San Narciso: Day One

Monday

6.30.2008

Shortly after 6am I was up and exercising again. While we loaded up the cars I stepped in my first fire ant nest in flip flops. They move fast and suddenly are covering your feet. At 7:10am we piled into two cars (I rode Belizean style in the back of the pick up truck) and we sped south to San Narciso, 20 minutes away. We eventually broke into the hurricane shelter which also doubles as the community center. Sports Servants held its coaching seminars here last year. San Narciso is a small town of bout 3,000, the largest village in the north. Local P.E. teachers and soccer coaches eventually trickled in by 10am and we had a good group. I quickly found my groove videotaping and I learned the rhythm of the week.




Ismael,Osvaldo, Edan, and Evelio (Forgive the phontic spellings!) were four little urchins who by lunch time were climbing all over me. They really like cameras. These muchachos were irrestible.



On our way home around 3pm I again rode in the back of our pick up with Reid and with Jeremy. The landscape is flat, coastal, and I could easily scan the horizon left and right as it slipped away behind us. The rural landscape is a contradictory mix of clean homes and shacks. I couldn't believe that people live in a house and suddenly I would catch sight of a family of six happily loitering in the back yard. Children, dogs, and bicycles are everywhere. But as I scanned the landscape I saw an enormous mound, probably 40 feet tall, covered with trees and grass erupting from the flat fields of grass. I wanted to leap out of the truck, shovel in hand, and begin excavating the ruin.






This afternoon we are all rehydrating and re-mineralizing. Dinner, Belizean rice and beans hopefully, is at 6pm.

-AR

Day of Rest

Sunday

6.29.2008

I slept hard, probably because the concrete room I am staying in has AC, and becomes a human refrigerator at night. It's wonderful. This morning I woke up before 7am and decided to explore Corozal Town. I still get that urge of exploration, common to all men or maybe just to teenage boys. First I exercised on the front porch and a cool wind licked up off the bay. Zac was awake by 8am and gave me a quick orientation around town. I set out walking and went to mass at St. Francis Xavier church in the town square. It is a beige and yellow 1970s creation, like a spaceship landed to rescue any surviving Mayan aliens. The service was lively, though, and I was quickly won over by the programmed synthesizer beats. How can you not feel happy singing, "I got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart (what?!) down in my heart, down in my heart!" The only other gringo was Father Brian, originally from Chicago, who was celebrating his first mass there after being in Colombia for 11 years.

I wandered the streets for a few more hours, found an open internet cafe, wrote the previous blog, and then found a great dive for lunch and to shield me from a sudden downpour. When I returned everybody was watching the Germany vs. Spain soccer match. I hid away and read more about Belize in my guidebook. I found out in my reading that less than one mile away stood the unmarked ruins of an ancient Mayan temple called Santa Rita. I borrowed the car and after one wrong turn I found it. My first Mayan temple! It was modest, to be sure, but I experienced that thrill of discovery, even though shacks, dogs, and children circled the site. It was a similar experience to my wanderings around Republican era Roman sites. It reminded me of gazing out the window at the aquaeduct ruins scattered near the Due Santi campus, in the Albano region south of Rome along the Via Appa Antica. I climbed to the top which afforded an excellent, panoramic view above the tree tops. I could see for miles. Santa Rita was founded shortly after the Trojan War, about 1000B.C. but this temple reached its pinnacle around 900A.D. Unfortunately, most of the stones had been cannibalized by the 1950s to build modern Corozal.





Shortly after returning home two great guys, Jeremy and Rhett showed up, and that night our entire group went to eat on the edge of the bay at a hotel restaurant.




-AR

Southbound

Saturday
6.28.2008

Today does not make sense without reference to the previous two days. I'm in sync with the universe. For six months I had worried that I would miss the birth of my first nephew. After four days in Toronto at the 15th Annual International Boys School Conference (See link on the right side of the screen) I returned on Wednesday night. By 10am the next morning Amanda Keith was in labor and my beautiful nephew was born at 5:52pm. Friday I had the entire day to pack for Belize/Central America and that night Sarah and I got to have an unforgettable dinner together at Cafe Nonna. I was badly missing "baby Joseph" Friday afternoon, but I got to see him for two hours (I probably cradled him for an hour while he slept). See video links on the right.

This brings me to Saturday. The trip down to Belize was simple. In Dallas, Texas I had a two hour layover and rode the Skylink train around the entire airport twice. It was like the monorail at Disney World - lots of free fun. From the Skylink I could see Los Colinas skyscrapers overlapping a slender University of Dallas Tower, silhouetted against the white bulk of Texas Stadium, that in turn overlapped downtown Dallas about 10 miles away. So many seminal growing up experiences at UD seemed, simultaneously, close and far from my memory.



Most of the flight from Dallas to Belize City was shrouded in humid, low floating clouds. I had not been this studious since college and had diligently penetrated the forest of words in my lonely planet guidebook. Did you know, for instance, that 40% of Belize's land is protected in some way - that Belize practically invented eco-tourism - or, that the Caste Wars of the 1840s have everything to do with the great variety of ethnicities that colors the country? All of a sudden we burst through the bottom of the clouds and the white gave way to a vast expanse of vivid coastal green, pock marked with shimmering swamps.

Belize international airport does not deserve its name - it's the smallest airport I have ever been to I think. Surprisingly, or appropriately perhaps, I had met a Toronto couple on the plane ride who were headed for Ambergris Caye to close on their condo. Lucky them.

My first impression of the country was a collision of the senses. I felt the wind rush off the Caribbean, I felt the salt stick to my skin, I smelled that salty coastal dew, I saw the dark skin of the Afro-Caribs who dominate the Belize City population, I rejoiced at the sight of the brightly painted buildings and signs, and I heard the din of multiple languages. Suddenly, upon my arrival, all those words, those symbolic black and white abstractions, became instantly enfleshed, knit up by bones and blood and history. This man stamping my passport may have had ancestors who canvassed for votes which led to Belize's independence in 1981, who had ancestors who survived the brutal British suppresion of Mestizo resistance in the Caste Wars of the 1840s, whose ancestor intermarried with a British Mahogany logger in the 1750s, who had ancestors who worshipped with Spannish missionaries throughout the early 1600s, who had post-classic Mayan ancestors who witnessed the first bloody conquest of the Belizean Mayans in 1544, whose ancestors quarried stones to build the high-classic temple complex of Lamanai in 650AD at the height of the Mayan civilation. And so on . . . before memory.




Zac Hood picked me up at the airport. Cars sped down dusty roads past shacks and brightly painted dilapidated houses. A shocking number of people biked everywhere and many people walked these dangerous roads, often frighteningly bottle-necking. We rendezvoused with David, Georgia, and Clara. Clara took us to the Baboon (i.e. Howler Monkey) sanctuary. An old, strong, thin, dark, seemingly withered, bearded, man guided us into the sanctuary and the alpha male Howler Monkey answered his calls with deafening whoops.




Everywhere armies of Belize's most productive citizens, the leaf-cutter ants marched with huge photosynthetic loads on their backs. On the forest floor they had cut a dirt highway through the thick, dead-leaf cover. Clara treated us to Belikin Beer, locally brewed in Ladyville, which boasts a Mayan ruin on its label. David, Zac, and I sped north to Corozal Town, racing the setting sun and swerving around slower moving vehicles in the night. The stars were magnificent, even out of the car windows, and my readings came back to me - how, according to the account in the Popol Vuh, the three stars in Orion's belt are recreated in the arrangement of three Mayan temple around a central plaza, emodying the three mountains and hearths of the cosmos that sprang up from the watery void at the beginning of creation.

The internet cafe is closing up for lunch, I guess. More to come! And hopefully less wordy.

- Andrew

T-Minus 1 Day

6.27.08

One year has past since I Czeched out! How am I going to stuff all these clothes and cameras into my bags? Good bye Eastern Europe, hello Central America!

“Huh? What is Andrew doing in Central America?” The short and sweet: My high school classmate, current colleague at MBA, and friend, Zac Hood, started a non-profit called Sports Servants three years ago. Sports Servants brings football (soccer) seminars coaches and to kids in poor villages in Belize every summer. I helped Zac edit Sports Servants’ first promotional video. He has finally persuaded me to come to Belize by bartering my video expertise for the trip. I will be with Sports Servants for two weeks, then will probably travel on my own, and will likely swing back through on my way home.