Day Three: Meeting Byron

Meeting Byron

Wednesday
7.2.2008

When I woke up this morning I had no idea it would be my toughest, yet most rewarding day so far. The test would not happen until the early evening.

The coaches were running on Belizean time and Coach K did not begin teaching until 10am. Belizean time must come out of Carribean culture; It is certainly unrelated to the calendar obsessed Mayans. It’s healthy, though, to learn to slow down. While we waited for coaches to arrive I played with Nel. He has down syndrome and is about 30 years old.
He wears the same clothes every day and smells like a homeless person in the United States; he hauls around a Winnie the Pooh back pack, and pushes a baby stroller. He just wants to play and loves to give hugs - in fact, he’s obsessed with giving hugs. His sound effects and ninja skills transcend his ability to speak only Spanish. I played with him for an hour. Ismael joined in, too. We played tag and I let Nel vanquish me with laser beams from his fingertips. I think I tired him out for the rest of the day because he disappeared after we stopped playing. He certainly exhausted me and I could not stop streaming sweat. Therefore lunch was a great relief - moist tamales wrapped in hot plantain leaves.

We returned to Corozal around 3pm for a quick nap. By 4pm we were headed to a village called San Antonio to coach some more. Our contact was Lincoln. Zac told me not to bring the video camera, but I didn’t understand until we arrived. San Antonio is located less than one mile inland from the Corozal town square. I couldn’t believe that it was considered to be another village. We turned down a dirt road and I noticed a familiar shack. Then I noticed a familiar wooded area beside a water tower. I had been to that wooded area! It shrouded Santa Rita, the Mayan ruin that I explored on Sunday. Just several blocks from the ruin beside the road was a rundown soccer field. Adjacent to it was the most dilapidated concrete school house I had ever seen. On the opposite side of the field was a two-story, brightly painted peach-colored house. On the long side of the field, between the school and this house was a nicely maintained house and yard.

But at the corner of the field, squeezed between this manicured yard and the school, was a shanty town composed of wooden, one-room shacks, connected by trails running through overgrown bushes, snaking through the thick tropical foliage between rusting cars to other shacks that would be considered storage sheds, not homes, in America. One shack above all drew my attention - almost beckoned to me. Concrete slabs, tin cans, plastic, and trash littered the edge of the soccer field or sat nestled in the underbrush sweeping up to this structure. Clothes lines stretched out from the right side of its happy, turquoise exterior, a beautiful Carribean hue. Children were everwhere. Twenty or thirty of them. The teenagers and early twenty-somethings sat in the portico of the school house, but most of the children were ten years old and younger. Most of them were bear foot. They were very dark-skinned, descendents of East Indians actually, maybe with a sliver of African in them. Puddles from the daily showers collected in pools of dark mud. One boy sat in a red wheelchair by the house. A despondent man, the father perhaps, who knows, snacked on something in a window. A woman watched the little children play, her enormous pregnant belly bulging through her tight shirt. But framing the doorway, rather than being framed by the doorway, dominating the landscape, sat the matriarch, like some wild and fantastic vision of earth mother herself. Her knotty black hair swept back from her head, which seemed dimunitive atop her large body. She wore a short skirt that her thighs bulged out from under, and her halter top supported her huge, sagging breasts. She looked worn out, and used up, from enduring the relentless toil of her day to day existence. I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene. I was in disbelief. I have never experienced poverty like this with my own eyes.

While we waited for Lincoln I noticed the minutest details around me. I felt like I was tumbling into this image. And somehow - I am still in utter astonishment how - in absolute juxtaposition to the squalor were the smiles of the children. Their faces radiated beauty and love. We mingled with the teenagers and children around the portico of the school and quickly learned that the people in this shanty town were all related. One twenty-something on a bike wore an Eddie George jersey, another unbelievably fit guy clenched the bars on a window to flex his muscles through his white tank top, and a beautiful three-year old girl covered in filth grinned at me from around the corner.

But I couldn’t take my eyes off the boy in the red wheelchair near the turquoise shack. He wheeled up to me and I found out that his name was Byron. He was difficult to understand and said that he was ten years old. He seemed intellectually slow; I imagined that a fever may have been the cause. He was barefoot, covered in filth and smelled a little like urine. He didn’t seem crippled but his legs were very thin. Dot-like discolorations were sprinkled across his feet, legs, and hands, and in some places they seemed to coalesce into bulging blister-like bumps. He moved his hands in an awkward and twisted way. His cavities looked like spots of black mold on the undersides of some of his teeth. A red haze crept up from the corners of his eyes inwards towards the center. Who knows what parasites are living inside his body.

Finally, Lincoln arrived and Coach K began coaching on the field. I felt an awkward tension like we were not yet accepted by the village. Many of the little kids came up to the edge of the field to watch. I wheeled Byron on the field and sat next to Zac. That’s when a wave of emotion really hit me. Above all, I felt sad and confused, but it was certainly tinged with some anger and frustration at the squalor and neglect of these children. “What was I supposed to do about this neglect?” I thought. “How was I supposed to feel? What did these feelings mean? Why will the poor always be with us? Why did these people live like this? Why do children suffer? Why is Byron suffering from preventable disease!” I started to cry pretty heavily, even sobbing some, but I struggled to hold it back.

We finished before 6pm and left; it felt like another 8 hour day being there. By 7pm we left to go to Mr. and Mrs. Moralez’ home for dinner. Mr. Moralez is vice-principle of San Narciso school and has been at the workshops. He wanted to invite us to dinner to say thank you. They were gracious and their home was beautiful and comfortable. It felt like the Taj Mahal after this afternoon. I sat at the far end of the table beside David and Alfredo Ek, who I talked to most of the dinner. The evening was full of boisterous laughter and bonding with the Belizeans. We were grateful guests in the home of these simple, good, honest people. For an hour Alfredo answered my questions about Belizean: He described the difference in flavor that Tamales have that are made from fresh maize as opposed to manufactured tortillas, or the rich flavor that wrapping tamales in plantain leaves gives, or the subtle difference that cooking the tamales under the earth instead of on open coals imbues the tamales with. After dinner Mr. Morales, Jesus, and Alfredo expressed their fear that Sports Servants might move the camps out of San Narciso. They also expressed their opinion that the most successful way to grow SS would be to have the Belizean government accredit it. Zac looked like all his dreams had come true. Reflecting on this evening I am reminded of something Zac suggested to me on my first day. He said that the natural question is to ask what these Belizeans don’t have; the useful question, and more truthful question, is to ask “What do they have?”