Benque

The flight to Belize was relatively uneventful. We picked up our rented car and a cell-phone, found Ed and Janice Stratman (a couple from Wyoming with whom we were going to Benque) and set off across what I hoped would become the Western Highway. Eventually I decided that we weren’t lost. We stopped in Belmopan to buy minutes for the phone and buy plantain and cassava chips for our taste buds. We arrived in Benque after dark, missed the turn to the mission, turned around at Guatemala, and finally found our intended location, thanks to the cell-phone.

In Benque we met Father Dan Estes, a young priest who had worked as a teenager for Ed and Janice at the field study camp they operate in Wyoming. We were so late arriving that all the spaghetti was gone in the mission dining room, so Father Dan took us up the street to the Chinese restaurant. In the conversation over supper, we learned that Benque has water treatment but that Father Dan wanted to show us the village of Arenal. He also talked about his mission to the people of Benque. The parish operates an elementary school and a high school, with a total of around 1200 students, and we met several of the teachers at one time or another during the evening.

The parish is building a building that houses the dining room, quarters for the priests, and eventually a chapel and a common room. They are also renovating a building that used to be a printing plant. It is becoming a warren of rooms and corridors that will be a convent. Our rooms were in this building. It was hot and humid, but we were tired and glad to get to bed.