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...