Belize trip, Spring 2007

Wednesday, May 23, pre-trip

We spent the afternoon and evening packing and making other preparations. When we put Ashley to bed she commented that we hadn’t sung “Will you come and follow me” on Sunday. Nevertheless, we have felt the congregation’s support and we thank you.

Thursday, May 24

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.

Friday, May 25,

The morning was very nice, relatively cool. I went to run, and enjoyed seeing people go to work. I saw several birds, including after checking my bird book, a kiskadee. We had breakfast with the mission crew. The food was good, pancakes and fresh fruit. It reminded me of Jaguar Creek, but not quite as good. Father Dan was busy for the morning and he needed to introduce us to the people at the other prospective sites for water installation. We decided to visit the nearby Maya ruins. We went to Cahal Pech, the oldest known Maya site in Belize. It was interesting, much smaller than Caracol. I saw an Arakari ( kind of toucan) there. We went on to Xunantunich, a very elaborate site with some beautiful friezes. I saw a Trogon there. We had to cross the Mopan river to get to the site, which we did on a small ferry that carried us across. All passengers had to get out of the car while it was loaded onto the ferry so if the car went off the ferry or unbalanced it only the driver would go in the river. Motive power was a crank that turned a truck tire rim with a cable from one side of the river to the other wrapped around it. There were a number of large Iguanas on the river bank.

After lunch we embarked with Father Dan to the village of Arenal. It was several miles down a very rocky, dusty dirt road. The village reminded us very much of Armenia. There were many small thatched house, many stick houses. We found a small health clinic, which is open once a month. The village is about 600-700 people. There is a police department and a fire department. The village is on the Guatemala border and is in fact split down the middle between Guatemala and Belize. There is electricity and water on the Belize side and there are water pipes into homes, but not on the Guatemala side. Unfortunately, the major and the person in charge of water were not available. The mayor was on strike because of some ongoing political unrest and the water person was out of town until the end of the week. Father Dan was able to speak to one of the village women who was knowledgeable about the situation. She was interested in the idea of clean water, but she told us that she thought that the water was chlorinated before it was pumped into the water tower. The water is drawn from the river and pumped into a water tower which is high on the hill above the village. Father Dan’s mission runs the village primary school and they are building a new one in the village. Ms Sanchez, the village woman Father Dan talked with said that there are plans to extend the water system to the Guatemala side. We decided to collect a water sample at the site of the new school and returned to the mission to test it. The results were interesting. Our testing system detected no residual or free chlorine. The water was very hard and high in alkalinity. We are waiting on the bacteriological results. An incubator to keep the sample warm is definitely not needed.

Saturday, May 26,

Armenia and Jaguar Creek today. After breakfast at the rectory in Benque, we set off for Armenia. We saw a sign at the turn to the community center that proclaimed the presence of a “rudimentary water system”. We were early for our meeting, so we poked around the laundry for a while. My first impression was disappointment; the door had been removed, there were various bits of block and other rubble and a broken chair on the floor. Most but not all of the plumbing had been attached. The cistern, which had been attached to the community center, had been moved to the laundry, but there was no connection to the laundry plumbing. The result was that the community center has lost its water supply but the laundry hasn’t gained one.

Things turned worse and then better when Michael, the Peace Corps guy, and Pedro Garcia, the chairman of the village council and a member of the water board, appeared. Pedro told us clean water is a crucial issue because there is NO water. He said the first well collapsed, they installed another, which collapsed, and a third, which produced for about an hour before it went dry. They hope that when the rains start in a few weeks, the well will produce again, but it is obviously not a permanent source. They had borrowed a water truck from the Water Ministry and trucked in a load from Caves Branch River, but it wasn’t treated. The Ministry has offered to deliver water by truck if the village had a tank to put it in. It’s not clear that it would be chlorinated, so further treatment might be needed. But there is no tank. We figure that with a population of around 1500, assuming not all would use the water, they would need 2000 gal/day with little left for non-drinking/cooking use. We estimate a 2000-gal tank would cost about $1200 Bz ($600 US).

Pedro is interested in the possibility of purification for whatever water is available for daily use. He is also concerned about accumulating treated water because the community center is a designated hurricane shelter. He was put off a bit by the estimated operating and maintenance costs, but he seemed to think it might be possible to support it. He understood that they would have to run and bottle for 5-6 hr/day, and that may present a personnel problem. However, supply pipes have been laid to the community center just behind the laundry, so hooking the laundry up will not be hard once there is water.

Two civic wells, with hand pumps, are in use. We sampled them, but the second was difficult because the people collecting water had run it dry, and it took 5-10 minutes to recharge enough to get a sample. Both had high pH, high hardness, and high alkalinity.

We had heard from the peace corps worker and from Jaguar Creek that the Armenia primary school needs a new sanitary system. When we brought up the issue of a new septic tank, Pedro said he was considering options. A septic tank would not be useful if there was no water, and he didn’t know the leaching capacity of the potential drain field. He was thinking they might be better off with new, larger latrines, but he didn’t know whether there are too many rocks to be able to dig, and whether the wet-season water table is too high for deeper latrines to be possible. We encouraged him to work on the problem and let us know what it might cost.

We got to see Filberta, who we worked with at the clinic. She is very concerned that not much progress has been made in health education. I promised that if we got back to Armenia, I would talk with her and the other community health nurse Odelia about those issues. We have since decided that a return to Armenia at the end of the week is probably essential, both to solidify our position as interested and committed and ready to help, but to also just make a second contact be fore we come home. I was again impressed, as in the middle of the day we watched middle school age children labor up the hill from the river with 5 gallon containers of water. How do they do it? I don’t think I could. Chuck is not saying what we feel is obvious, there are many opportunities to be of service in Armenia and probably much can be done in the future, but they need water now, it seems easy to do—so let’s get it done.

From Armenia, we went on the Jaguar Creek. where we met Mark and Adrian Parcher, the new operators. We learned that their mission is to disadvantaged children – building supplemental facilities for schools, providing scholarships, etc. They are still working closely with Armenia, and they agree water is a serious problem. They reported that Rotary International has just approved a grant to install a septic system at the Armenia primary school, information that Pedro had apparently not yet received. They would be glad to house a group of water workers.

The camp has changed a bit but not a lot. They have remodeled several of the cabanas and bunkhouses, and they are replacing the batteries in the power plant. They have also cleared some of the forest at the edges of the central open space. But mostly it looks the same and had the same feel. Being there brought back many memories.

We are now at In His Will Ministries, with Lynn and Chris Kszos, Robin Graham, and Susan French. Actually we are now in San Ignacio at a dance recital that includes Caleb Coverdale, who is in the camp director family. Several of the pieces have religious titles, although they look like any other dance recital pieces. I’m glad we came. This is a side of Belize we hadn’t seen, where there are dance recitals and PTA, soccer moms and ballet moms, and cute little blondes as well as cute little Mayans and Hispanics. Dale’s not quite so glad. She says it’s past bedtime.

Surprise! The bacteriological sample from Arenal is already black.

I was hoping this would go out on a wireless connection, which some 12-year-old kid who was attracted by the computer told me was possible through one of maybe three routers, but no deal, but probably because I didn’t know how to turn on the wireless in the computer.

Sunday, May 27, part I

We went to an Anglican service in San Ignacio this morning, with the Bishop himself in attendance. It was a nice service, a combination of more formal than we are used to and less formal than we are used to. Afterward we were accosted by a woman who is in Rotary and plans to go tomorrow to visit a village that has only an untreated well. She is excited about getting other Rotary folks together with us to talk about how we might combine forces. We’re looking forward to that.

We spent the afternoon observing God’s day of rest and appreciating God’s beautiful creation. We visited Herman’s Cave and Blue Hole. After several hours of contemplation we concluded that the water of Blue Hole is probably not an appropriate site for a Living Waters System.

We have preliminary results from Armenia well #1 (the central one we remember) appears to be a clean site. The second well is bad. We will be emailing the Peace Corps representative in the AM with this information.

We met as a group this evening, and it was a very fruitful meeting. We have detailed plans (too long to enumerate) as to how to proceed the rest of the week. We will be meeting with the Rotary people tomorrow afternoon. It is raining, and temperature has dropped 10 degrees, the Lord has indeed blessed us.

May 28, Chuck’s birthday
This has been a fractionated day. Some of the group went to help build a fence around what will be a basketball court at the learning center, associated with In His Will Ministries. It certainly was reminiscent of Armenia, scorching temperatures and hard physical labor. Chuck, Lynn and I went to visit Octavia Waight Center for the Aged.

We were very impressed with the facility, you could send your grandmother there. It is clean and the patients are well cared for. They freely allowed us to see all parts of the facility. The facility is clean and Spartan. There are 6 rooms with 4 beds each. Some are devoid of decoration and some clearly have a lot personal mementos. Each room has its own bathroom and bath/shower. The staff seemed comfortable and good with the patients. We had to wait a while to see the director, so we chatted with the patients, who expressed satisfaction with their care.

We also talked to the director. He has been director for 18 years! It is a non-profit organization that receives some federal funds. They have been buying bottled water for drinking for their patients. The home is in San Ignacio, which has a municipal chlorinated water system, but they had requested an evaluation of their water because they had had an outbreak of diarrhea 3 months ago which they thought was related to the water. They have 26 patients and they feared that 3-4 would die. They also have had times when the water runs brown, or tastes like chlorine, or there is not enough water pressure to have water. They have installed a cistern that they collect water in and use it for when the water pressure is too low to have water. He is very concerned about the cost of water, they pay $300 a month for city water, which they use for cooking as well as other water uses, and they spend $125/ month for bottled water to protect the health of his patients. We have tested the water, both the tap water and the water from the cistern. There was a minimal amount of chlorine present in the tap water. We promised him we would report results. As a team we have mixed feelings about this site. The major problem is that they probably have clean water at least part of the time, and it therefore may not qualify as a Living Water site. But they have a vulnerable population, at least anecdotally they have intermittent water problems and, they would be an easy install and education component. They have a pump to move rainwater from the catchment cistern to a storage tank, they have a full-time maintenance staff, they are accustomed to handling clean water and keeping it clean, and they are very aware of the appropriate uses of clean water. Also, distribution of water jugs would be strictly in house rather than dispersed around a village.

Among our accomplishments of the day was to use Belize figures and calculate the cost of water from a Living Waters system. We think that the straight cost is 1-1.1cents/gallon. If you pay an operator $30 BZ/hr and give away 20 percent of your water the cost is close to 8 cents/gallon. A five gallon jug would then cost 40 cents and you could give away 20% of your water

Our contact with the Rotary club did not materialize today. Belize time seems to be the problem. We have hopes that we will be able to meet with them tomorrow and possibly visit the Yalbac site, another village which we have not reported on because we do not yet have enough information. We want to at least test the water there so we have a baseline. We have been unable to contact the Orange Walk site. The telephone system from here to there is not working either by cell or land line. We plan to try again tomorrow and if it does not work we will probably drive up unannounced on Wednesday. We have done all our appropriate email contacts with our previous sites and now just await return information.

The evening was spent at the learning center helping local kids with homework. It was reminiscent to us of tutoring inner city children in Chicago, with great variation in ability and the general level below what one would expect in mediocre schools in the US. However, we were startled when helping a high school girl with her math homework that it included review of simply subtraction of complex fractions and beginning algebra with multiplication of complex numerators and denominators. Since the girl seemed to get the concepts but did not manage the manipulations it became clear that she had learned a good deal of the algebra along with the simple fraction manipulations.

Another day is done, we are tired and both discouraged and hopeful.

Note from Chuck: The roads from Armenia to Belmopan and Belmopan to San Ignacio have become much less exotic, since we have driven back and forth so many times. I still assume I will get lost if we are going someplace new or even for the second time. San Ignacio has several one-way streets, but none is marked, so I have found myself going the wrong way several times. Our first time through San Ignacio, I missed the westbound bridge and took the eastbound bridge, which has one narrow lane. Fortunately, an oncoming truck waited for me rather than making me back up, and the policeman who was near the end of the bridge didn’t pursue me. On every trip we have to stop at a police roadblock, but they only check the inspection and insurance stickers.

The flowers are beautiful. Hibiscus and bougainvilleas are everywhere, and there is a lovely tree called Shower of Gold with huge clusters of yellow flowers without any leaves to obscure them, and the Flamboyant tree, which is a bright orange. I want to bring home some seeds, but I think Customs wouldn’t approve.

We are checking the blog as well as posting, and we would love to hear from you.

Tuesday, May 29

Today was fairly quiet. I spent the first part of the morning on administrative work, checking e-mail and trying to set up meetings, and then I joined Dale and the others at the construction site. We completed one of the block walls and put up the fenceposts for its fence, and we poured concrete into the other block wall. These walls are not as even as the ones we built for the laundry, but I don’t think they started on a level concrete base.

The morning was overcast until I got to the work site, at which time the sun turned vicious. It stayed hot until about 2PM, when it clouded over and began to rain. It took until 3 PM to quit and pack up to come home. We welcomed being rained on. It felt good to be wet and cooled off.
We tutored some high school kids on homework. In the process I learned that UPS means uninterruptible power supply and that URL is universal resource locator.
Tomorrow some of us go to the village of Yalbac, and some of us to Orange Walk to check on the New Life Presbyterian School. We have a meeting with Rotary folks in San Ignacio set for Thursday.

Wednesday, May 30

From Dale
Today was a big day. We split into 2 groups; one went to Orange Walk, the rest of us went to Yalbac. Yalbac is 30 miles due north of Unitedville. Most of the drive is up rough dirt roads. We went with Sheree and Akai Fukai, and some one named Joe Carlson, all of whom are associated with the Rotary of San Ignacio, are interested in water, and are ex-patriot Americans. None of us speak Spanish. We had instructions to speak to the principal of the school. We left just after noon and arrived in the middle of the day to find the school closed and no one around. We spotted the well. Eventually a couple of teenagers came by and they told us that Mr. Neill, the principle of the school, has closed school because his wife was ill and in the hospital at San Ignacio. They also told us how to find the vice chair person Maria (I think Castillo). Maria spoke only Spanish but we managed to communicate in some basic ways. We learned from her that the second well in the village was contaminated with oil, and the Minister of Health had told them that the other well was contaminated. We learned that the village is 19 families with 106 individuals. We asked where people got water and we were told from the creek. When we asked if they used it to drink she said no, that they buy bottled water (at approximately 1 Bz dollar a gallon). We briefly explained that the system we were proposing would require maintenance and they would have to collect money for it. She was concerned that it would be too much money for the people. We explained that the water would cost about 8 cents/gallon and she was much more interested after that. There are several challenges with a water system for this village: they have no electricity, and due to the hardness and alkalinity they will need reverse osmosis as well. On the positive side, the Rotary is interested in the project and there is an intact village council. The Rotary people will pursue the contacts when we have left and they will keep in contact with us.

We will meet with several people from the Rotary tomorrow. They have people interested in water and also have people who are familiar with water regulations and water boards in Belize.

We have a meeting arranged with the people from Armenia for 6:30PM on Friday. I hope to meet with Odelia and Filberta at 4 PM. The news from them is mixed. The Belizean government will provide water from tank trucks but it is straight river water. The rainy season has just begun so it is possible that the wells near the reservoir will fill and they will have water soon, but another dry season will come.

From Chuck, Wednesday
I was in the Orange Walk group. Orange Walk Town, in Orange Walk District, is north of Belize City. To get to it, we had to drive east on the Western Highway for about an hour and then north on the Northern Highway for another hour. We went through a lot of uncultivated scrub, some of which had been burned off, and passed one sugar refinery. After a few wrong turns, we found the Presbyterian School, which is a fairly large three-story building with a couple of water tanks on the roof.

I had e-mailed Rev. German (pronounced Herman) Cob, who we thought was the director of the school, to ask for an appointment. He responded that he was no longer associated with the school, and that he had forwarded my e-mail to Rev. Rafael Ku, who is now the general manager. I e-mailed Rev. Ku to reiterate our interest and to say that we had decided to come to Orange Walk hoping that we could see him. We left this morning without receiving confirmation from Rev. Ku, so we were uncertain what to expect. As it turned out, he was waiting for us. He had been unable to get an e-mail out, so he decided he would just be sure to be there when we arrived.

We learned that Rev. Ku is general manager of all Presbyterian schools in Belize, not manager of the Orange Walk school. He told us the sordid tale of how the first director had slipped from Presbyterian ways and was disciplined by Presbytery, but refused to abide by their rulings. He managed to shift the license for the school from the Presbytery to himself, and he diverted funds to his own pockets. Presbytery couldn’t manage to take the school back until recently. German Cob was hired to direct the school, with his wife as principal, and he gradually caught on that the lack of any financial records covered up the embezzlement. Apparently he decided that he couldn’t take the pressure from Presbytery, so he didn’t come back from spring break, effectively handing the school back to Presbytery. They got a temporary license to finish the school year, but they have a shortfall of about $5500 US for June salaries. They don’t have records of tuition payments, so they can’t track down parents who are behind. Ku expects to get a gift of $3000, so he is left needing $2500. Then to get a license to reopen in the fall, he has to have an education plan, a staffing plan, and a business plan (which will include government grants). A very tough task in a short time.

The school has about 120 students, down from about 180 before the parents realized that the administration was corrupt. The school is clean, the children are happy, and I was impressed with some of the things they were learning—Standard 1 (3rd grade) was learning about vowel diagraphs, and Standard 2 was learning about magnetic fields. Everywhere there were pictures of Jesus and religious slogans (this is typical of Belizean schools, even those with government support). One wing of the school has not been completed, including classrooms, restrooms, and a gymnasium; I think the capacity of the school could be doubled. They have one unisex restroom, which is functional but not attractive. They have city water, but they don’t trust it, so each classroom has its own bottled water dispenser (bottled water costs $2.50 US for 5 gal.) At the end of the school day we saw teachers and students emptying the garbage and mopping floors.

Eventually we got to see the Living Waters system that had been installed in 2003. It is intact, although one pump appeared to have seized, and I couldn’t tell whether the other one would turn. I think they might be repairable. It looks like there are pipes leading to the classrooms, but I told Rev. Ku that if we were to rebuild the system, we would set it up so they would bottle the water and carry it to the classrooms. We agreed that although there was potential to get it running again, we couldn’t do any planning until we knew that the school was going to remain open.

Rev. Ku is a remarkable man. He is one of five ordained Presbyterian ministers in Belize, and the only one born in Belize. He oversees about nine schools, many of them preschools only, all over Belize. He actually lives in San Ignacio, west of where we are staying, but he was in Orange Walk for two days to do school business there. He has started a Presbyterian church in Santa Elena, the across-the-river sister city to San Ignacio. He also teaches in a seminary that he established in a church in Belize City. He has seven candidates whom he hopes will soon be ordained, and he hopes they will remain in Belize to strengthen the church. He was educated in the US, after having been kicked out of Guatemala when Guatemala was being combative toward Belize. He then accepted a standing offer to attend a Reformed Church of America Bible college in Grand Rapids, MI. He told an amusing story about arriving the first of January with only his Belize clothes. He said people had to shop for warm clothes for him because it was too cold for him to go out. It had been 100 degrees at home, and it was below zero for quite a while in Grand Rapids. He stuck it out, and then went to a Reformed seminary in Jackson, MS, where the temperatures were a bit better. He really impressed us with his dedication to his job, his concern for the church and for the children.

We concluded that this is not the time to be concerned about water purification, but it is definitely time to pray for the success of his efforts to keep the school running.

Thursday, May 31

Chuck again. This morning we went to a meeting with some Rotary folks in San Ignacio. The president and past president joined the Fukais and Joe Carlson, whom you met in Dale’s blog yesterday. The president is the only native Belizean in that group. We also had a member of the water board of the village of Santa Familia, which is just to the northwest of San Ignacio. The past president wanted a central distribution system for Yalbac, with chlorination at the central holding tank. Others thought the expense of piping from the well to all of the houses isn’t justified, and agreed that chlorination is not necessarily reliable and that chlorinated water doesn’t taste good. We agreed to keep thinking about Yalbac, even though their source water is to hard and alkaline that it will require softening and reverse osmosis, and the village has no electricity.

The Fukais then took us to Santa Familia, where we rejoined Robbie, the water board member. She is also from the US, retired after a career in the Air Force. She is a very organized and forceful person. She said that a few years ago the government handed her authority for the village water and a budget of $3. There was a flat rate of $10/month for water, which is pumped from the river to a holding tank, and from which it flows through distribution pipes to the houses. She said she had increased payment rates from 38% to 99% and now has a surplus of $18,000 to make improvements.

Her interest in us is related to her intention to get the school off the village distribution system. There must be major leaks, because they school uses a disproportionately large fraction of the water they pump, and if they can get the school off the system, the pumps will not have to be replaced as often. She wants to install a rainwater catchment system and supply the school from a cistern. The school is fairly large, with 287 students currently, and it has, by my estimate, about 70,000 to 75,000 sq. ft. of roof on four buildings. She thinks they can store enough water to last through the dry season, and she likes the idea of treating what they use to drink.

The school is a Catholic-operated school with government support. The principal thought that the water plan would be approved by the board that oversees all Catholic schools in Belize, so we are encouraged about the potential there.

We met the chairman of the village council, a young man with a vision for progress in the village. We learned that there is another school in the village, a “Christian” school that had not been interested in the catchment system. We talked about the possibility of talking them into cooperating, since the capacity of a treatment system should be enough to sustain the daytime drinking water needs of more than the Catholic school. So we were even more encouraged about Santa Familia.

After lunch we went back to Benque to say good-bye to Father Dan. This was more a sentimental trip for the Stratmans than a business trip, since we had concluded all of our water-related business with him except to tell him about the school in Santa Familia. From there it was back to Spanish Lookout, a Mennonite community between Unitedville and Yalbac, so we could have ice cream from the dairy there.

Dale had been concerned about confirming our meetings in Armenia tomorrow, so while we were heading for Benque, she phoned the general store to leave a message for Filberta. We were also concerned about how to get hold of Michael, the Peace Corps guy. When she asked to leave a message, she found that Filberta was in the store that very moment. Filberta agreed to talk to the other health care worker and to Michael, and a short time later, Michael phoned to confirm that he would be at the meetings. We thanked God for the timing that connected Dale to Filberta and saved us a trip to Armenia to find her and Michael (which would have ruled out ice cream).

Tomorrow morning we plan to go to the Belize zoo, a small zoo with native animals in natural settings. We did this on our way home two years ago, and it was an experience we wanted to repeat and to share with the rest of our group. Tomorrow afternoon we will go to Belmopan for some shopping and a visit to the Department of Rural Development to talk about the Armenia well situation and to Armenia to do chemical tests on the river water.

Friday, June 1

This morning we went to the zoo, where we saw spider and howler monkeys, toucans, peccaries, jaguars and other cats, many other native animals and birds. Afterward we had lunch at the world-famous Cheers restaurant. It was a nice break from our travels from village to village.

After lunch the Farragut group left to hike and swim at the Blue Hole park across the road from Jaguar Creek. We did some shopping in Belmopan, to stock up on Marie Sharp hot sauce and jellies. Dale needed to organize materials for her health care meeting in Armenia, so we stopped to get a drink in a restaurant on the edge of the market. I was amazed to find that we were on the periphery of a wireless internet server, probably from one of the nearby internet shops.

Dale dropped off at Armenia for her meeting, while Ed and Janice and I went on to the river to test the water. Its pH was very high, but hardness and alkalinity were within limits for treatment without reverse osmosis. That was good news. We didn’t have time for the 48-hour bacteriological test, but we wouldn’t assume even with a good sample that the river would remain uncontaminated.

In Armenia, Dale met with Filberta and Odelia, the health care workers, and the Peace Corps worker. Besides water, their major health issues are worms—tapeworms, “beef worms” (bot-flies), and hookworm. Dale discussed educating the people about how to avoid tapeworms and hookworm, and she got a list of needed medical supplies. Once again we faced the problem that giving them medicine would help only as long as the medicine lasted, since they will become re-infected immediately.

During the meeting, children began to gather to see what was going on. Robin sat outside and chatted with them, and then she read a book I had bought at the zoo. It was in a version of Creole, which would be appropriate in Unitedville, but the kids didn’t really relate to it because they speak either Spanish or Mayan in addition to English. But they did enjoy clustering around Robin and getting her attention. Eventually, some of the kids showed up with craft items their mothers had made, so we had to buy some baskets and beads. One child had things his father had carved before his recent death.

I had gone to a Government ministry to try to get a geological map so our experts at home could try to get some idea where there might be water. If there was a map, it was at another ministry, but I had been routed to a woman who appeared to be the ministry’s manager of the Armenia well project. She told me that they had found water at 230 feet and then cased the well and screened it at 240 feet, where they didn’t get water. She said they were hypothesizing that they had a thin layer of water and had blocked it off with the casing, so they were going to pull the screen up ten feet to see if they could get water. This would happen in the next week or two. As an aside, the water was contaminated with bacteria. The story at Armenia was that they had talked to the drillers, who said they well had produced and then gone dry, and they were going to drill another 100 feet. Also, they said the International Development Fund was putting the well in, not the government. So one of our problems is not only finding out who to talk to but determining what the truth is after you talk to people. I think maybe you have to hear enough stories that you can recognize the truth when you observe it. I guess that’s a feature of Belize.

Pedro arrived for our second meeting, and we thought he may have been a bit overwhelmed to be greeted by six of us. Of course, he was at the end of his work day, on a job in which he teaches jungle survival to British soldiers. We talked more about the water tank that they need, and agreed that until we know what happens with the well in the next couple of weeks, we can’t decide what size tank we need. We agreed that Antonio, from Jaguar Creek, would be a good project foreman, and Pedro thought Jaguar Creek might be able to get a church group to come and build the pad for the tank. We think the job can be done for around $5000, including the tank. Then we would have to find out whether the water would be clean enough to drink. We left with a good feeling that with God’s guidance, our congregation can accomplish something really important to the Armenia villagers.

Saturday, June 2

We said our goodbyes after an early breakfast and headed for the airport. Along the way we had to pull off the road for a few minutes to let an oncoming bicycle tour of forty or fifty cyclists get past. The rest of the trip was uneventful. Our plane was delayed for a bit because it was overloaded. A combination of ejecting a party of four, burning off some excess fuel, and a better breeze got us off the ground and over the Caribbean in a few seconds.

We traveled from the coast to the western border, and about one-third the north-south distance of the country. We went about 750 miles, which required $300 BZ in gasoline (that’s $150 US). We developed an unexpectedly good friendship with Ed and Janice from Wyoming, and we met many people who could help us with many water projects.

We thank God for the opportunity to make this trip and pray that it will be fruitful. And we thank all of your for your prayers and words of encouragement that helped us along the way.