Different directions

Dave says it’s my turn today, since I haven’t been keeping up. We had breakfast with the Rotary club this morning. They are involved in a huge number of projects. One of the hot ones coming up is a canoe race. I’m not sure how long, but first prize is $1000 BZ and there’s a big party at the finish. We met a young woman from Telluride CO who is studying sustainable development here at Galen University for credit at U of Vermont. That sounds like a good thing to do during a Vermont winter if you can arrange it.

Dan and Sheree took off on a site visit trip look for other potential sites. The Director of Rural Development, whom we had met last February, had suggested a few places to look at, and they went to check on them. It was a pretty long day; they didn’t get back until around 7:30. I’ll leave the findings to Dan.

Anne Hansen got a ride with the Rotary president to a village where Swarthmore Rotary is sponsoring a preschool. He owns a huge amount of land with timber and cattle and builds super-expensive houses and owns a couple of hotels. I think she got an eyeful of how the other small fraction lives. She caught up with us at Yalbac in time for lunch.

Dave and Aki and I went to Yalbac to work on the treatment system. On the way, we stopped in Spanish Lookout for some PVC for the well. I ran into Mike from In His Will Ministries, where Dale and I stayed on our survey trip in 2007. It’s interesting to run into people at different places from where they fit in your picture of the country.


Dave says progress on the treatment system was incremental. I thought it was very exciting. We got the new well pump into the well, with wire for power into the treatment building but no plumbing beyond the wellhead. Dave and Aki are much more patient than I am: I would have hot-wired the pump to the generator to see a geyser from the well.


Anne and I had a teaching session with the kids. We kind of commandeered them for the afternoon. The teacher went home and let us do our thing. We talked about germs and illness and handwashing and when to use the clean water they would get from their treatment system. They were pretty excited about the songs and games, and they didn’t want to go when we declared the session finished. We had to shoo them out with the promise that they could come back tomorrow afternoon.

My wildlife report isn’t very exciting because we haven’t been in the right places. Yesterday I saw clay-colored robins at the resort and great kiskadees and green parrots at Yalbac. A gecko almost fell on Anne at the resort. This morning at the hotel where Rotary meets we saw blue-gray tanagers, a female shrike-tanager, a hummingbird that the local record suggests was rufous-tailed, and a basilisk lizard, which has the interesting behaviors of running on its hind legs and running on water. The flowers are beautiful, especially several varieties of bouganvillea.

Tomorrow we will have teaching sessions with some of the women in the morning and the kids again in the afternoon. I’m really looking forward to that and to seeing water from the well.

Peace to all,
Chuck

Joe Petrof

He was sitting on a barstool at the counter when we walked in; a large heavyset man with a silver flattop and an interesting carved cane. I didn’t pay him much attention as the Mennonite sales clerk asked how he could help us in heavily accented English. As Aki and I began asking questions about how to plumb a well with an electric pump, the clerk questioned another clerk in Low German. The second clerk looked at us and said “You should ask Joe about that. He does wells all the time.” Joe had gotten up to leave, but turned when he heard his name. We outlined what we were trying to do. He gave us a classic you-guys-really-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing look and said he would tell us how he would do it.
After a lengthy and detailed crash course in how to plumb a well, he finished by saying “You don’t have to listen to me, but that’s how I would do it.” We assured him that his plan sounded a lot better than ours, and he said “OK then. Let’s go shopping.” He helped us pick out everything we needed, becoming more jocular and engaged in the project the more we talked.
We discovered that he was an American ex-pat who came to Belize 12 years ago and never went back. He’d screwed up his knees and hips playing football for the University of North Carolina and found Belizean weather much more friendly to his joints. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State, and owned a well drilling business in Santa Elena, not far from Aki’s house.
As we were checking out, he asked again if we thought we could handle it. I asked him with a grin what he was doing the next couple days. He said “What time will you be in Yalbac tomorrow? I’ll meet you there after I get my crews started.”
People in Belize are like that.
- dan

We Accomplished What We Needed to Accomplish

We made it out to the first day on the site with some trepidation. The potential show-stopper was removing the old hand pump from Yalbac's well. The government said they would come and do it last Friday, and then on Monday or Tuesday. Over dinner on Tuesday night our team started discussing what Plan B, C or D might be if the government didn't show. At around 10:30 on Wednesday morning a pickup with four guys arrived to dismantle the pump. As with repairing your car the job was essentially pretty simple but without a few key pieces of know-how and one or two critical tools it would have have been nearly impossible for us to tackle ourselves.

The picture shows the workers extracting steel pipe fifteen feet at a time, disconnecting a section and then extracting another fifteen feet. The pipe went down ninety feet. The top of the water in the well is at sixty five feet and the bottom of the well is at 102 feet. Tomorrow will will install a submersible electric pump at the end of ninety feet of PVC.

Dan and Aki made a mid afternoon trip to Home Depot (or the Belizean equivalent) to pick up parts for installing the new pump. While there they met a local who ran a well drilling business who gave them tips on everything they needed to know for installing the new pump. He even promised to drop by and inspect our handiwork to make sure we have it set up right.

While this was going on, I was laying out the components for the water treatment board. I then started installing the plumbing for the external water tanks as shown in the next picture. Anne and Chuck made their initial contacts with the nearby school and have setup a teaching session for Thursday afternoon. Friday is a national holiday (Labor Day / May Day) so this will be their only chance while school is in session.

Harrison, the Yalbac village council Chairman, dropped by several times during the day to review our progress and lend a hand. Several locals helped out during the day and thankfully dug the ditch from the well to the water building. At the end of the day Harrison treated us to fresh coconut sliced open with a machete under a coconut tree next to the water building.

We could have accomplished more but we certainly could have accomplished much less.

To God be the glory,

Dave

First Day on the Job

My room at the Midas Resort.

A room like Dave's at the Midas Resort



We head back up to Yalbac village from our digs at the Midas Resort in San Ignacio this morning. At dinner last night with Sheree and Aki, our Rotary hosts, we formulated a fuzzy plan of attack. The two biggest unknowns at my end of the dinner table were whether and when the Department of Rural Development will show up to pull the hand pump from the well head so we can install the electric pump, and how many (if any) villagers will appear to pitch in with the installation.
Anne and Chuck were conspiring with Sheree at the other end of the table about the educational component and a variety of Rotary issues. There's an undercurrent in many of the conversations regarding "what next". Assuming this project completes as we pray it will, we're beginning to peek shyly toward the future to see what can be done in the next phase.
The weather conditions are shaping up to be more typically tropical this time around. Temperatures are 5- 10 degrees warmer than last February, but not much different from those in Oak Ridge when we left. The big difference is the humidity. We were greeted with a brief downpour at the airport shortly after we arrived, and rain announced itself on the tin roofs of the breakfast patio and in my room both last night and this morning. We're not in the rainy season yet, but it's definitely much wetter than two months ago.

Prayers today requested for flexibility and ingenuity as we evaluate the "lay of the land" and identify the challenges ahead and the directions we'll need to move in to address them.

- dan

We made it (again)!

Not much to say. Dan filled you in up to this morning. Our flights and connections were pretty uneventful. Chuck got busted at Charlotte's security for the foil bag around his Fig Newtons. We cleared Belize customs without incident and we were met by a thunder storm and hot and humid weather (Not much different from Oak Ridge at the moment I guess). We were also met immediately by the hotel shuttle so that went smoothly as well. We'll meet Sheree and Aki for dinner soon and plan tomorrow's schedule.

Please write! (Think I've made that point enough?)

Peace,
Dave

Back To Yalbac

We're on our way, once again. It's becoming routine -- maybe a bit too much so.
It's early here in the Best Western lobby in Charlotte. I slept pretty lightly last night, my mind racing with all the things I might have forgotten and all the things that could go wrong on this trip. That's probably because we spent a half hour last night looking for our hotel.
We left Oak Ridge on time, after spending 15 minutes redistributing the weight in our 6 large checked bags. They're all now within 10% of the allowed 50 lb limit.
We made it to Charlotte in under 5 hours, including a stop for dinner.
Then we realized that no one knew specifically where the motel was. After asking and driving and phoning, we finally found our home away from home for last night and settled in.
We leave at 7 this morning on a shuttle to the airport; our van stays here for the week. We meet up with Anne Hansen from Swarthmore in Dallas, and then on to Belize City mid afternoon and a shuttle to San Ignacio and Sheree and Aki Fukai, our local Rotary contacts.
The picture above shows Aki in front of our poured concrete water building. I think he's describing the fish that got away. He spent yesterday mounting water tanks on top of the building; We'll spend tomorrow beginning the job mounting water treatment hardware inside the building.
Prayers requested for traveling mercies today and for humility and flexibility the rest of the week. We're honored to be representing you in doing God's work in Belize.
- dan

Read it all

The entries in this blog were not always made in the same sequence as the events they describe, partly because we were sharing computers and were not always able to connect to the blog, and partly because Chuck is slow.

To get the whole picture, read down the blog to find entries made since the last time you looked, or read up from the bottom to see how the trip developed.

Farewell and wrap-up

About 7 AM Sunday we walked down to the Lamanai restaurant, expecting to go to Holy Eucharist at the Anglican church after breakfast. The restaurant was on the river, which was beautiful in the early morning light. We saw gallinules, great blue herons, great egrets, a little green heron, and several cormorants along the river, as well as grackles, kiskadees with their bright yellow colors, and several other species of open-space birds. Pat, who both is a fisherman and was facing the right direction, saw a few "honkin' big" tarpon jumping a bit upstream of us.

I had considered leaving my cell-phone at the hotel because I didn't expect to need it, but I hadn't been able to find my watch, so I had the phone for a timepiece. You can see from Dave's post that it was very fortunate that I had it.

Concerns about travel and slowness of the breakfast service combined to change our minds about church. We went back to the hotel to inquire online about our fate. Dan and I had been rescheduled for Monday, but Dan was to arrive in Knoxville a couple of hours earlier than I was. Dave and Pat couldn't find even a notice that the flight had been canceled. Pat couldn't get through to Delta by phone, so we decided to go to the airport and see what we could do. Delta was trying very hard to avoid having to put on extra equipment for Monday, so they managed to book us out on US Airways to Charlotte. As it turned out, we might have enjoyed staying in Belize the extra day more than driving in the snow, but as on several other occasions, what was less than optimal turned out OK.

So we are back, tired but happy with our accomplishments. During the Rotary meeting on Thursday I had a vision of our progress. We have worked toward a Yalbac installation for almost two years, during which there has been a sunrise glow of hope on the horizon. The sun has now begun to rise, but most of it is still below the horizon. Soon the dawn will be complete, and as the sun of Yalbac's success continues to rise, I will look forward to a time of multiple clean water suns brightening the day with God's love.

There is still much to be done. Continue to pray for Yalbac and Orange Walk, and pray for discernment of God's will as we continue to learn of people in need of clean water. Pray for Sherree and Aki and for the San Ignacio and Swarthmore Rotary clubs, that their efforts will continue to help the people of Belize. Pray for First Presbyterian of Cody as they deliberate whether God is leading them to an installation at the Presbyterian school in Orange Walk. And pray that our congregation will continue to experience the joy of Christ's living water flowing through us to others.

Peace,
Chuck

Homecoming

The last few days of our journey didn't exactly work out as we expected. Friday was a somewhat discouraging day where I felt that we didn't accomplish very much. I was beginning to feel that maybe the trip was a day or two too long.

Saturday turned out much better than we anticipated. We had a very productive visit at the Orange Walk Presbyterian School and even met a group of students from Vanderbilt who were working there.

We spent Saturday afternoon visiting the spectacular Mayan ruins at Lamanai and even got a bit lost on the way back. Perhaps that was a foreshadowing of things to come. As we were relaxing over breakfast before church on Sunday, Chuck's phone rang and Dale informed him that our flights home had been canceled. Soon after Delta called to tell him the same thing. We scurried to the airport where Pat found an alternative set of connections back to Wyoming. We got a flight back to Charlotte where we planned to rent a car to drive home. You can see from the picture how that worked out. After a white-knuckle hour to drive twenty miles, we pulled off and spent another night on the road in a hotel north of Charlotte. The drive was a still a little slow going early Monday morning but roads eventually improved and we were rewarded with a gorgeous winter wonderland drive through the mountains on the way back to Knoxville.

As I said, things didn't always work out as we planned. At times when prospects looked the most pessimistic we achieved breakthroughs that gave us hope for the future. Then when we got feeling pretty good about ourselves, we made decisions that looked good at the time but may not have been any better than doing nothing at all.

The Lord surely does work in His own time and in mysterious ways.

Peace and farewell until we return to Belize in April,
Dave

The rest of Saturday

At the end of our technical breakout upstairs where the defunct board is, we were called to lunch. The school cooks had come in to prepare lunch for the seminary class and the college visitors, and we were invited to join them. We had jerk chicken (what a surprise) and beans and rice, unless it was rice and beans (even more a surprise). I am writing this on Friday (or from the perspective of someone who sees the blog as being in the present on Saturday I will be writing it on Friday), and which meals were beans and rice and which were rice and beans has become blurred in my memory.

After wrapping up our business at the school, we hit the road for the Lamanai ruin. The ruin was 28 miles from the highway, but the first several miles were paved or smoothly graded gravel. Eventually we ran out of smooth and got back to our accustomed potholes. We went through Mennonite country again and saw many horses and buggies, some driven by children. Since they do have cars and trucks, I speculated that fodder is cheaper than gasoline when you have a farm. We were amused to see a buggy carrying several 10-foot pieces of PVC tubing. We just never associate modern technical activities with people who use horses as their major means of transportation.

Dave guessed correctly at every unmarked turn (when Ray was with us we were always urged to go to the left), and we reached the ruin shortly before it was scheduled to close. With what I am beginning to think is typical casualness about closing time among park rangers, we were told to take as much time as we wanted. I don't know what they could have done anyway other than close the visitor center and the gift shop, since the parking lot was outside the gate.

Lamanai means "Place of the crocodile". It is unusual among Mayan ruins in being spread out along the banks of a lagoon, the New River Lagoon on the New River, the longest river that is completely within Belize. This is the river that our hotel and Sunday's restaurant are on. Most of the Mayan temple sites are compact and built around a central plaza. Diet and economy were probably very different from those at temple sites in the jungle away from water like Caracol, the capital city of the Mayans in the Belize region, but there are in fact several ruins within an easy walk of a river.

We climbed the High Temple, which was indeed high. The steps are 16-18 inches high going up and higher going down. They had a rope hung along one of the sections so you could go hand-over-hand, which especially made the descent easier. It will be Thursday before the muscles in the front of my thighs stop hurting.

The view from the top was great. You could probably see into Mexico, although there was nothing to indicate the border. My globe has Belize in yellow and Mexico in blue, but the real thing was mostly green. To the south we could see the Mennonite farms, to the north the lagoon. We were joined on the summit by a group of Mennonites. Their speech sounded more Dutch than German to me, especially when one asked another to point out "dain huis". A couple of grandmothers had made most of the climb. They didn't go the final few steps to the summit, but sat and chatted just below the top. I certainly wouldn't put in all that effort to get to the almost top and not finish, even though the open space without a railing at that height makes me uncomfortable. Especially when I am staggering from the strain on my legs to get up there.

On the grounds we saw keel-billed toucans, white-fronted parrots, and several black howler monkeys. There was vegetation in profusion, with many kinds of flowers. I saw an aloe tree and a few varieties of spices. There were many bromeliads growing on the bark of trees.

We went home a different way. I think you could say we weren't lost since we ended up in Orange Walk Town just a few blocks from the restaurant where we had decided to have supper. We had been reassuring ourselves about our direction by looking at the sun, but suddenly it was gone, and very shortly thereafter it was dark. No long twilight here.

At the restaurant I spoke to a group of people who had been trying to help me see a parrot, which I eventually saw when it flew. They are ex-pat who run a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center a few miles south of Orange Walk. They said there used to be a lot of marijuana growing in the cane fields (did I mention that we had seen trucks lined up for maybe half a mile delivering cane to the mill?). I got the impression that alcoholism is pretty serious, but they are not so far from the modern world that they are not also into crack cocaine.

After supper I strolled around downtown again. I had to do some shopping for a few items that I always bring to Shirley Knight as a reminder of our first trip to Belize. I was also supposed to find the Anglican church and the restaurant for tomorrow's breakfast. I walked between 16 and 20 blocks and found the items for Shirley and the church. I was several blocks from the restaurant when I was accosted by a couple of women sitting on a streetlamp base with their little girls. They wanted to know if I was lost, and I told them I knew where I was going at the end of my search, but I didn't know where the restaurant was. I think they were concerned about my safety, because after they told me how to find the restaurant they told me not to go down there because it is a dangerous place at night. I enjoyed the interchange, especially flirting with the little girls (about 2 and 3 years old). After I got back to the hotel I wrote this blog entry, but it didn't go through and I didn't think to save it, so I am writing it again. Silly me.

Peace,
Chuck

Presbyterian Pre and Primary School of Orange Walk

We pulled up to the fence outside the courtyard/playground right at 9 Saturday morning and were greeted by lots of activity and about a dozen college kids. A sharp contrast to the previous afternoon, when we stopped by to get a water sample only to find no one around and everything locked up. The kids were from Vanderbilt University on an Alternate Spring Break mission trip through an organization called the Belize Project doing micro-business projects in Corazol on the northern border of Belize. We explained we were with Living Waters for the World, associated with the PCUSA, and several kids volunteered that they were also PCUSA. Small world. We were ushered into a classroom with about a half dozen Presbyterian lay pastors who were being “treated” to a lecture on Medieval Church History by a retired professor from the US. Interesting to consider what was happening in Belize during the Medieval period… After making introductions and small talk, it became apparent that we were needed elsewhere, mainly because there wasn’t enough room for us and the kids from Vanderbilt. That suited us just fine!

We rounded up some chairs and clustered into Ruth Ku’s office, actually much more spacious than the Earnest Banner’s government office in Belmopan on Wednesday. The conversation was a bit awkward at first. I suspect neither side expected much to come of it, since our conversation with Raphael Ku, Ruth’s brother-in-law on Wednesday had led both sides to the conclusion that a water system might not be feasible or appropriate at this time. Our concerns were primarily whether there was a real and demonstrable health need, and theirs was whether they could afford the costs in terms of both dollars and administrative time.

We began with small talk; I asked Ruth to bring us up to date on the history and progress of the school, so we could all be on the same page. As the conversation developed, it was as if a dark cloud began to lift. I began to realize that although our objective evidence indicated that the municipal water in Orange Walk was safe, the people of Orange Walk believed that it was not, and went to great lengths and expense to drink bottled water if at all possible. Perception is reality, and the school simply could not afford the perception that it wasn’t doing everything possible to protect the health safety of its students. Thus, they would continue to provide purified water whether we decided it was safe or not. This was further reinforced for me later in the conversation when we mentioned that although the very high hardness and dissolved solids in the Orange Walk water was not a direct health issue, it did create a bad taste, and was counter-indicated for people with kidney or gallstones. A light went on in Ruth’s eyes. She said everyone she knew had kidney stones including herself and Mario, her husband. And yes, the doctors did recommend that anyone with kidney stones avoid the hard municipal water. We had, in my mind at least, our medical justification.

Ruth’s first concern was cost. She had gotten the impression from Raphael that the expense of electricity for softening and reverse osmosis would be prohibitive. Add to that the fact that roughly half the water in an RO system is thrown away, and all would need to be purchased from the town, and it looked cost prohibitive. We did some back-of-the envelope calculations and concluded that the discarded water would only add a penny or two per gallon to the delivered cost, and even the high electricity costs in Belize would only add another nickel or so. Estimating wildly, we proclaimed that the school should be easily able to produce water for less than 50 cents (Belize!) per 5 gallon, far less than the $3 they were presently paying for bottled 5 gallon jugs. Ruth convinced us that the administrative burden wouldn’t be much more than the current process for buying commercial bottled water, and that her teachers and parent would volunteer to run the water system.

We were trapped on a virtuous cycle. The complications and objections seemed to melt away. Each side seemed to find more reasons why this could work and would be a good idea. Ruth recounted how the floods last fall had forced them to purchase large quantities of bottled water to bring upriver to the families who had been flooded out and left with contaminated wells. They were left for weeks without stable water supplies. She spoke emotionally about how a water treatment system in that situation would have allowed them to serve those needs at much lower cost.

Concluding our conversation, we settled back to reality and due diligence. Pat intends to bring this prayerfully to his congregation in Cody. We assured him that we would offer support in any way that made sense for future collaboration. Chuck promised a more detailed cost analysis, knowing her costs for electricity and water. I promised to provide some contacts from Presbyterian churches in the Yucatan where similar Living Waters systems were up and running.

As we stood to leave there were warm smiles around the room. Ruth extended her hand for a departing handshake. I couldn’t help it; I gave her a big hug. She returned it in kind.

To God be the glory.
Dan

Pain in the...

What a great congregation you must have. Dan, Chuck and Dave were driven nuts by me for a week while they focused on the Yalbac water project with diplomacy and efficiency. I cannot imagine how relieved they were to have the pain from their ass evaporate after kindly taking me to the ariport yesterday on the way to check out LWW's first Belize project in Orange Walk. Overall I focused more on food, so perhaps there emerged some awareness of food security in the midst of water parting while we traveled from Gales Point area to the poor South of Belize [Toledo district] to Cayo and project prospects there as well as the Yalbac covenant and details that are largely settled.

In case anyone is interested here is our church's website; we are far behind in blog and website development however.

http://www.swarthmorepres.org/home.html

Yours in Christ,
Ray Hopkins
Presbyterian elder and Rotarian from Swarthmore.

Friday travels

Today we took Ray to the airport and ended up in Orange Walk. On the way out of San Ignacio Ray had to drop off a sweater at the Octavia Waight nursing home, and he had to deal with a half-million Italian lyra (worth maybe $300) that were useless to him but of potential value to the proprietor of the Italian restaurant. I'm not sure what deal he worked, but it was amusing that he had to come to Belize to get rid of Italian currency.

We got to Belize City early enough for lunch. After wandering around the city, which is crowded and has chaotic traffic, we found the Indian restaurant Ray was looking for.
Soup for lunch was tasty and agreeably light. Above the bar a cricket match was being shown on TV. the picture wasn't really clear, but I think it would have been incomprehensible anyway.

After dropping Ray at the airport, we came back into the city to try to meet with the operator of the government water laboratory. He didn't show up, but I did have a brief chat with the woman who does microscopic identification and diagnosis at the malaria lab. Because the other guys were eager to get on the road, I resisted the urge to stop in the Maternal Child Health office to see what they are doing.

Up the Northern Highway the houses along the road were in somewhat better condition than most in the little villages in Cayo District. We were passed by a fast-moving pickup truck that had a small sofa in the bed, up against the cab. In it were two elderly-ish plumpish ladies in long Mennonite dresses, holding their straw sunhats on their heads and chattering away. It was a photo-op that we regretted missing.

In Orange Walk Town we first found the school and then found our hotel. We teased Pat for driving the wrong direction on the one-way street in front of the hotel, as well as having run a stop light earlier, because he is a former police officer (Previously Pistol-Packing Police, Presently Presbyterian Pastor Pat). The hotel is on a river and is forested down to the water. It looked like something out of the Amazon or African Queen.

After supper I wandered around town for a while. There were shops of a variety of sizes, from a large appliance store to room-sized shops stocked with CDs, T-shirts, and jeans. I found a grocery store with five aisles and one-hundred-pound sacks of sugar stacked by the front window. These stores generally do not sell produce, which is mainly sold at the open-air market.

Orange Walk town, with its town square park and central boulevard, has a more open feel than San Ignacio and Belize City. The people seemed more inclined to gather and socialize in the park than I had seen before. I was definitely more comfortable there.

Peace,
Chuck

Cristo Rey

Chuck and I drove out to Cristo Rey from San Ignacio just as it was getting dark on Thursday. It's not far; maybe 20 minutes. It felt much farther on a rough road in the dark. Especially since the news I knew we were about to deliver wasn't good.
Chuck, Peggy, Lynn Kszos and her daughter, and I visited Cristo Rey last spring. We learned that their well water was very hard, harder than Yalbac, with high dissolved solids. We also learned that both the well water and the river water are biologically contaminated. However, we had also learned that Cristo Rey had a government sponsored water delivery system with a tank and a chlorinator, but that they weren't using the chlorinator at present. I had decided in advance that we had to tell them we wouldn't treat the well water.
We met with Giovanni Montalvan the mayor, and Alfredo Guerra the chairman of the water board, and a few others. We told them what we had learned and that we wouldn't treat the well water. They confirmed that the pump had broken on the chlorinator but that they didn't like the taste anyway and were concerned about what the chlorine did to the concrete when it spilled, so they had never fixed it.
We then offered them a carrot and a stick. We suggested that we could put in a system to treat their river water to give them the same quality water as in San Ignacio or Santa Elena if they could locate or build an appropriate building. I handed them a blank Water Issues Survey and said we could meet again on our next trip and discuss things further. I also suggested that they could check out Yalbac to see if something like this would be appropriate for them.
As we were leaving Giovanni said that they were opening an internet cafe in the next couple weeks and he would have an email address. I smiled and said we'd keep in touch. On the way back through the hills to Santa Elena, Chuck's cell phone rang. Dale was calling. The contrast between our communication expectations and those in Belize was striking.
Dan

Golden Corral

We retraced our steps from earlier in the week toward Yalbac. This time we stopped in Spanish Lookout, the Mennonite community south of Yalbac. Our destination was the Golden Corral, a restaurant, where Chuck and Mike Sale and I had eaten with Sheree and Aki last spring. This Golden Corral has nothing at all to do with any Golden Corral at which you may have eaten in the US. This one has Belizean rice and beans (not stewed beans and rice) on the menu, along with German pirogues. I ordered the regular sized beans and rice with beef, thinking that a $5Bz small portion wouldn’t be enough. My $8BZ ($4US) arrived stacked high on the plate and dripping off the edges. And on top of that, it was delicious.
We were meeting Harrison for lunch and further discussion of the Yalbac project. We showed up about 15 minutes early (US time) and he showed up about 15 minutes late (Belize time). Although we were eager for Harrison to sign our covenant agreement it became quickly obvious that he was not, setting it aside and changing the subject instead of saying no. Belizeans hate saying no. Harrison was much more interested in a conversation with Dave and Aki about having the company he works for, Belize Concrete, build the water building. Aki reviewed the proposal and decided it was about the same cost and much simpler than hauling concrete blocks up to Yalbac and building it with volunteer labor.
After lunch Harrison picked up the stack of covenant copies to bring back to Yalbac. They’re having a community wide meeting on Sunday afternoon to discuss and hopefully approve the covenant. Signed copies will be delivered to Sheree and passed along to us, completing the preliminary stages of this project.
Dan

Wildlife comment

One other note about the trip back from Spanish Lookout. While we were waiting for the ferry, we were visited by a warbler-sized hummingbird, which flew around the car, peering through each of the windows as though it wanted to come in and join us. It was a female green-breasted mango, a beautiful bird, gray on the front with a black stripe down the center and burgundy-violet colors on the underside of the tail. The beak was about 1 1/2 inches long. I guess it decided it couldn't get into the car, so after a tour all the way around, it flew off.

Although there is much poverty, Belize is blessed with much beauty.

Peace,
Chuck

Encountering the Men on the Bridge

As we were standing around “debriefing” one evening this week I was struck that we may be in a situation analogous to the “Man on the Bridge” story from Pastor Kerra’s sermon on February 15. We are clearly in a situation where may accept someone else’s burden and be trapped in a long term dependency where we can’t extricate ourselves. (Okay, so maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake but I wasn’t even in church that week so cut me some slack.)

The analogy isn’t perfect but I’ve never met a metaphor that I can’t extend and stretch to the breaking point. Rather than accepting a burden unbidden from a stranger, we are seeking people already dangling from the bridge who we want to help. As in the parable, some want us untie their ropes from the bridge and accept their burden with no expectation of helping themselves back up.

Some are simply out bungee jumping and don’t need any help, thank you very much. (One of my favorite sayings during this trip has been “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”)

Finally there are those who are truly in peril, are seeking assistance and are certainly willing to help themselves back up if we can help them (if you want to keep extending the metaphor, sometimes we need to convince them that they are in peril).

The trick is to discern which is which because it certainly isn’t always obvious. That’s where God’s grace and the ability to wisely use our God-given gifts comes in I guess.

Peace to All,
Dave

Rotary

The weekly San Ignacio Rotary meeting is held from 7 to 8 AM every Thursday in the elegant but slightly shabby (this is Belize) San Ignacio Hotel, owned and run by the wife of the current Rotary president.
I presented the standard Living Waters PowerPoint with embellishment to focus on our Rotary partnership and the Yalbac water project. The 20 or so attendees were interested and receptive, asking quite a few questions as I wrapped up.
Afterward, the president and I signed three copies of our three-way covenant agreement with Yalbac. Ray and Pat then headed off with John, the president, to San Antonio, a village south of Cristo Rey, while Dave and Chuck and I headed back to our rooms to prepare for a lunch meeting with Harrison Mocollock, the chair of the Yalbac village council.
Dan

Ash Wednesday

The morning was pretty quiet. We had a leisurely breakfast and did paperwork until it was time to go to Sherree and Aki's to regroup. On the way we dropped Ray off at the Octavia Waight nursing home, which we have visited on previous trips, to take care of some business. He was on his own to walk back after that, so he got a bit of exercise.

Aki drove us to Belmopan, where we located the office where we were to meet. The office was not in the government compound, but according to Sherree was on a road a ways around the ring road in a building like the ones a block over but under the tall tree. It turned out the be the last building on the way out of the loop where the King's Children's Home is located. We had a very producutive meeting there, as I think Dan has described. I was pleased but somewhat boggled by being able to phone and set up a face-to-face meeting with the head of a government program in just a couple of days. Sherree made it a very relaxed meeting because she and the director were joking about various other projects and what a nuisance she had been. I'm convinced that if the director actually comes to watch the installation, he'll be hooked and really supportive. Maybe putting plumbing together is a guy thing.

We went immediately from that meeting to Raphael Ku in Santa Elena, the sister city of San Ignacio. Raphael is beginning to burn out from the load of school management, which he seems to do with no staff; church development, which worries him because church growth is not keeping up with school growth; and seminary concerns, which he didn't say much about but had talked about quite a bit when we saw him last year. Fortunately, a new general manager is coming and in a couple of weeks he will have three seminary graduates to share the load of pastoring. That will double the number of ordained Presbyterian pastors in Belize and increase the number of English-speaking pastors from one to four. He didn't specify, but I think the students are Belize-born, as he is, so he will no longer be the only one.

We went to Ash Wednesday service at St. Andrews Anglican Church, where Dale and I initially met Sherree and Aki. Dale and Ashley phoned me during the sermon, so I missed most of it, but it was given in Spanish and translated inaudibly by a teenager who had trouble with some of the words. I got the feeling she was also having a little trouble with the Spanish, which seemed really strange.

After the service, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant operated by an Italian. The food was excellent and certainly different from Italian food I have had in the States.

All in all, it was another very productive day. Thanks to Sherree and Aki for greasing so many skids for us.

Peace,
Chuck

Raphael Ku

Arriving about 15 minutes late (we’re now on Belize time) we greeted Raphael Ku in the courtyard of his small church in Santa Elena, the sister city to San Ignacio. Raphael is one of 3 ordained ministers in the Belize Presbyterian Church, and the only ordained Belizean. He’s also the general manager of 10 Presbyterian Schools in Belize. Raphael invited us into the preschool and showed us around while answering questions. Then he ushered us into the sanctuary where he hosted a long and frank conversation about the future of the Presbyterian Church in Belize and the situation in Orange Walk specifically. This was a valuable preamble to our visit on Saturday with Ruth Ku, Raphael’s sister-in-law and principal of the Presbyterian Pre and Primary School where a defunct Living Waters system resides. The focus begins to shift from our work in Cayo to future possibilities on the broader Belize landscape.
Dan