Dispatches From Belize

This week, University Relations science and research writer Matt McGowan is working in Belize with students, faculty members and a few alumni who are part of the Belize Community Development Program. The program is a partnership between the University of Arkansas and Peacework, an international humanitarian organization founded by UA alumnus Stephen Darr.

This is the second year students have come to work in Belize – south of the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, which is about the size of Massachusetts, has approximately 300,000 people –  although the partnership between the University and Peacework began in 2005. The multidisciplinary program is an innovative approach to enhancing educational experience and engaging students in sustainable global development. Supervised by faculty members, students participate in many local projects, including small-business development and marketing, literacy and social work in schools, sustainable agriculture, ecology and civil engineering.

McGowan will file daily observations about the program, its participants and Belize, especially Dangriga, the coastal town where the program is based. His story about the program will appear in the fall issue of Arkansas, the University’s alumni magazine.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

The power goes out occasionally. I’ve haven’t noticed it too much because I’ve been out and about a lot. At first, I thought it was isolated to the Bonefish, that maybe the profs and I were cranking up the window units too much and tripping a breaker. Gray’s friend Tom, who’s become my friend, too, guiltily mentioned the same, and Popp said that wasn’t the case at all. The government has instituted rolling blackouts to cut down on expenses. Apparently, Belize is behind on its payments to Mexico, from whom it buys power.
The point of the above story is that during one of these 30-minute power outages, I realized, somewhat ironically, that they have a lot here that we don’t have in Northwest Arkansas. Late last night I was reading in bed, about to fall asleep, when the power went out. The lamp kicked off and the window unit stopped humming. I lay still. My glasses were still on. This is fine, I thought; no big deal. As I said, I was about ready to fall asleep, anyway. So I took off my glasses, set them next to the lamp and waited to slip into unconsciousness.
It was eerily quiet. And then I heard something, faintly. I listened to it for a while, a few minutes, maybe longer, and then I realized it was waves hitting the beach. Now that is something we don’t have that back home.
Nor do we have the kind of fruit they have. Oh, man. If there’s one thing I could take home, it would be crates and crates of pineapple. It’s not like the pineapple we get, at least not the kind we get in Fayetteville. Pineapple here is easy to chew, perfectly sweet and natural. (High-fructose corn syrup hasn’t invaded Belize yet.) The cooks at the Jungle Huts serve chunks of it with mango and bananas at virtually every meal. I can’t get enough. And up near Pomona and Steadfast, oranges fall off trees. Compared to grocery store oranges, they look imperfect, but they taste so good.
They also have a lot of cool, cruiser bicycles here that seem to serve people quite well. I love seeing women pedaling to work or school with toddlers sitting on the handlebars. That sounds dangerous, but I haven’t seen one accident. In fact, the pedestrians, bicyclists and vehicle drivers all seem to interact peacefully and safely, even though the streets are narrow. Again, this is different than the typical American scene, where you feel like you’re risking your life when walking across the street.
A lot of people get stuff done here, but two people, Rachel Duncan and Shauna Copeland, deserve mention. These two young women have lived in Dangriga for several months prior to students and faculty coming for the four-week session. They have handled logistics between Belize and Fayetteville and served as liaisons between local community leaders and both UA and Peacework administrators. More importantly, by hitting the streets, they have built relationships and trust in the community, perhaps the most critical ingredient to ensuring that the Belize Community Development Program works and has some kind of lasting impact.
 It’s difficult to explain their connection to the community, other than to say that they have become Dangrigans. You can see it in the dynamic between the locals and both women. Two experiences demonstrated this to me. After escorting the literacy students to Sacred Heart School yesterday, Rachel reunited with Eunice Nunez, acting principal at the school. The two women embraced and then held each other’s hands for the longest time. It was easy to sense the mutual respect and genuine affection.
The other experience illustrated to me that for most regular people of Dangriga, Rachel and Shauna are the face of the Belize Community Development Program. The other day I was walking across the bridge over the canal, and a small-time hustler named Charlie stopped me on the street. Again, I looked SO foreign.
“Hey, man,” Charlie said. “You with Rachel and them other people.”
Rachel said this to me during an interview: “Between Shauna and me, if someone has a question, we can find someone to answer it, from the mayor all the way down to Charlie.”
Today was my last full day here. I don’t want to go home, but I miss my kids more than I can stand, and Saturday is my daughter’s 13th birthday.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Today I carried buckets of water to the garden at St. Matthew’s and broke up a fist fight between two boys outside the soccer stadium in Dangriga. The latter event made me sad. I don’t know anything about these boys’ families or their economic situation, but the fight made me think about anger and other soul-killing effects of poverty. (Annual per capita income in Belize is about $4,000, and prices aren’t that much lower than those in the United States. One-third of the population lives below the poverty line. The national unemployment rate is 9.4 percent. Farmer said half of the men of Dangriga do not have jobs.

Before the fight, I witnessed a really cool thing. UA English instructor Laura Gray’s students have been teaching literacy and creative writing at a few schools in Dangriga. I sat in on a poetry unit at Sacred Heart School and saw an electric exchange between Gray’s teaching students and the Belizean sixth-graders, who got fired up after hearing one of Gray’s students read a Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem that is so lyrical and evocative to me that I have to repeat it:

We Real Cool (The pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.)

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing Sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Wow! What a poem. It has everything: a picture, a story and a song. How could a child not be inspired to write after that? Hearing it and seeing how the children responded to it made my day. Even the fight couldn’t spoil that.

The afternoon was spent at St. Matthew’s in Pomona. The Ag students, with help from Farmer and many of her business students, planted corn, sweet peppers, radishes, tomatoes, carrots and a few other vegetables. For the students, it was long and arduous work but extremely satisfying, probably a lot like farming without with having to worry about balance sheets or combines breaking down. I shot about thousand photos and then carried those buckets. It was nice seeing the teachers and students of St. Matthew’s plant seeds next to Popp and her students.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

At the end of yesterday, on my way back to the Bonefish, I ran into Amy Farmer and Kim Smith, professor of biological sciences. They were sitting on the steps in front of Val’s, a beachfront laundromat and so much more. (Dana, the proprietor and Val’s daughter, sells ice cream!)

“You ever bird watch?” Smith said.

 “Not really,” I said. “But I’m willing to try.”

“We’re going early tomorrow morning. You should come.”

I stumbled outside around 6 a.m. and found Smith talking to a local. The sun had barely risen over the silver, ocean horizon. It was a quiet and peaceful. Smith was ready to go. We hopped in a van and picked up his students at the Jungle Huts, which, thankfully, had a full pot of coffee. Smith drove south on the main road. Outside of town, we crossed a narrow bridge and parked in front of two horses standing in the middle of the road.

After petting the wandering horses, the students and Smith got busy spotting and identifying various birds – pelicans, of course, terns, hawks and something called a social flycatcher. The experience baffled and awed me at the same time. Obviously, I had never been in the company of serious bird watchers. It was like they were speaking a different language. I quickly got lost. Every time someone spotted a bird – and it could be a small bird a half mile away – they each raised their binoculars and started listing various features – colors and markings and such. Then they’d discuss and announce a different bird name, which always sounded exotic to me, but they treated it as rather mundane event. A few times, though, their voices rose with excitement over a bird they hadn’t seen before.

This is a good time to say something about these students, all of them. If they represent the future of America, I feel less cynical. Their passion and energy are infectious. Yes, they are idealistic, like most college students, but what’s wrong with that? These young men and women season their idealism with intelligence, poise and compassion. They really come to life when they interact with local residents, especially children in the schools. It is moving to see them work with nine- and ten-year-old boys and girls, hunkering down in their desks and trying to understand subject/verb agreement. After this experience – for them and me – I believe most of these students will choose service careers of some kind.

Back to work! Shops and schools reopened today after yesterday’s holiday, and everyone, including the project team, got down to business. After breakfast, Farmer and I rode out to Billy Barquedier National Park with the engineering and ecology teams. Soerens and Smith had their students busy tweaking the water-filtration system, which sits on a steep mountainside, and building a compost toilet for the park. While we were there, a young couple from Chicago arrived. Farmer rushed over to them and quickly surveyed them. Had they gone to Dangriga, she asked. They had not.

The afternoon was full of meetings. I accompanied Farmer and three of her economics students to Ecumenical High School, where junior Olivia Meeks competently explained the microlending program to the school’s principal. In addition to serving as executive director of the Belize Community Development Program, Farmer also leads students on five individual projects: small business development and consulting, tourism promotion and marketing, economic literacy, community clean-up and education/microfinance. The latter program offers educational loans (students and their families must pay tuition for education, which is run primarily by the Anglican Church) to students’ families at the beginning of the school year in August. The loans must be re-paid on a monthly basis throughout the school year. The principal at Ecumenical said there definitely was a need for the loans at his school, but he wanted to ensure that the students understood the responsibility of re-paying.

After that meeting, Farmer and I joined more business students at Dangriga’s municipal building, which houses the town council and mayor’s office. Students on the tourism promotion team were meeting with Shannon Castillo, Dangriga’s finance manager and acting town administrator. They discussed plans and preparations for Dangriga Day, which is June 7.

I listened to the plans, shot some photos and wished I could attend Dangriga Day. Maybe next year.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Most shops and services were closed today due to a national holiday – Commonwealth Day, a legacy of British rule. Belize, formerly British Honduras, obtained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1981. Although politically independent, the small nation (Belize’s population is approximately the same as Northwest Arkansas) maintains some ties to the British Commonwealth.  

Farmer and I went for run early this morning, which gave me a good look at much of the northern section of Dangriga. Small, clapboard houses and a few shops face narrow, dusty streets. Only the main roads are paved. Many houses stand on stilts, evidence of hurricane preparedness.

The architecture here is interesting. Most modern structures are modular and made of cement reinforced by long strips of rebar – another sign of hurricane preparedness. The old commercial buildings on “the main” remind me of the French Quarter in New Orleans. These structures have colonial and Victorian flourishes, fading remnants of British colonization

As Farmer and I jogged through neighborhoods, I remembered another initial impression of Dangriga. In previous conversations with her and several students – primarily marketing students working on tourism promotion – I learned that unsightly trash everywhere was the main reason tourists did not want to visit Dangriga and the Stann Creek District, despite its natural beauty. (Farmer and her students had actually conducted surveys with tourists.)

“Where’s all the trash?” I asked. “I thought there was supposed to be trash everywhere.”

“Most of it’s gone,” she said. “It’s so much better than last year.”

  At the end of last year’s four-week session, students, faculty members and hundreds of locals – adults and children – participated in a city-wide clean-up day and knocked out much of the trash problem. Then, after students and professors returned to Fayetteville, a group of concerned citizens convened. Every Saturday, members of this group picked up trash along sections of the beach and in some areas of town, Farmer said. Also, throughout the off-season, the mayor of Dangriga and the town council promoted a litter-free campaign. Farmer said the UA/Peacework community project cannot take credit for the off-season clean-up effort, but that activity is exactly the kind of sustainable effect the project is designed to promote.

 After breakfast, Kameri Christy-McMullin, associate professor of social work and faculty adviser for the social work project, gave me a mini walking tour of the southern end of Dangriga. We walked to the bus station, the hub for transportation to Pomona, Steadfast, Billy Barquedier National Park and Belize City, which is about three hours away. (A small plane takes only 30 minutes.) Christy-McMullin showed me the bus routes, and then we bumped into Yolanda, a member of Dangriga’s women’s empowerment group, which Christy-McMullin and the social work students have collaborated with to conduct workshops on issues such as self-esteem, decision-making, leadership development, family violence and alternative forms of discipline.  

“It’s nice,” Christy-McMullin said as we left Yolanda and the bus station. “People here are really starting to recognize us and trust us.”

In the afternoon, Thomas Soerens, professor of civil engineering and faculty adviser for the engineering project, took me and about 15 students out to Billy Barquedier National Park. We viewed part of a water-filtration system he designed and installed with his students last year. The system provides clean water to two small towns down from mountains in the national park. The little creek that serves as the source for this water also carved out a beautiful waterfall, which everyone swam in.

I thanked Soerens for taking me there. “This is paradise,” I said. Soerens, who’s soft-spoken and chooses his words carefully, nodded in agreement.

On the way back, we stopped at St. Matthew’s School in Pomona, a small citrus-farming community about 20 miles west of Dangriga. Agriculture students supervised by Jennie Popp, associate professor of agricultural economics and agribusiness, have worked with students and staff of St. Matthew’s to build a large garden behind the school. Students watered rows of corn.

“We need rain,” Popp said.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

After baked chicken and fried conch at the Jungle Huts (the students home), Amy Farmer and I were walking back to the Bluefish Hotel (the faculty home), and Farmer, economics professor and director of the University of Arkansas’ Belize Community Development Program., was telling me about Dangrigans. She said they were naturally friendly.

“They don’t have air-conditioning,” she said. “So they sit outside a lot. They wave and talk to people who pass by.”

“Kind of like it was in our country fifty years ago,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.”

I worry about the effect, culturally, of modern conveniences such as cable television and air-conditioning, which pulled Americans off their front porches sometime in the 1950s and removed us from view of other people. Now we’re all shut-ins, and too many of us don’t know our neighbors. Farmer confirmed my superficial observation – I’d been here only three hours – that Dangrigans know each other, and I think this makes them friendlier and perhaps less fearful of foreigners.

Because I looked SO foreign as I dragged my bags along the dirt road that connects the airstrip to the Pelican, a nice, beachfront hotel that reminded me of the kind of place from which Ernest Hemingway might have penned a letter while waiting for his fishing guide. It was Sunday, so kids were out on the streets, kicking soccer balls and riding bicycles. As I approached the intersection near the Pelican, I noticed a large, intergenerational family doing exactly what Farmer said Dangrigans do – sitting outside.

This family was having a meal. Some of them were eating on the porch and the stoop that led to the front yard, where others were sitting on chairs and talking. I felt stupid, but something – curiosity? – made me look over at this family, and when I did, two elderly women waved at me profusely. I don’t know; I was feeling strange in my own skin, and that simple gesture changed everything. It made feel welcomed and comfortable. If you’ve ever stumbled into a small town in a corner of the world, a wave or hello from a local can go a very long way. I hope I’ve been that nice to people visiting my country.

The cab ride from the Pelican to the Bluefish was exciting. People were everywhere. More kids on bicycles. Older people walking in all directions on both sides of the street. A small group of teenagers jumped in front of the cab and darted across the narrow road. The driver didn’t react. Very calm dude. Then, everyone seemed to be going to the same place, and all of sudden we came upon a dense crowd of people lined along a tall, cinder-block wall that stretched a whole city block. When I looked up and saw people at the top of the wall but on the other side of it and looking away from the street, I realized it was some kind of stadium.

“Are they playing soccer there?” I asked the driver. “Football?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a community game. Those older than 30 are playing the youth.”

“Really?” I said.

And then, with extra light in his eye and a twisted grin, the 55-year-old driver nodded and said: “And the old men are winning.”

I asked him how much time was left in the game, because I wanted to come back and watch some of it. He just laughed at me. Then he dropped me off at the Bluefish, where I met Farmer and some of the other faculty members (you’ll hear about them later) of the Belize Community Development Program, and we walked to the Jungle Huts for dinner.