Guatemala and home

We left Belize on Sunday and boarded a bus to Guatemala to see Tikal, one of the most famous Mayan ruins. We paid our entrance fee at the border, one which seems to change depending on the day or the person working the counter. Although the countryside looked much like Belize, Guatemala just seems to have so much more culture. We passed through a small town where the local women were washing their clothes by the lake and children rode by on small bareback horses.

We arrived at Tikal in the morning and learnt all about the extreme intelligence of the civilization- something the culture doesn't necessarily project this day in age. The calendar they used in their time was more accurate than the one we use today and many of their buildings were constructed so the sun and the moon would appear in special slots during the equinox. They were extremely gifted astronomers and mathematicians. They also built Tikal in a location with no natural water source, claiming it was more important to build where the three forces met- the force from hte earth, the sky and the underground lava flows. Now some of these practices seem trivial, for example, they weren't allowed to cut palms for their houses unless a priest allowed it, 3 days before or 3 days after the full moon. Interestingly enough, in the days preceeding and following a full moon, the sap from the plant travels up into the leaves of the plant and when cut the palms last up to 20 years compared to the usual 3-5yrs. Unfortunately the arrival of the Spanish destroyed their civilization through warring and disease and the only Mayans who were able to survive were the farmers and the hunters and thus the knowledge was lost. I asked one Mayan how often she had to replace her thatch roof and she replied every 3-5 years.

The buildings were magnificent towering above us against the clear blue sky. We climbed up as many as we could to look down upon the rest of the excavated village. Although we avoided climbing the ones where or tour guide showed us the blood stains from the previous week's fallen tourist. We saw cicadas, which are bright turquoise, locusts which have magenta wings and we spent some time chasing after a troupe of howler monkeys in the trees. We watched the sun set from the top of one ruin (after having climbed 3 others to find the best view). Ian and I then got up at 4:30 the next morning to watch the mist rise off the jungle and give way to the ruins around us.

We bussed into Flores, a town not too far away and peeked around the colourful cobblestone streets. The handicrafts are beautiful there and the stores all seem to be draped in layers of coloured cloth. We spent some time wandering Flores and the neighbouring Santa Elena before heading back to Belize City to fly out.




On the flight home from Dallas to Chicago I reached into my knapsack to grab a granola bar and realized I had brought my steak knife with me! And I had somehow gotten through security with it at the Dallas Airport! We also flew home from Chicago to Ottawa with the Blind Boys of Alabama, the headliners at this years' Jazz Festival.

It was a great trip but I'm sure glad to be back in a comfy bed with a warm shower!

The Best of the Best

We completed our week in Belize City which included numerous meetings with everyone from the Ministry of Education to the University of Belize to the PanAmerican Health Organization and everything in between. We made some wonderful contacts and got some great advice for next year! We also spent some time volunteering at the Red Cross. We offered them our services and they came up with a great job for us! Cleaning out a dirty old supply closet!! Yay!

The room had been filled with boxes of all kinds and the floor was covered in two feet of random clothing that was donated for hurricane relief. So we reluctantly sorted through some of it knowing that it was a pretty futile job that we were really only doing to keep our contact open with the organization.

One of the best things we did this week was to reminisce about the best and the worst moments of the trip. We compiled this list (in no particular order) of our favourite questions and comments from teaching:

1) What is outercourse?
2) Anne: "Where does the baby grow inside a woman?"
Class: "The uterary! The pancreas!! The UTENSIL!!!"
3) Do boys ejaculate once a month?
4) Why can't you eat the eggs from menstruation?
5) Anne: "What's it called when the penis stands up?"
Boy: "An egyptian!"
6) Anything starting with "Miss, I saw on Discovery Channel...."
7) If you cut off the penis will it grow back?
8) How many vaginas does a girl have?
9) If you get herpes will your penis fall off?
10) Why do boys get lazy when they go through puberty?
11) Kyle: "Where will new hair grow during puberty?"
Girl: "Guatemala!"
12) If you miss your period and you eat lots of really sour things will it make your period come sooner?
13) Can the peanut get stuck?
14) I think sex is like eating ice cream, please read this out loud.
15) If I wash my breasts will they get smaller and smaller?

And our personal favourite...

16) What is a nipple condom?

We are heading off to Guatemala to see Tikal and Flores this weekend! Hopefully I can remember my spanish....

The Final Week in School and the Texan Family Dog

Our team headed off to Corozal, the most northern district in Belize. As it is extremely close to the Mexican border, the town has a very hispanic feel to it. It's on the most beautiful stretch of coastline with parks and benches lining the turquoise water. We taught in a a variety of schools in town as well as in the surrounding villages, each one treating us to a different kind of Belizean food. The district coordinator, Miss Pena, drove us to and from every school and became almost like our mother for the week. The first day she took us to see the local mayan ruins and gave us a tour of the town. The following day, she took us to her family's house for lunch where we ate traditional escabeche, a type of onion soup with chicken served with handmade tortillas made by the grandmother on an open fire in the back yard. Every day she would bring us mangoes or creole bread to give us a taste of Belizean culture.

Besides giving us these amazing experiences, she also shared with us some of her most personal stories of her family and her students to give us a first hand account of the type of abuse that is commonplace in Belize. At 15, her daughter was kidnapped on the way home from school by a drug dealer who raped her then sold her to all of his friends. She was missing for 8 days and on her way to being sold in Guatemala when by pure chance a storeowner across the country recognized her as Miss Pena's daughter and hid her in the back of his store. The rest of the stories are really too heartbreaking to even recount. They are the type of stories I will never forget for the rest of my life and will constantly remind myself of when life in Canada seems what we consider "hard".

This past weekend we bussed into Orange Walk district to take a tour of the Lamanai Mayan ruins. There were about 20 people on the tour including a stereotypical Texan family that gave us hours of entertainment/bewilderment at the fact that some people like this actually exsist! They started out by bringing their family dog on the tour which immeadiately infuriated the dogs chained up at our departure point for the tour. They were luckily chained up, but were barking incessantly and pulling on their chains. This went on for about 10 minutes before the grandmother finally said "I wish that dog would be quiet!" The father was one of those men who liked to repeat everything the guide said adding his two cents to every comment. We took a 1hr ride up this beautiful river. It looked like black glass with banks overflowing with trees from the dense Belizean jungle. We saw numerous birds, lizards and plants along the way. When we arrived (and after the teenage girls had finished brushing their hair) we walked to the first temple, the Temple of the Masks. This smaller sized ruin had 4 10 foot carvings of faces all symmetrically arranged on the building (only one had been excavated in order to preserve the others). The mayans were interesting people in that every 52 years (the length of one mayan calendar) they built on top of the old temples with new walls, altars, carvings and levels. So during each historical period of their existance, the buildings would look completely different. It's really quite something. The carving of the face or mask was gorgeous and carved from white stone. After the Texan family dog had climbed all over it a few times, it decided that this would be a great place to relieve itself... on a 2500 yr old mayan carving....

The second temple was the largest and had hundreds of stairs to get to the top. The QMO team waited patiently as the previous group was trying to come down the steep steps. The family, of course, scampered right up passing the poor old couple trying to make their way down without falling 500ft to the ground. I was not impressed. The view from above was dizzying, but also beautiful. Mayans used to use it to look down upon the rest of the city and keep watch for intruders and smoke signals. The final temple, The Jaguar Temple, so named for its jaguar face stones was also quite large and impressive. It looked down upon a residential section of the town that we also walked through. We also saw an area where they played a type of ball game where either the winner or the loser (they are not sure which at this point) would be sacrificed. A giant carved stone in the centre of the court- the centre marker was lifted by archaelogists who found liquid mercury in a container underneath. The 9 year old made extra sure it was sturdy by walking all over it...

The site was very interesting and breathtaking in many cases. Unfortunately it poured rain on the ride home and we all got soaked. We tried to scope out some crocodiles down this small stream, but the Texan dad kept yelling "THIS MUST BE A SHORTCUT GIRLS!! IT'S A SHORTCUT!!" that they were all well warned of our arrival and we didn't see anything at all. We had a lot of fun, both because of the ruins themselves, but also laughing at the obliviousness of the family to their actions. We got in a van at the end of the ride with some of the other tourists. When it looked like we might not be leaving right away and my friend offered to move out of the way so I could get back outside I mumbled "that's okay, I'd rather be cooped up in here than out there with the family". A couple of the others heard me and we all had a good laugh, everyone feeling slightly relieved that they were not the only ones put out by our southern family.

We are now back in Belize City for the wrap-up week of our project. There will be lots of meetings, planning and administrative stuff to ensure a smooth project next year! Then we have a week to do some more touring around until we all head home!

More Photos

Drumming in Gales Point Manatee
Teaching in Corozal District

The Barrier Reef, Drumming and our European friends

We taught all week in San Ignacio and its surrounding villages. This week was particularly laden with hilarious questions and remarks from the students, many of which started with "Miss, I saw on Discovery channel..." We are currently compiling a top 10 list of our favourites to be posted soon.

On the weekend we returned to Caye Caulker for a little beach time. We relaxed on the pier in the afternoon while fighting off the advances of a couple of British soliders who were still excited at the prospect of being posted to Belize instead of Iraq. One soldier (complete with superman tattoo) tried to impress me by showing off his diving skills... big mistake. Trying to impress a girl with horrible dives only works if she isn't a competitive diver herself. Needless to say I showed him how it was really done and that was the end of that. At night our team went out to do a little dancing with the locals and showed then how we dance "white style". We could tell they were enjoying our moves by their pointing and laughing.

The next day Meaghan R. and I headed out on a full day snorkeling trip to the Belize Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world. We swam with sharks and rays for a while then explored the coral gardens and found fish of every colour, pattern and size. Everything from tiny navy blue fish with fluorescent blue spots to needlenose fish to humungous ugly brown bottom feeders the size of a 10 yr old child. My favourite part was swimming in the middle of the schools as the rest of the fish swam non-chalantly around me. For the Finding Nemo fans, I swam in one school of Dori fish for a while. We met two frenchmen on the trip who have been traveling for a year doing development projects as they go along. They had stereotypical French accents and kept us bursting with laughter the entire time. My personal favourite story of theirs recounted their time in China, where they found that the entire population sees it necessary to spit at all times: "Soo I am walkeeng along, mindeng mah own bueesness and peepull are spitteng here, spitteng dere and all of a sudden some crazy man 'orks out a biig one and whap! Dere it is! On my pants! And I say, tank you very much! You are F-ing deeeescusting!"

This week we returned to Belize City. For safety reasons, we generally stay in our hostel after dinner time which can get somewhat boring. We have found that the best source of entertainment has been our front 2nd-level balcony. From here we watch the action unfold below receiving compliments from the bums, turning down marriage proposals from the passerbys and debating whether there is actually food in the containers that leave the sketchy chinese 'restaurant' with no tables and a security guard across the street. Some of the villages we've taught in involved getting up at 5am to get out there in order to teach around 40 kids. One school we taught at only had 16 kids! We taught in one area where the sexual abuse was horrific. After our presentation we got at least 7 different questions from kids on how to deal with abuse. These 7 questions coming from a class of 30 or 40 students. One memorable question asked "What happens if you tell someone and then they start abusing you too?" The kids who listened to the presentation initially did not have paper with them. When we wrote the helpline numbers on the board many of them were so desperate to get them they were writing them on their arms or shoes. The principal recognized that there was abuse in her school and wasnted us to address it because "abused children become bad students and they should be focusing on their studies". She suggested that we tell them to sit up straight because girls who slouch often bring the abuse upon themselves.

We just returned this morning from a quick trip to Gales Point Manatee, a tiny town on the coast near Dangriga. We arrived at 7pm to take drumming lessons from a man named Emmet who runs a school and makes his own drums. We learnt all the techniques and played all kinds of rhythms making a melee of amazing sounds. My hands are a little swollen this morning, but it was well worth it! We are heading up north for our last week of teaching tomorrow! Hard to believe the time is going so quickly...

Photos

Playing with Delia, a Mayan girl I met at the bus stop in Laguna Government Village, Toledo.

Skeletons in the Aktun Tunichil Muknal Cave



Teaching at Christ the King School in Dangriga, Stann Creek.

Aktun Tunichil Muknal

This past weekend being a long weekend here in Belize as well (go commonwealth!) the entire team headed off to San Ignacio, a beautiful town not far from the Guatemalan border. The team went off to do some cave tubing, and I headeded off on a little adventure of my own to Aktun Tunichil Muknal, Mayan for Cave of the Stone Sepulchre ... ATM as the locals call it. ATM is an archaeological treasure in the heart of the Belizean jungle. After a 1 hour hike to the entrance of the cave we swam in pristine saphire coloured water to reach the beginning of our real adventure. The cave was used in ancient times by centuries of Mayans to perform bloodletting ceremonies, make offerings to the gods and make sacrifices. We crawled over giagantic rocks, squeezed through tight spaces and waded through chest-deep water all while admiring the amazing rock formations that surrounded our every move. Stallagmites (on the floor) and stallactites (on the ceiling) formed cathedral like walls around us and above us. Thousands of years of tiny drops of water all combined into one amazing sight. After about two hours of caving, we climbed up into a more secluded area of the cave to find the floor littered with broken clay pottery. One tiny step in the wrong direction and you could easily step on an ancient piece of history. Mayans would bring the beautifully crafted clay pots into the site and break them in honour of the gods. Some even contained detailed carvings on the side depicting the gods. The most fascinating part of the caves were that they were used for human sacrifices. 16 different skeletons were found inside- most of children under the age of five. The skeleton after which the cave was named after is found in one of the uppermost regions of the cave and has been partially coated with deposits of calcium carbonate from years of lying in the cave. It was an amazing sight! And I met a lot of neat people on the tour as well, including one woman who became the "team mother" making sure everyone knew where the sharp rocks and dangerous turns were. It was an amazing trip, one which has apparantly also been chronicled by national geographic.

The teams split again with my foursome staying here in San Ignacio to teach in the Cayo district. Yesterday we trekked our way to St. Martin's school in a tiny town called Blackman Eddy only to find that the principal wasn't expecting us and also wasn't the person on our information sheet. We soon realized that we were supposed to teach at St. Martin's school in Belmopan, the country capital. So we hopped on the bus and did our best to teach at the right school for the rest of the day. Because of Cayo district's proximity to the Guatemalan border, we've found that most of the kids are hispanic so it provides us with new challenges when we teach. My favourite part of teaching is by far the question and answer period. This is when we experience the funniest and saddest parts of the project. Today during the session Katie picked up a paper with a question on it and read aloud "Will..you..marry me?" We looked up, turned to each other and simultaneously said "uhh no" much to the delight of the class. Unfortunately we also received a question saying "What happens if a nine year old girl is being sexually abused and right afterwards she gets her period for the first time?" It is sad to have to tell someone that what she thought was her first period may have very well been the result of internal bleeding. But we are providing them with numbers for all the services and maybe a little bit of hope for something better.

The weather here has been cooler as the rainy season sets in a little early. Mangoes are ripe and we have been trying some new fruits including one fuscia one called pitaya. Hard to believe we've allready been here for three weeks! Looking forward to the next four and thinking about everyone at home!