures
not even a fourth of them are unearthed. You can climb on so many of them and
they just keep going like you climb up one and walk through it and then all the
sudden there is a ball court. Guatemala was also incredible the people there
have such a rich culture there was a lot of them wearing traditional Mayan
dress walking around Tikal and apparently they still do rituals and ceremony's in
Tikal itself. We also learned that although yes December 24, 2012 is the end of
the Mayan calendar this just happens to be one of the several times the Mayan
calendar has ended and will simply just start over again at year 0 and end in
5,337 years. Hate to disappoint looks like we will make it to 2013. Then for
lunch we had a traditional meal and I was dared to eat the homemade hot sauce
by a spoonful which of course naturally I did it. Regret, I have never felt so
much fire in my mouth and I started crying because it was so hot. But totally
worth it because I got free ice cream. So end of the day ended up with lots of
stamps in my passport and another unforgettable experience.
Walking across the boarder!
Back view of temple one, the most famous one. Its a temple because it only has one staircase.
Me, Bri, Kristy and Andi at the top of one of the many ruins. I love them.
Some more ruins, pretty cool looking they are all covered though with an additional layer of bricks to help preserve them.
One of the carvings on the side of the temple its covered up with a hut to help preserve it, its really big and incredibly cool looking supposedly its in the image of The Chocolate King, one of the most famous kings.
All of us together with temple one in the background!
This ledge was slightly intimidating this is a close up of the one that is above.
Saturday was all day fun, literally. We left about 8:30 and went zip lining,
it was of course raining again because now it is rainy season and we were zip
lining through the jungle. The views were incredible, it was over 2,000 feet of
zip line which involved climbing ladders, hiking through the jungle or simply
zip line from one platform to the next. There was a few tree people collisions
because you are responsible for stopping yourself, but we all made it out
alive. At the end for the last zip line we had to take a jungle lift up, it was
a little nerve racking but completely thrilling.
(Currently dont have any pictures of zip lining)
After lunch we drove to a different place and went cave tubing which
was absolutely incredible, on of the coolest things I have ever done. It of
course naturally started pouring down rain the second we got there so we hiked
through the jungle for about 45 minutes in the rain before we could put in our
tubes. It then stopped raining so we free swam for a bit and then entered the
cave. You have to go with guides which was actually really cool because they
gave us this whole Mayan tour and how the Mayans believed the caves were the
entrance to the underworld and would go in them and perform rituals. They had
us all link together as they took us through the caves. On the way home we
stopped in Spanish Lookout which is where all the Mennonites live. Awhile back
the government made a deal with them that they could live tax free so the
country could benefit off their produce, its so odd to see people dressed as
pioneers driving cars. They are the most technology advanced people in the
country and make the best ice cream. And now its Sunday and Ive been working on
this blog post hanging out with everyone in the house. Our chef, who we call
Mama Kay came over and ate dinner with us, she speaks creole and is one of the
most entertaining people I have ever met as she called out everyone in the
house on different things, like not being married yet or having a crush on each
other. Oh and we attempted baking chocolate chip cookies. So all and all there
are really no words to describe how truly amazing this has all been. I
absolutely adore everyone in the house we all get along so well and I feel like
I have already known them from somewhere before. I love life. Thank you for
taking time to read my blog posts, if you have made it this far.
The whole group! Almost the whole team went, and yes it was absolutely pouring rain, the first time I have actually felt cold here, but so worth it.
The end of the river.
Hiking through the jungle to get to the starting point.
This is were we started the cave entrance is on the far right, the water so blue and pretty.
Everyone in the water!
All linked together ready to enter the cave
Exiting the cave.
Random Mennonite picture! They have the best watermelon.
