http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrbIQM3xYXA

This video was from last Sunday at Caribbean Villas for the sailing club

This 5000+ sq ft Luxury Home is offered at 2.5 million usd. complete with dock this is truly a home not to pass up, offered completly furnished and with you own private pier with boat lift, get more details at jeffinbelize.com

Wow one more day of rain, I hope today will be the last day...Sunshine tomorrow as this weather is for the dogs.....

Come take a look at the new blog I'm contributing to at: www.economixt.com

After unloading our backpacks to the edge of the dock the boat pulled away and for a few moments we all stood sort of looking at each other waiting for something to happen. We heard the bark of a dog and turned toward a path leading from the island to see five large German shepherds coming barking toward us. Shella grabbed at the edges of her skirt and I murmured a sort of what the hell?, wondering if we were about to take a mauling. An old woman came staggering behind them calling at the dogs or us, Take it easy! Take it easy!

A brutish looking German nearing her seventies, sub-beaten and overflowing from an orange bikini, came to greet us. You could tell that in her youth she may have done quite well in that same bikini, however, now it struggled to tie her folding sun-worn hide like strings fastened around loose meat and caused everyone’s jaw to loosen in awe. Her face was pulled back in that painful tooth-exposed look of fear or excitement that is the hallmark of senility. It was as though her very gums may be red hot and that she had to smile to avoid scorching the rest of her face. From this same mouth however she spoke with the soft calming voice of a pleasant grandmother, welcoming and kind. Her head twitching uncontrollably and eyes bobbed as she brought us on a tour of the island. The dogs, now recognizing us as friends and not food, had stopped growling and wove between legs and people, sometimes knocking the old woman sideways and clearly seemed to run the island.

The tour lasted not fifteen minutes and we were finished with the old woman and began moving bags into our hexagon thatch on the water. It was perfect - four beds, a small shelf with a gas burner and several kerosene lamps for the evenings. The floorboards were loose and you quickly learned which could and could not support your weight. I loved its imperfections - the rusty nails, the crabs scurrying across the floor. A porch that wrapped around the building held chairs facing the ocean and I couldn’t have been happier. The house had just enough and nothing more. Looking down from the porch deck you could look straight to a green sea-grass bottom with schools of fish passing by.

That afternoon the group took to the water. The day only the thin breeze to keep the skin from overheating and allowed us to snorkel far away from the island with ease. After a mile away from the island it was legal to take any food we could find and so Scott, Mike and I were searching under rock shelves and coral for lobster and collected several conch to shell back at the house. That evening swimming lazily back under a fire sky it was hard to contain the melting sense of time and pressures. The warm lapping of the sea on our backs as we coasted over deep crops of coral gently rocked and detached us from mainland reminders.

Back at the house Scott and Mike pulled loose and fried the two conchs while I boiled the lobster. That night we had fried conch pieces as an appetizer and pasta with lobster. Sitting on our porch facing west we ate silently having among us neither the words nor the need for them to describe our contentment.

That night after everyone had fallen asleep under a warm breeze, I snuck quietly outdoors to watch the moon creep above distant clouds. The sea and its wind have always seemed ancient to me. They are the unmoving forces of the earth reminding us of the simplicity and triviality of our lives. This feeling has always been freeing for me. Knowing that whatever I may become in this short life that it will be of no great consequence, that nothing of man or its makings should deter or distract me and that I am allowed to live freely through the purest of my own intentions. Without electric light for many miles the sky echoed with its crisp and timeless constellations. Feeling ghostly and filled with great holy thoughts of life and night I snuck back into the house for my pillow and sheets and went to sleep on the porch facing the sea.

Packing in my bedroom it all seemed to have been rushed upon me. The last great travel during my years in the Peace Corps. There were just 36 days until I’d be leaving this country and still the idea was wholly fictional to me. Belize was my home and my life here was what I knew best. The heat, the people, the routines, they would all be left behind and I had yet to conflict and settle upon my solutions to this looming change. With only a month left I had begun to hear the slow and deep crescendo of time in my ears. It never left and was a constant reminder to be kind and grateful during my remaining days.

On trips like these away from my small Maya village I’d been all over Central America. I’d hiked volcanoes, seen hidden lakes, secluded shorelines, and slept on too many floors to count. The last trip would be a week on the most remote island under Belizean claim. Roughly 25 miles from the Belize coastline I would spend a week on an island no more than half a mile around attempting to align my mind between the two years spent in Belize and the two years I would soon be spending attempting a graduate degree in a cold New England town. The setting for this sort of mass collection of thought was perfect, distant and silent, without electricity or distraction. I felt sure that I would have all the time to come away with the mental order I was seeking.

My small group of Peace Corps Volunteers and I were to leave on a boat at 9 am on Sunday from a specific site along a river in the center of the country. We met the night before to stay at a cabin in the woods so that we could make our boat on time. I arrived at the cabin with a friend Shella. A few hours later the rest of our group arrived carrying bags packed with enough food to last them the week. Mike, Janine and Scott. Mike approached me first and offered a bear hug that seemed to be the only way he could express his overflowing excitement for the week to come.

Man! Are you ready? Let’s get out there and see us some ocean, huh? I can’t wait! he said releasing me from his grip and moving in to enclose Shella next. Scott, a quiet outdoorsman shook my hand and exposed a v-shaped smile that gave his face a bright contagious glow. Janine, smiled behind her sunglasses while I asked how their trip had been.

Set in a porch chair looking out to the river at dusk that evening I thought about two coincidental events that would take place this week. First, it was the week of the year that would include the longest day making this week that with the most hours of daylight for the year. Additionally, the month’s full moon was scheduled to rise at the center of our stay making it also the lightest week of nights for that month as the moon waxed and waned. Some quick calculations and I decided that the probability of us choosing the week of the year with the most daylight for our trip as well as the full moon taking place at the very center of that week were roughly 1 in 1560. The two coinciding events made the next seven days a rare week of light and I was for some reason comforted knowing that even the planets were on our side. That night we slept on our anticipation and woke with the dawn to meet our boat.

Skimming across the sea early in the day I watched Belize shrink into the horizon. Crossing the protective barrier reef we reached deeper water and soon were powering over rolling swells without island or mainland in sight. A young attractive Canadian couple, Patrick and Rita, sat tightly next to each other – she shuttering into his arms as the sea spray came over the bow and he smiling with an beaming sense of adventure. Next to them on the boat was a wiry and nervous looking Brit who described himself as a retired military man that now led rafting trips on a river in Honduras. He sat paying no attention to the swells or spray and focused intently on drawing a sharpening file over a knife he kept in a sheath on his belt. I liked the Canadian couple immediately. It had been nearly two years sense I had held anyone like Pat was holding Rita and I envied their intimacy. I envied what it must have felt like to be traveling with a woman you loved, to be forging into new destinations together and dealing with whatever challenges may come. Even just the name Rita with its old-fashioned simplicity seemed to pull at the very Rockwellian sources of my upbringing. The name brought to mind warm living rooms, a dog by the fire and a house filled with the aroma of a holiday meal.

Bounding over open water the island seemed to come from nowhere as if it had risen from the very sea to provide a landing for our boat. The driver tied us to a worn sea-beaten pier and it began.

And so say goodbye to all those hot concrete rhythms of the Belize City streets. From the wet bags of garbage along the fence to the broken glass on the floor, from a soaked sidewalk to this sweat stained bench. It’s the shouting banter of the Belize City bus terminal. The CD salesman, tall and gripping a cigarette, Beliken bottle and stack of CDs all in one hand while he speaks with the other. His eyes in constant motion and he can’t stop speaking. The thin homeless woman with scars on her back. She’s almost in tears holding her body tightly with one hand while the other hangs limp. Ignored and aching in the center of the terminal she’s caught in the light of a broken rain cloud and takes the form of a holy statue, sad and ghostly as if divine in her pain, and completely alone. An old driver rubs the back of his neck while stepping off his bus and lights a cigarette. The sky is dark with rain clouds as if it is shadowed by the earth, or perhaps just mirroring something here on it. The bus driver stands under the edge of terminal roofline staring into the rain and lending face to lean on cigarette. And while his smoke drifts above his head, in ascending halos of grey, you can see in him a great and ancient pain. The pain of man and work, the pain of time and the weight of it. The CD salesman has taken a seat and rubs his eyes. Long back hunched over with face toward the ground. He looks for the first time, weak and frail and forgiven. They’re all still and calm for a moment and appear in those seconds to be absolute fixtures in this place, like the concrete, like the gravel. The rain is bringing a thickening darkness and from the tuning of the rain on this metal room, you can hear the moan of a lonely requiem. The bus driver drops his cigarette in a puddle next to his feet and as though a cue, the thin woman turns to walk away, and the CD salesman stands up.

My bus nears Belmopan passing the fruit dealers sitting along the highway. It’s 4 o’clock in Belmopan and the commuters of all kinds are making their way home. A woman in a clean green bank teller’s uniform opens her cell phone to check the time. She’s waiting to catch the 4:15 to daycare then the 4:45 to the store and be home by 6. A man on a bike with small lunch box passes the bus terminal peppered with the dirt of the day. There’ll be a light on in the kitchen and the oven’ll be warm when he gets there. A boy and girl in school uniforms sit close and silent on the bus. He’s searching his hands for something to say and she’s trying to hide her smile by looking out the window. They’ll never be able to forget these seemingly simple afternoons memorizing each other’s words and the motion of the bus. Their faces beat with the pulse of hearts that whine and their faces are filled with the reason we should all try at all. The bus pulls away and the view of the station shrinks into just another spot in this city. It’s 4:00 in the universe and Belize is on its way home.

Just a small catch up on what has been missed in this blog since the sense left me a while back. I took a three-week vacation with three other Peace Corps Volunteers to the southern-most edge of Nicaragua where we participated in a fabled local Easter celebration. The event itself lived up to all expectations of being a great overflowing of all brutal hedonism at the knife-point of a violent and unstable country. For the four of us PCVs it was the bachelor party without the wedding. Then, in this distant black-sand surf town I met up with two gal friends from college. Together the three of us traveled casually back to Belize stopping in various cities and bus stops to eat, take pictures and discuss all the atmospheric topics of life that one is allowed to indulge during long-distance travel.

Back in Belize we visited my small village. I had secretly been smiling to see how the two worlds would collide and what I may feel seeing old faces in this little place I call home. We skimmed the edge what my life here and then made a quick escape for beach chairs in the sun. On Belize’s premier beach we met up with two other friends from college already at the height of their vacation. Spending five days straight staring at the sea from a lounge chair can have dangerous affects on the mind. One’s world begins to be simplified into a tunnel of dangerously comfortable decision. Routines are built around repeated luxury and one can easily be fooled by their make-believe land. A cold drink now, or later? How many hours have I been in this chair and what day is this? Why don’t I wear sandals in my other life and what type of liquor goes best with fresh-squeezed lemonade? From my lounge chair the passing crowds of haggard vacationers clumsily making their way across the sand looked like a migrating Neolithic species foraging for bone scraps, further twisting the minds perspective. There is something innately disturbing to me to be on vacation in another country but it has never stopped me from doing so. To be a vacationer in a vacation town is to be a foregone conclusion and I’ve never understood people who are comfortable with that.

After 3 of the 4 friends visiting left for their northerns homes it was myself and an old friend. We spent our days in long-winded discussions on science and society all while laughing to a point just shy of injury. At dawn on the morning when the last one would leave I woke her and took to the road. I saw that plane fly north from the side of a long desolate highway. I hitched for hours and hours that day along citrus groves and cornfields and having all the endless miles to reach conclusions and find ways to digest all that had just happened. Alone for half a day with just the sun and my shoes I put tags on the topics we had touched upon and by the end was left content and at peace along the roadside.

Back in my village with a mountain of work waiting for me I spent the next few weeks working constantly. During this time I was accepted to graduate school in a program and was hired for a position that would remove money as an issue in my life. My school celebrated its annual Maya Open Day and I had roughly a dozen PCV visitors to my village at one point or another. Now after the heat and activity of vacations and my school’s major events has passed I’m feeling a bit adrift and so have had the time for reading to reenter my daily routine.

In a week or so I’ll be traveling to attend our famed Peace Corps Close of Service Conference where the Peace Corps administration here in Belize will prepare myself and 23 other volunteers for their impending return to the States. We’ll submit reports, update our resumes and generally have the nostalgic pulp squeezed out of us so that we return to our villages both sad and satisfied with our service in the PC.

It’s been a busy last month and a half. Even now I feel utterly incapable of attempting a guess at what it has all meant or how these events align themselves with the others of my life. Either way, there will be plenty of time for that later. For now, I’ve just got some reading to do.

The final unit in my 2nd year computer class is for students to start their own blogs. This unit is based on the idea of trying empower students as well as teach them how to use the internet and the computer. The blogs have just gone up today and here is the list. They'd love comments so feel free to say Hi.

www.selvinroches.blogspot.com

www.danielrosado36.blogspot.com

www.auguiebochub.blogspot.com

www.iriscoh.blogspot.com

www.patriciasacul.blogspot.com

Recently there has been some controversy in response to an article in the New York Times written by Robert L. Strauss "Too Many Innocents Abroad". Strauss, a former PCV and PC Country Director suggests some drastic changes in the PC recruiting process and PCVs in Belize have been asked by our Country Director whether they hold opinions on the article so that they may be brought up at the worldwide Country Director conference scheduled in a couple of months. I thought I'd post a link to the article and my response as an entry.

Too Many Innocents Abroad

Response to Too Many Innocents Abroad

Jeffrey Frank

PCV Belize ‘06-‘08

After I finished reading Robert Strauss’ article Too Many Innocents Abroad and the Letters to the Editor that followed I promptly shrugged, got up from my desk and wondered what all the fuss was about. His article and the comments from his readers sounded like any vibrant breakfast conversation you may have with a group of PCVs and enlightened, albeit indirectly, one of the major catch-all concepts that looms over the discussion of the PC’s aggregated value – individual comparisons don’t work.

It is all too tempting for individual contributors of this massive organization to offer their perspective on the net value of the PC, however, ultimately their opinions can only be accredited by their own experience and thus are only somewhat able to grasp the whole. This is why most of the Letters to the Editor, save for one or two, sounded so self-centered and irrelevant. “When I was in ____ I saw _____ and think _____ about it” – that sort of response. Any PCV or RPCV can give examples arguing for or against Strauss’ argument because in a given day most PCVs find themselves both overly-qualified for some tasks and royally up-the-creek on others. Could some PCVs be matched more accurately with projects that fit their skill set or better trained by the PC? Of course. Could some PCVs be more flexible and willing to learn the skills needed to act affectively as a PC? Of course. This is the curse of any qualitative organization.

There is no balance sheet for how well PCVs worldwide are influencing their communities and so nearly anyone can choose to poke and prod the PC with the refinements and adaptations they see needed. And this is where an ironic magnified relationship seems to take place between the PC and the PCV. Just like the PCV the PC seems to be at its best when it open and flexible. Two words I think I hear echoing the halls of PC headquarters around the world.

Strauss suggests raising the bar on PC applicants to select only the most elite volunteers. This is a perfectly fine opinion and the sentiment deserves respect. The immediate problem however is that it creates a recruiting nightmare. How do you pry a highly educated or experienced U.S. citizen away from their other options to serve in work they are drastically overqualified for? An enormous PC marketing campaign would be necessary to heighten the allure of the PC. Additionally, the request to raise the bar universally on PC applicants implies that the net success/failure value of the PC is currently in the negative, which I think is quite wrong. If the PC is failing, it is failing only in respect to its infinitely tall potential.

What needs to be addressed in response to Strauss’ article is whether there is more to gain or lose by raising the bar on PC applicants and whether attrition rate of PCVs has any correlation with the qualifications of the PCVs. On the former I imagine more would be lost by a drastic raising of the bar, because even if a PCV finds themselves unable to meet the technical qualifications of their project, they may still be able to succeed at PCV Goals 2 and 3. As for the second question of attrition, I would doubt there is a strong correlation between the education/experience of a PCV and their likelihood of prematurely ending their service, as (in my short experience) most PCVs quit the PC due to personal reasons unrelated to both their experience/education or PC project.

In the end the PC strives and survives on articles like Strauss’ and would be insufficient without the prodding of its people. Strauss’ opinions certainly deserve attention, however they should also be weighed and examined with consideration for his own perspective, education and experience.

There is something quite inhuman about being a Peace Corps Volunteer. It becomes vividly apparent almost everyday that there is a strain of pure lunacy running through the whole idea of cultural integration – not exchange, but integration. As someone who was raised and educated in Maine, I possess, on the most basic levels, the provincial knowledge of this territory. Quite accurately, you could call this my culture.

“Cultural Integration” is a buzz-phrase in the international development business and the Peace Corps specifically. It is a founding goal of being a PCV as per the belief that you won’t be able to have any affect until you have become properly acculturated. This is a fine theory, and I swear my issue is not merely semantic, but I have to take issue with how this idea is shaped by reality and revealed under the light of application.

For example, today I spent most of my Sunday with a group of students who live at my school. We rode bikes around the village laughing and poking fun at each other, swimming and playing in the river, fishing for our dinner, talking personally about ourselves and just generally having a good day. Despite this fluidity I don’t believe the example is evidence of my being “culturally integrated” into anything.

Does having a mutual empathy and understanding implicate integration or does it merely mean that worldwide humans tend to have the same orchestra of emotions, wants and needs? Is cultural integration the act of perfecting the local language, making sure you know all the local gestures and customs? If so, then I should simply write a book and save all future PCVs to Belize a whole lot of time. Maybe cultural integration is the level of acceptance or respect you have earned among your community, but then again this would ultimately be subject to both the measure of your openness and the openness of your community, meaning that no matter how strong your efforts they may fall flat in your community. So we have no clear definition of exactly what this vital idea means, but that’s fine for now.

Next is the question of whether a calculated effort to produce authenticity results in authenticity or just a carefully tailored facsimile. Certainly everything I’ve learned to be "Belizean" is Belizean through my own inference, which is only accredited by the aggregated knowledge of my short twenty-two years preceding my arrival in Belize. And here is where arrogance comes strutting in. The very founding thought that another culture can be learned and mimicked seeks to both weaken and celebrate the culture in the same paradoxical breath. The idea follows me and many other volunteers I imagine through their everyday lives of what exactly it means to be attempting cultural integration. I know that I will never be Belizean, nor will I ever be able to create a perfectly detailed attempt at acting Belizean.

Day to day I use whatever sloppy lessons I’ve learned about the culture over the last twenty months, be it in the form of language or the way I carry myself, to help facilitate a more effortless exchange of thought. This is a genuine effort for breaking down the cultural barrier, but it leaves both myself and the other person departing from our cultural norms in order to meet on a distant yet more amicable field of communication. The other person may try to speak clearer English or slow down their Spanish while I’ll try to bend my English into Creole or speed up my Spanish. Either way we are both out of our element – hardly integration. And here is where the aspect of lunacy enters. When you are living in a state where you must always be bending the edges of your inherent cultural norms in order to fit into the surroundings, you're bending the edges of your own natural form. Being successful at this takes a sort of lunacy. You must allow for an easy departure from your most innate characteristics, a constant detachment from your comfortable internal processes and live in a state of constant mid-air volley.

It is an exciting and difficult mental state to maintain and that is why I’m convinced there are some slightly-insane yet fully functioning Peace Corps walking around out there and, for good or ill, they just happen to be some of the most successful volunteers the Peace Corps could ask for.

I’m stepping off an 8-hour bus ride to start hitching the fifteen miles to my village, it’s about twenty minutes until sundown and I haven’t had the chance to eat today. At some earlier point in my life a sentence like that would have happily summoned thoughts of ragged freedoms, poetic travel or Kerouac in any other reheated form. Right now it’s just a huge pain in the ass.

To most, what I’m doing would seem like a supremely stupid thing to do. Hitchhiking at night down a rural jungle road teeming with snakes when I could easily crash on the floor of some Peace Corps Volunteer living near the next bus stop. However there is one certain thing I’ve learned during the last 20 months in this country: serendipity lives under a thatch roof.

Like no other place I’ve ever been, a list unique factors work in concert to make it almost difficult to go wrong in the country of Belize. Maybe it’s the culture, maybe it’s the terrain, or maybe it’s the size of this country, but for whatever reason, I have absolutely no hesitation starting down this 15 miles of dirt road in the dark.

I’ve been walking for a few minutes thinking about this and I can’t count how many times during the last year and a half that I have been saved by the uncanny serendipity of this country. Almost every week there will be some point when I suddenly need to find someone I’ve never met but must meet with for my work, or some item we urgently need for the radio station and I have no idea where to find it. Inevitably I will turn and ask the next person I see and they will reply with what ought to be the countries motto, “Oh, yes of course I know Mr. ____. I’m his brother in-law and I’m on my way to see him right now, hop in.”

It’s been about an hour. The sky is a reflective oil-black, shimmering with some of the brightest stars I’ve ever seen and a full moon’s gaze. Two headlights of a truck are bouncing about a mile away behind me. I’ll wave them down to try and get a ride and even if they drive right by, even if I have to walk another 10 miles, I’m compelled to believe that it’ll all work out.

A couple minutes later the truck is beside me and rolling down it’s passenger window. Isidoro, a friend of mine who lives in my village is listening to Led Zeppelin as loud as he can and shouts for me to get in. I shake my head at the perfection of the situation and jump in singing to “Ramble On” with Isidoro as we start off across the darkness.

Forced to unearth some old papers the other day I came across a few notes I scratched while flying back to Belize after my Christmas vacation this year in Maine.

In my other life I speak with an accent. It turns my “R”s to “aah”s and every emotion known to man can be expressed with a quick inhaling “Ahyutt.”

In my other life I stitch several languages together at once in a grappling attempt to be understood. “How are you?” comes in the form of, “Sa’ a’cho’ol?”, “Como esta?” or the unexplainable, “Weh di gwaiin?”

In my other life snow piles up to the windows, I dream of long mountain trails and the right skis to sail them.

In my other life the hills are endless jungles of dark impassable vegetation and the seasons define themselves by the daily dueling of sun and rain.

In my other life I end my day on a lawn of spotless white sheets and under billowing comforters. I wash myself with steaming water that rinses the pores and I sleep clean and quiet and warm in the middle of dark winter nights.

In my other life I sleep in aging layers of mold and sweat. I brush the spiders and bugs from my bed and sleep among the high-pitch hum of the insect chorus.

In my other life my dinner is cooked or grilled and it hums an aroma that excites the mind. It has a side dish, a hand-made salad and a gourmet beer bubbling in a tall pint glass.

In my other life my dinner is was grown within walking distance from my plate. It is either rice or beans and was likely clucking and flapping that morning.

In my other life there are people with my last name. I call them up or go to see them for no reason at all. They stop what they’re doing to sit on an afternoon porch tell me what whatever may come to mind.

In my other life there are people with names like Sho, Rodriguez and Salam. They stop by just because and we’ll sit in the shade and talk for no reason at all.

In my life I’m missed and they’re always people waiting for me to return. In my life there are people I miss and people I will miss in my life.

For the one or two lonely souls who may actually read this blog with any enthusiasm I apologize for not having taken the time during the last forty or so days to place an entry. During that time, a confluence of events has surrounded my life, sapping from it, the time for this type of indulgence. Nonetheless, I am back in Belize and back to the solitude of my village as I wait for classes to resume. Below is an article I wrote recently for our Peace Corps Belize magazine looking back on the last year and a half of working in Belize.

Well, here we are, standing face toward the last six months of the latest great adventure. With our time here narrowing I find myself brought again and again to the cliff of unwanted reflection. It seems as though the times are begging now, more than ever, for some sort of summation; some sort of viewpoint from our footprints before hindsight comes to paint its more convenient images.

There are elements of this job that beg to inspire thoughts of our capacity as humans and the strength of our higher resolve. There are moments that tempt to tear the fabric of our hope and place a scar upon our founding optimism. They are the calls of our vocation. They are the times that ask for us to go to the well, and seek from it, a further measure of our efforts. And possibly the most astonishing, the most alarming of moments, are when you have gone tired to the well, and found there much more than you could have ever expected.

Before joining the Peace Corps my beliefs regarding the capacity and resilience of our human spirit had yet to be ripened by either time or trial. At 22 I believed in the strength of our fundamental human tenets because, in my short experience, I had simply reasoned them to be true. It is these tenets of truth, hope and solidarity that work to bind our humanity, that lie at the heart of our human consciousness and which call forth the unwritten human code that states we can and will do better. After spending the last two years in my village, and most importantly among you all, I’ve learned to trust in these convictions because I have been witness to their presence and I have seen them residing in the faces of those I’ve met.

One of the tough realities we face as Peace Corps Volunteers is that we live in a state of constant promise, constant hope and thus constant failure. We live in a world where even after our homeruns are hit we are cursed and blessed to look further in hopes of surpassing what we thought before unsurpassable. It is the internal engine that asks: what will be our next great challenge, what next will test the length of our ability and raise the height of our human potential. Some may have felt this way their whole life, but for those of who haven’t it is a startling day when you turn to look and find the job imprinted upon you; that you are no longer attempting to fulfill the parameters of given goals, but the drive your most internal missions.

6 months and counting and soon all this will change. In the years that lie ahead, hindsight will choose to tell us just what really happened and just what it is we really learned. But for now, while the mud is still drying on our feet, I have the urge to guess. I’ve learned that it is always worth attempting to be the best of things during the worst of times. I’ve learned that at our very best we are simply hoping to be better and I’ve learned that the fate of our efforts will be determined not by the distance of our results, but by the distance we went to reach them.

The Mayah’ak is a ceremony that is centered on making an offering to various Maya spirits. Hundreds of folks gather from all over Belize and Guatemala to stay up all night dancing, playing marimba and burning a bonfire of copal (a flammable substance made from tree sap), candles and leaves.

Five days of preparation and by he afternoon of the ceremony everything looked ready for the arrival of our guests. By six o’clock the roads in both directions were a clutter of rusty pick-up trucks and families crawling out of their beds. Coming over from my house dressed in the traditional garments I welcomed some of the guests and helped carry bags or children into the building.

By 6:30 the thatch room was packed and music was beginning to play. I’d love to give you an idea of what was being said by those coming to the front of the room with short speeches, but the Mayan Q’eqchi language is just a jumble of impossible sounds when screaming scratch-box stereo. As usual I was at the center of a storm I could hardly understand.

At one point running around making sure there are enough plates, fixing chairs and helping people find the bathroom, etc, I started to notice the faces of those around me. No one, not a single person was smiling, no chitchat, no conversation no excitement of any kind. The faces were stone hard and impressively bored. Sometimes even when I think I have come so far in understanding this culture, I can still be suddenly reminded of just how confused I actually am. For a moment I thought the whole ship might be sinking and we were in for a mutiny for discontent and hatred. Then, like slapping my hand to my forehead I consulted the simplest of human textbooks and asked the stern woman next to me if she and her family were hungry.

“Yes, we’ve come a long way. When will we eat?” Ah ha, without fail food would save us. I jumped up and went to the kitchen to give my hands. Several women were moving about the kitchen and I asked the head cook if there was anything I could do.

“Yes, Thank You! We need you to move this pot, Jeff, none of us can lift it.”

“Diego, get over here and help me with this pot.” The pot was roughly three feet in diameter and two feet deep filled to the brim with boiling chicken parts. We hauled it off the wood fire and on to the ground where the woman could begin serving it to plates.

Just after everyone was fed and the crowd regained its pulse I knew we were in the clear. The music kicked off with a local legend, Florencio Mes, the sixty-something harp player from a nearby village. Later that night I would have a long conversation with this half-drunken rock star about his recent travels through Europe performing on his harp.

“I could have stayed in Italy, Jeff. I mean stayed there.” He said swinging a hand onto my back.

“Good stuff, Mr. Flo, beautiful places.” He was stinking of rum and I got him a chair just before moving on.

As a teacher at the school it was my job to keep an eye on three students I had been assigned to: Manuel, Diego, and Enrique. At events like this its almost a certainty that other boys from the surrounding villages who have chosen not to go to high school will show up drunk and try to convince out students to drink as well. I was determined to keep a tight leash and it was in that act when I began to feel the nagging pains of parenting. Every ten minutes I had to shift my eyes or check behind trucks to see if someone was out sneaking a sip of rum. I honestly could care less whether an 18-year old wants to sneak a drink of rum, but nonetheless.

Somewhere around 1 am during a longwinded speech in Q’eqchi on a topic I could barely decipher, I realized I might be in for trouble. Even my dog, who earlier had been unable to contain herself with excitement for all the chicken bones lying on the ground, had long gone back to my porch and fallen asleep. The ache of fatigue rolled in with the cool fog and clouds of the night. Sitting in a chair mumbling conversation with a couple other teachers it became apparent that I simply might not make it. The idea of the ceremony is that you stay up all night and then go to a local temple to finish it all off with a blessing. As 2 am pushed its way in I started to look for an exit. An inkling of regret crept in for not wanting to finish the ceremony, however being that I didn’t understand the speeches and had seen at least three other Mayah’ak ceremonies before, I started to bargain for some sleep.

“How much do you want to look after my students so that I can go to bed?” I asked a teacher Filiberto sitting next to me.

“Oh, Jeff, hmm let me think.”

“Dollar per student per hour? How’s that?”

“How about you get me a small bottle of rum the next time you’re in town.”

“Good man, it’s a deal. See you in the morning” The night was cool, nearly cold and I biked back to my house where another Peace Corps volunteer, Graham, was sleeping in my hammock. I knew I had about two hours at best to sleep before being woken up for the ending of the ceremony at the local temple.

“WAKE UP WAKE UP, GOOD MORNING EVERYBODY!” Those who had stayed up apparently had done so with the help of alcohol and were now eager to disturb all those happy slumbering souls in my house. Graham, an ex-marine, border patrolmen, member of SWAT and now a Peace Corps Volunteer was completely unimpressed with being woken up at 4am.

“My god, what is that?” he groaned.

“It’s the damn Peace Corps, that what it is. You coming to the ceremony?”

“Hell no, I’ll hitch out after the sun comes up.” I threw on some pants and hollered back to whoever was outside us up.

On the bus to the temple most of the kids were quiet and bordering on consciousness but a couple where standing in the back of the bus dancing and shouting. I’m not sure if it is just the excitement of being in a motorized vehicle or just reveling in the chance to act like shrieking goats, but they stood in the back of the bus flashing gang signs and hollering.

“Yea, Boy, Yea 50 Cent!”

“Yea, get money or die tryin!” The phenomenon of young Maya kids mimicking the style of Los Angeles gangsters is so incredibly beyond me. These kids have spent the first 18 years of their life living in rural villages, bathing in rivers, and swinging machetes on their farms now jump around in the back of our bus pretending to be some kind of Maya adapted version of an commercial rapper. It’s such a ridiculous contrast I just have to laugh. Usually, that is. This morning its just obnoxious and I come as near as I ever have to standing up and throwing them off the bus. Instead I try to reason with the situation by attempting to dish out some embarrassment.

“Samson! Dion! You sound like a couple of parrots you know that. You hear something and you repeat it over and over again like a parrot! Stop making so much noise so the rest of us can sleep.”

“Yeah a 50 Cent parrot, yeah Caw caw caw.” They smile and laugh and I turn back and have to laugh a little myself.

At the temple we walk to the top of the terrace and the spiritual leaders from Guatemala and Belize begin creating a circle for the burning of the offering. The crowd forms and begins following the prayers. I have joined in on this part of the ceremony at one time but after some thought I’ve decided that it’s a disingenuous act that, although not explicitly detailed, can detract from the sanctity of the proceedings. Instead I sit on the side giving explanations to a couple of tourists that stopped by to see the temple and happen to get a lot more than they asked for. I imagine that if I weren’t there they might have come across the ceremony and thought the Maya had never gone away and that if spotted they might soon be captured for sacrifice.

After a few hours of this the group is dancing around the fire and eventually we all dance our way to the bus and back to our school. There is a small goodbye and a final meal of tamales and coffee as we say goodbye to those traveling far back to their homes. Eventually we make the bumpy ride back to the school and everyone takes the rest of the day off to sleep and clean up the campus.

It seems like we’ve all been racing toward the November Strait here in Belize. No longer are we filled with the fear and anxiety of our task, the cement walls of our solitude or the leather strap reminders of our past. The threat and test of our jobs as volunteers have faded in the sun and are now just foreign words our tongues can no longer pronounce. Months have slid by quietly while our eyes were focused on the ground. Buffered and unbothered by the complication of our lives back in the States we have all become a lot simpler in our slow rural villages.

Still, from somewhere far and eerie we begin to feel the first tidal tug of the November Strait. Our 17 months will soon start to funnel and grow turbulent with thoughts and plans for uprooting once again, and returning to the U.S. of A. Our reactions to the November Strait will likely determine the next five years of our lives. In ways unknown to us, we’ve all been morphing; quietly shifting our psychological innards and realigning the pathways of our rationale. Slack lines replace the taunt beliefs on which we might have once hung our values. Fresh wooden platforms support our new versions of logic or priority, and while some the soil around our old values may have eroded, some of the grandest may still remain.

The November Strait is coming and on the other side is the uncertain last six months of our service as Peace Corps volunteers in Belize. After the holidays our setting will suddenly be one of impending change and uncomfortable dislocation. Some will search their memories for meaning or substance. Some will implant conclusions and cement summaries regarding what they’ve learned or accomplished. We will have to find ways to put down our tools step away from our projects leaving them finished, or far from it. Jobs and careers wait in the bustling big city bay on the other side. We’ll return to it's fury in canoes holding wooden paddles and will be surrounded by cruise ships and speedboats.

Yes, for good or ill, The November Strait is upon us.

It is a tradition now at the Tumul K’in Center of Learning that every Saturday all students, staff and visitors from the village of Blue Creek all come together for something we have been calling cultural night. Cultural night is a chance for the school to celebrate its Maya culture through dance, music and performances. At a point in history when aspects of the Maya culture such as dance and music are dwindling, this weekly event is meant to remind students of their heritage.

Around 7 pm you can see lines of shadows as villagers walk the path toward the school toting children and donning traditional garments. They are walking toward a large thatch building with no walls. Chairs are set up at one end of the rectangular floor facing two bed sheets hanging as an improvised curtain. Behind the curtain, two students are connecting wires on a makeshift stereo system and handing me my microphone. I’ll be the master of ceremonies tonight and so I’ve also receiving directions from everyone and anyone who wants some part of their performance to be just right.

All the staff are dressed in their traditional clothing and about 8 of them are bustling around preparing themselves. Women wear long brightly colored dresses and white embroidered blouses. Men are dressed in black pants or jeans with white embroidered shirts. I’ve decided to mix cultures tonight and am wearing jeans with a Maya belt, a white dress shirt and a leopard-print tie. An older man from the village of Blue Creek has just bought a new marimba and has brought it to the event. He and two other men are tapping out a song and as soon as it is over I walk from behind the curtain and start the event.

There is something I should interject here. Does it not seem odd to anyone else that I am the master of ceremonies in all this? Me? The only person in the room who is not Maya, not even Belizean? For reasons I’ve still not deciphered this is the second cultural night in a row that the staff has asked me to lead the ceremony. Needless to say I try to muscle though the night forgetting the fact that I feel like an utter fraud. Nonetheless, I introduce our first event. Te staff line up, everyone stands and we sing the Belize national anthem, a song I understand little of, but make an effort to hum loudly from the back. After this, Victor Cal, my partner on the radio station comes forward to offer a short refection on what it means to have everyone gathered here this evening.

Marimba is played. People both awkwardly and eagerly stand to dance making sure neither to touch nor make eye contact with their partner. Games are played. I have a pocket full of bubble gum that gets handed out to children who run up to the microphone to answer my questions. Other teachers come forward to tell riddles and jokes. We take a break for some marimba music and then it is time for the main event. Usually it is the students that are forced to create skits and perform. Tonight, however, the staff has taken it upon themselves to perform a skit telling the story of a girl named Ix’pa and how she gets pregnant and learns the lesson never to drop out of school. After this we have more dancing and marimba. The skit left everyone laughing and the mood is light as locals brush children off their knee and take to the floor. The night goes on with more games, music and a true story/public warning about how a teacher once saw a half-man half-animal creature in the jungle surrounding the village.

By night’s end it is ten o’clock, children are falling asleep on the floor around their parents and everyone is trying to muster the energy for one last song. I get up and dance, a site which a year ago would make villagers giggle and cover their mouths but now seems like just a part of the proceedings. By 10:15 the same shadow line of villagers is walking back to their homes. There is an air as everyone leaves there is an air that suggests the community is a little bit closer for having event. Students are laughing and walking back to their dorms and I slowly riding my bike back to my small home in the jungle reminding myself that these are the days.

There is a moment in just about each week, a fleeting period of minutes when each second tonks its locking pass in a seeming desert of time. The instant comes without warning and carries all the symptoms of a festering disease. These are the sudden moments of spearing memory and have the uncommon ability to snare you in your unbeknownst seconds of vulnerability.

Standing in my classroom facing twelve well-dressed fawning students while rambling on about the inner workings of a computer keyboard I was struck by a sideways glance out the far window. Moments of unexpected nostalgia are the bloodspot on the wall from the battle between the conscious and the subconscious. It was something to do with the way a tree in the distance nodded against a distant wind that put me unwillingly in the hillside of some remote New England forest. Immediately the thin scent of pine passed above my upper lip and I felt the fur of a brisk winter day slip under my shirt. Students sat waiting making immediate glances in the direction of my eyes looking for an explanation for my silence. I heard the grandfather creak you hear when tall pine trees bend achingly in the winter wind. I watched plumes of dusted snow curl between a labyrinth of solemn trees. I thought I heard a student say my name and that’s when I felt the ugly stench of a dream beginning to know it must recede and all the pains of reality that are about to sneak in.

“…Mr. Jeff?” I cannot describe to you, just how greatly my loneliness yawned as I turned in that moment, away from my begging daydream, and toward the classroom before me.

“Yeah…” I pause watching the last branches in my forest quiver and fade into their icy landscape. “…I was…just saying that if you’re…unfamiliar with your finger positions you can remember your home row key settings by looking for the raised keys F and J, where your index fingers should be. This will help you learn the fastest and most accurate way to type.”

If I’ve neglected a single topic in this journal, a single topic of the most upmost significance, it is a look into the psyche of a Peace Corps Volunteer. I’ve spent nearly 16 months now in this small Belizean outpost and can finally speak with some authority on the subject of this unique creature. Certainly there is variation within the Volunteericus Peace Corpicus species, however there is also a cocktail of behaviors that no PCV can live without.

Possibly the largest similarity is the pull to leave the familiar behind. For some it can come as a slow rationalization – a paced calculation that some change is needed. Maybe its been whispering to them for a long time but has simply been too muffled enough to hear. As the voice gets louder it slipts into their consciousness and they might start seeing the image of a dusty Latin American town, or vast African countryside when they blink or close their eyes. Perhaps they hear the voices of some foreign language calling them to leave what they know behind. Whatever it may be it’s often something they’ve known to be in them for a long time. These people recognize their urges and begin to plan their Peace Corps experience. They mark it on a calendar, fit it into their ten-year plan and when the time comes they are happily prepared to change their lives.

For others it can come as fiercely as a cracking whip. These people have had the same constant whisperings but too much other noise to hear them. These are often the students or careerist who are dedicated to their work and too distracted to see just where it is taking them. Like a neglected tumor, the urge to venture builds until they have erupting epiphanies, which change their lives forever. In the process of carrying out some mundane everyday task they feel a rush of pressure from their subconscious rise up and reveal what they didn’t know was there. These people redefine themselves to become a Peace Corps Volunteer. They quit jobs, break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and hurriedly prepare for the other end of their Peace Corps plane ticket.

For me it all began on a snowy college day listening to the calm drone of an economics professor review equations for long-term growth models. In the midst of the sedate lecture hall a terrifyingly potent stream of adrenaline came charging up my spine. In an instant I felt trapped and exposed as if I were the fish and everything I knew were the grim wall of the barrel. I had been working on an argument for how the value of the Indian rupee would affect outsourcing in the U.S and slow the convergence of our economies when I was nearly paralyzed by an alert from the subliminal.

In a moment I realized I had no idea what I was doing. The equations were correct but I had no idea who exactly it was that lived in India. I had no idea what drove their minds or their lives. This fact shocked and scared me. I only knew their numbers, their percentages, but had no clue what any of it actually meant. Like a telescoping lens the idea ballooned and I realized that almost everything I’d ever learned had come from a book. At 22 I had attended a thousand classes, taken hundreds of tests but still could credit hardly anything I knew to actual worldly experience. My entire Rockwellian upbringing had left me without any idea of the context. My realization was that after 16 years pushing my mind down the sterile hallways of academia, I had no more understanding of humanity or what it means to be a person living in our world. I had no weathering, no struggle, no hard experience that couldn’t be found either on the shelves of a public library or at an autumn harvest fair. The concept left me with a sense of deficiency as if I had spent far too much time at the feet of some incomplete idol. Earning this sort of experience felt vital to making the great life decisions I knew I would be forced to confront as I grew older. It became absolutely certain in my mind that before continuing in any direction at all I would need to earn the human education that had been absent for too long. I spent the last months in college muscling through a set of ever-paling classes and searching for a way to make my great escape.

The only explanation I can muster for this universal Peace Corps compulsion is that there is a point in the growth of every young person when they begin to wonder just what is in store for them, where exactly its all going and what they can do about it. For some it’s the fear that they may never be leaving their small town. For some it’s the fear of not knowing what else there is. Either way, the cool pot of water suddenly reaches an urgent boil and they absolutely have to go. They may not know where or why, but they need out, if only to see what types of failures they might find. It’s the strange drive laced into ones youth that screams for the unknown. It’s the growling snout of something deeply primal that longs for adventure, risk and whatever they may be able to capture and call their own. Nearly every PCV has this and they wear it like a signature fragrance pouring off every word they speak.

Since the settlers first came to Central America and began putting borders and titles on what is now known as Belize, the Maya have never own the rights to their land. When the British ruled over British Honduras the Maya were forced to move their villages around the development of the British. When Guatemala took over the land, the Maya had to move again at the will of the Guatemalans. When Belize was created the Maya had to give their land to the Belizean government.

All of this has been forever changed with the Oct. 17th ruling by the Belizean Supreme Court declaring that land rights will be given to two Maya villages.

Here is the situation. The southern-most district in Belize, Toledo, is made up of 38 Maya villages. These villages have existed for centuries and have been successfully managed by a traditional Maya governing system. Within the last ten years oil has been found in the two of the villages in the Toledo district and without land rights, the Belizean Government was in the process of handing over the oil filled land to a U.S. oil company. A small group representing these two villages has spent the last ten years trying to get the courts of Belize to implement the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People and declare land rights for these villages. The drilling of oil in these villages would destroy the land with roads and pipes and construction, which would run directly though the homes of many villagers. Additionally there would be no legal basis for the villages to gain a cent for the use of their land.

Well, the Belizean Supreme court has now ruled in favor of the villages and set an enormous precedent in Belize for the Maya land rights and internationally for the rights of indigenous people. This is the first time in history when a domestic court has ruled in favor of giving land rights to an indigenous group of people and the first time ever that the UN’s Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People has been sited in a court case. With so many indigenous groups worldwide battling for rights to land which they have existed on for time before the construction of their governments this sets an important example for change.

Everyone in the Toledo district where I live has been following along with the story of the oil company that wants to come drill near their homes. Many have been feeling furious yet helpless to do anything about the turning over of their land to an outside company. With this ruling it means that now oil investors will have to gain permission from the villages themselves for rights to drill instead, which will either mean no drilling at all or that the village will at least be able to gain from the extraction of their resources.

Additionally this ruling inspires a change in the mentality of the villages in Toledo. Without land rights villagers have never known when the government might find it most profitable to turn over their village to a logging company or some other outside investor, something which has happened several times in recent history. Having this threat in their minds has deterred villagers from making long-term investments in their land. For example, crops with long-term returns such as fruit trees have been rare in Toledo because the people have not known if they would be able to, quite literally, reap the fruits of their labor.

I’ve just finished getting off the air broadcasting our second of three one-hour specials discussing this topic and explaining what this means to the listeners of our radio station. You can hear a recording of one of the several articles I’ve been reading on the air by clicking on the Pando link on the right side of this blog titled “Maya Land Rights Article Oct. 20th.” Pando is required to download this broadcast. Any comments you may have I will be happy to broadcast this afternoon during our afternoon news hour.

Arriving at the parking lot of Tikal National Park reminded me of tailgating at an open air concert. Vans and buses were packed and people lingered around selling food and drinks out of their trunks.

Tikal National Park had opened its site up for free to the Maya coming for the celebration. Not being Maya, I quickly realized I would need to stay hidden amongst the crowd. The park wardens were picking people out who didn’t seem Maya-enough, I guess, and asking them to explain their affiliation with the ceremony. While walking up the mile-long trail to the Tikal temples, Dalia, a pure Mopan Maya was stopped while speaking Creole to another teacher from our school. She had to explain in her poor Spanish that she was from Belize and in Belize people speak Creole. In Guatemala guns are everywhere and so the wardens, of course, each had a shotgun slung over their shoulder. Of course there wasn’t exactly any reason for me to be worried about being shot by a Guatemalan park ranger, but nonetheless I prepared my speech in Spanish for how I would explain both my white skin and my presence at the park.

“Estoy un maestro en Belice a el centro de aprendizaje Tumul K’in, y un volunterio con de cuerpo de paz desde el Estados Unidos.”

At the main arena of Tikal is an open field, which I’m told, was used to host sporting events. Many of these events were to determine who would be the next sacrifice. (counter to some instincts, it was the winner who was sacrificed because the Maya wanted to sacrifice their best. Many would have willingly been sacrificed but this was a way to fairly narrow the choices) In the center of this field all of the spiritual leaders came together to create a circle where the burning ceremony would take place. A couple thousand arrived in total. A marimba had been carried up to the field and it was played constantly throughout the day. I was able to stray from the pact of teachers and wander alone around the enormous expanse of the Tikal site. With seven major temples and countless other structures the Tikal would take days to thoroughly examine.

The weather remained overcast all day keeping the sun from exhausting the crowd and the rain from driving them away. The teachers from our school had traveled for the last 24 hours to arrive at Tikal and on their faces it seemed as though it had all been worth it. Everyday at our school they profess about the importance of maintaining Maya traditions and values, and here they were at the heart of both. At one point or another I saw each teacher find quite places where they could have their own moment to pray.

The height of the day’s ceremonies came just around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. All of the copal and candles that had been so delicately made were put together into a giant circle and set ablaze. Those closest to the circle began a single line dancing around the fire. Then the circle spread to a second row, then a third and then almost the whole mass was rotating slowly around a giant fire with rich black smoke rising up above the jungle. After watching from the top of a corner temple for quite a while I decided to leave for the more distant fourth tower. The fourth tower is the tallest of those at Tikal and as it is about half a mile in the distance, it’s a perfect place to climb and take in the scenery. From the top of the fourth tower you could see the smoke from the fire billow above the trees and hear the faint sounds of the marimba and chanting.

Around 5 o’clock the ceremony began to wind down and folks starting to walk the trail about to the parking lot. I sat on the roots of a tree on the side of the parking lot eating tacos made by a woman reaching into the back of her trunk and watched the massive flow for about half an hour before looking for my own van. The Belizean dollar is about 3.5 times more valuable than the Guatemala Quetzale and so many of the teachers from my school had spread out through the tourist shops to purchase traditional clothing they couldn’t find in Belize.

This seems like an appropriate time for an observer to comment on the meaning of the day. However, I’m not sure I can do that because I don’t think I can quite comprehend exactly what this celebration means. I saw people cry while simply watching the ceremony and I saw children stare in awe while their parents sang and danced. Nonetheless, I’m not Maya and I’m not born from a culture that feels the eroding waves of modernity melting its traditions. I can speculate that this day affirmed to many the nature and importance of their ancestry, but it would be foolish and indirectly ethnocentric for me to suppose anything of detail. For me, I’m encouraged by any large peaceful gathering and in this case the focus of maintaining heritage was an inspiring look into the strength and conviction of the living Maya.

That night we traveled back to Casa de la Esperanza and slept deeply under the weight of our fatigue. The next day we traveled in the rain back to the border village of Santa Cruz and made our walk through the mud back to Belizean soil. The river on the trail had flooded and so we had to take horses or canoes to cross. From the village of Jalacte we hired a pick-up truck and rode the 30 miles across the washed-out dirt roads to Blue Creek. Bouncing and laughing in the truck there appeared an agreeable symmetry to the last two days of travel. Driving inland in the bed of a rusty truck we faced Guatemala as the sky turned into its sunset shade of orange-pink sepia. I started to think about how I would remember days like these ten and twenty years from now and how I might very well be changing right before my eyes. I have eight more months in Belize and for possibly the first time it felt like that time wouldn’t be enough.

Every year, as a response to Columbus Day and as a chance to gather, Maya from all over Guatemala and Belize make the trip to Tikal, one of the largest sites of the ancient Maya, to perform ceremonies and affirm their traditions. This is the story of one such gathering.

Because our school has the purpose of maintaining Maya traditions, our teachers were invited to gather at this year’s annual Maya celebration at Tikal. As I’ve mentioned before, the defining aspect of our school is its commitment to the promotion of Maya traditions, traditions that are constantly being threatened by modernity. In turn the teachers who have chosen to work here do so because they have a deep appreciation for the school’s mission. The cast of characters included all of our teachers. Roxy, a Yucatec Maya and a Veterinarian; Isidoro, a Mopan Maya and our school’s Handyman; Esther, a Yucatec Maya and our Managing Director; Denfil, an East Indian and our Academic Director; Dalia, a Mopan Maya and our English teachers; Ophelia, a Q’eqchi Maya and our school’s Accountant; Clarencio (Che), a Yucatec Maya and our school’s food processing specialist; Aurelio, a Mopan Maya and a former teacher at the school; Salam, a Mopan Maya and our school’s Agricultural teacher; Filiberto, a Q’eqchi Maya and our school’s Math teacher; and myself, a Peace Corps Volunteer from Maine.

A bus had been arranged to bring us and other interested folks to the village of Jalacte. Jalacte is not an official border crossing but there is a well-known illegal crossing path, which we intended to use to both reduce the cost of and expedite our trip. We reached Jalacte in the mid-afternoon and started along the muddy cow-pasture path to Guatemala. The border between Belize and Guatemala is still under contention and officially there is no resolution. The crossing brought us across fields, a small river and eventually to the Guatemalan village of Santa Cruz. Although it is only a twenty-minute walk, the change between the countries is sudden and tangible. There is no English or Creole.

That evening we had arranged to be guests at another traditional Maya school, in the town of Poptun, called Casa de la Esperanza. From Santa Cruz we hired a small van and packed ourselves in for the three-hour drive. Casa de la Esperanza was hosting nearly 200 folks from around southern Guatemala who were making the trip to Tikal the next day. While eating a few tamales with my staff, I watched as waves of people arrived carrying only small backpacks and toting scores of children. We would all sleep on the floor that evening, but most would not sleep at all. In a multi-purpose sort of room at the school an all-night ceremony was held to begin the next day’s celebrations. It began with speeches in Spanish and Q’eqchi. Despite sticking out in the crowd like a couple of flag-waving frauds, another Peace Corps Volunteer and I were greeted warmly by the master of ceremonies as he walked from the microphone after a speech.

Even though our presence was consistently welcomed with a smile and a handshake there was a pervasive sense of intrusion that stiffened my actions that evening. It is the feeling that by simply watching I was somehow corrupting the sanctity of the proceedings. I talked this over with some of my teachers and they assured me that people were eager to see an outsider interested in the traditions. I tried to accept this but maintained a seat along the periphery of the action.

Sept. 21st is the Belizean day of independence. It celebrates the day when Belize “threw off the chains of its colonial masters” and declared itself a sovereign nation. For us at my school, Tumul K’in, it means we will drape ourselves in traditional Maya clothing and go promote Maya culture by walking in the district parade. Even though the Maya have inhabited Central America far before anyone else even knew it existed, they are always tossed into the margins of cultural recognition.

Our school has the mission of promoting Maya culture and those teachers who have chosen to stay working at the school have done so because they feel deeply about the mission. When having our staff meeting to discuss what the school should do for Independence Day it was openly said that they could give a shit about independence or being labeled as Belizeans or anything but Maya living on the land of their ancestors. The main goal for them was to expose and promote the school and present a group of proud Maya students to the public.

We packed into our bus and bounced out of the jungle across the dirt roads to the district town of Punta Gorda. Both the other high schools in the area were in attendance, each bringing with them over 400 students each, we have about 30. We organized our group at the front of the parade behind some decorative soldiers from the Belize Defense Force and strutted around the 3-mile route.

People cheered and waved flashing pictures and dancing. The marching band behind us provided enough music for our students to dance around swinging their long dresses and kicking their legs to perform the traditional dances. At the end of the parade we stood in the crowd listening to a speaker on a stage in the central park. I took some interviews with students and recorded them to play later on our radio station. After making sure some of my radio helpers knew how to conduct an interview I handed over the recorder and went to find a burrito stand before we had to return to the bus.

We scheduled a volleyball match in a village named Mafradi a few days earlier and so on our return trip we stopped to have a friendly afternoon of volleyball. Volleyball is all the craze for some reason. I imagine some missionaries with a volleyball fetish came through the area some years ago and got the locals addicted. I have to say, for a people not known for their towering height, the Maya are surprisingly good at volleyball. An hour of rain earlier in the day had layered the court in mud and we slid around for hours laughing and covering ourselves in filth.

Our students had walked proudly in their traditional clothes while being peered at by kids from the other schools. Returning to the school, everyone tired and happy from a day of excitement, there was a potent sense of solidarity among the students, the staff and the school. I went home, showered, grabbed some food and went back out to start my evening tutoring classes.

4:30am I’m throwing my hand into the dark trying to find that twisted sadist of an alarm clock. The radio station I was sent here to run has to be turned on at 5 o’clock because Maya families start their day before the damn sun rises and so we have to broadcast early before the men leave for the fields and the kids go to school. I set my alarm for 4:30 because I need at least 5 minutes to lay thinking back to college when I could wake up at noon in a clutter of beer cans and books. I need 10 minutes to roll out of bed and make coffee, 15 minutes to drink it and get dressed, and about 30 seconds to walk to the radio station, turn it on and start talking.

Fifteen minutes into my morning broadcast another teacher, Victor Cal, comes in. Vic isn’t just a teacher; he’s a fifty-something year old Guatemalan Q’eqchi Maya and is the heart of this school. Victor grew up during the Guatemalan revolution. At the age of 13 he started fighting in the wars against the Guatemalan government and eventually went to school in Nicaragua where he earned a university degree. Vic and I manage the radio station. He’s an old man and he has lived life. He has two sons and has adopted several handicapped children, which he currently is raising in his home.

Vic speaks three Maya languages, Spanish and does a damn good job with English if I can say so. Around 5:30 Victor takes over to do the morning messages in Maya Q’eqchi, the local language of the villages in our listening range. He tells people it is time to get up and greet the earth. He reminds them to be kind to their neighbors, their wife and their kids. Then he reads the Maya calendar and tells listeners about today’s Nawal. The Nawal indicates what type of a day it will be, or what types of things are good to do on this day.

The Maya calendar is the oldest known calendar of any civilization and is based on three different sized rotating cycles. It is a very complex system but in short, it works like this. The Maya Calendar uses a 260-day cycle called the tzolkin where days rotate on a series of 13 days. The 260-day calendar is very traditional and has lots of particular ceremonies involved, but we’re not going to get into those here. These 13 days rotate along a set of 20 names (the Nawal), which indicate a characteristic that will be present on this day. Depending on the Nawal you’ll know if today is a good day to have a meeting or a good day to find a woman. We roughly base our work at the school on the calendar and because today is Bat’z it means today is a good day to get things done and I can be assured it will be a long one. This 13-day cycle makes what is called the Short Count and makes a series of important intervals at 13, 52 and 104. Don’t ask me how, but the short count is based on combining the tzolkin, the solar cycle of earth and the 584-day orbit of Venus.

Then there is the Long Count. The Long Count is what has gotten many people worried about the end of the world taking place on December 21st 2012. Here’s how the Long Count works. As far as researchers can tell the whole calendar began on August 11th 3114 BCE with the beginning of the Long Count, or The Great Cycle. The Great Cycle lasts 1,872,000 days and is equivalent to 5,125.36 years (accounting for our leap years and so on). The issue with people talking about Dec. 21st 2012 is that after 5,125.36 years the Long Count will finally reach its predetermined end. Now this isn’t to say that the world will end, moreover that the new Long Count will begin. Astrologically what will happen on Dec. 21st 2012 is the Sun will arrive at the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the eclipse. To the Maya the cross made by the Milky Way intersecting the plane of ecliptic represents the Sacred Tree. On the morning of Dec. 21st 2012 the Sun, the father, will rise from the center of the Sacred Tree and begin a new Great Cycle.

Some have connected terrible events with the ending of various Maya cycles, but that is usually when the violins come into the background on the Discovery channel and they start to flash Hitler’s face randomly. I am interested in the calendar, however, and am probably going to make an effort to come down to Blue Creek again and hang out with Vic on Dec. 21st 2012 just to be apart of the ceremony. From the archeological perspective the information about the ancient Maya can be fuzzy but this explanation is from what I have patched together from the many conversations I’ve had with Vic on the subject.

Enough of the history lesson. Around 5:30 I leave the radio station. The sun is just starting to bend over the jungle and gives grey morning tones to the activity already taking place at the village intersection. A bus from further down the road passes with the driver waving a hand out his window and toots the horn twice. A student is carrying a 5-gallon bucket of water from the river to the kitchen for cooking breakfast. Men from the surrounding villages are passing on bikes to their fields carrying machetes and small backpacks holding their lunch.

5:30 I stroll back to my house passing our group of female students in long brightly colored traditional dresses on their way to the kitchen for breakfast. They smile, give cheery greetings and I mutter something under my breath still half-awake. They giggle, I groan. Chab’il, my dog, starts to hear my boots breaking through the grass and comes shaking around the corner unable to control her tail and staggers around my ankles in klutzy excitement. The name, Chab’il, is a Q’eqchi word for almost anything positive – good, tasty, beautiful, pleasing, friendly, it’s a context word but also makes a pretty good name for a dog. I mix her a bowl of instant milk and dog food and find myself a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee. I don’t know exactly what the connection is between man and dog, but there’s nothing like eating breakfast on your back porch with your dog wearing nothing but underwear. Something about being able to sit in one place nearly naked and survey both your domain and your disciple. Either way this is 5:30 am and I’m starting the day.

Highway patrolmen are taught to notice when oncoming vehicles are braking by watching for when the nose of the car dips toward the road. I remembered this as I watched the front bumper of the oncoming truck dig toward the ground and swerve off the road to avoid the oncoming wall of speeding bus.

Something must have happened in the mind of that other bus driver. Maybe some dancing chemicals in his brain suddenly allowed him to realize what he was doing, or maybe he was able to glance at death and didn’t particularly like the view. Whatever it was he chose to postpone his dream of orchestrating a massive vehicular homicide and slowed to let our bus pass.

Despite our new gift of life our bus was livid. People were angry and organizing. Within minutes a ringleader emerged. He was a tall black man with the thick steak forearms who had been standing in the back of the bus hollering almost the entire time. He began walking up and down the aisles trying to convince people to get off at the next stop. He proclaimed that if we all got off, the driver couldn’t get his pay. A few volunteers around turned to make eye contact and see how I was going to respond.

“You gettin’ off, Jeff?” one asked. I paused trying to think of the best way to give my response and not push myself into a position of being responsible for the decision they would make.

I glanced up, shrugged my shoulders and said, “Shitty driving happens. The next bus won’t be here for another two hours and we’re only an hour from our stop. I’m staying, but do what you will.” Out of the 24 PCVs with us all decided to stay except for an older couple who seemed completely in awe that such a thing could have taken place in the world as they know it.

Despite the fiasco on the bus we arrived in Belmopan an hour later unscathed and just before sundown. A line of half a dozen bosses gave an update on the storm in the hotel lobby and told us to find hotel rooms.

Now that we had arrived all there was to do was wait. This is possibly the worst part about being a PCV during a hurricane - waiting in the comfort of your hotel room to see if your village is going to be destroyed. The guilt of your full-size bed and restaurant food sinks in and poisons your efforts to relax and ride out the weather. I would be willing to bet that any PCV worldwide would rather stay their village to be with their community than be forced to evacuate to the safety of the Peace Corps’ protection. The day before leaving Blue Creek I had taken a walk around and took mental ‘before’ images to compare with after the storm. I checked the ropes supporting the radio tower I had spent the last year trying to erect and even tried climbing up its sixty-feet to detach the antenna so it wouldn’t be damaged by the winds.

In the hotel the next morning I was watching a Mexican weather channel and saw the first signs that Felix was turning away from Belize and toward the coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua. It was going to be making landfall in a few hours and it was still a category five with winds well above 160 mph. Belize was out of its path and of course there was a sign of relief. We were ready for it and nothing was going to happen, just some rain. I couldn’t help but think of those in the countries south of us who hadn’t prepared at all because, until the last minute, it was us who was suppose to be hit.

The next day the earliest information reported over 100 people in Nicaragua and Honduras dead and over 600 still missing. Later through Peace Corps channels we would be told that Belize as a country had been the most prepared in Central American and both Honduras and Nicaragua governments had made almost no preparations or warnings until the final hours when it was too late.

The hurricane season in the Caribbean has only just begun and usually does not burned out until late November. All meteorologists are gauging this year to be a record-breaking season and all there is to do is wait.

The day began at 4:30am with the sharp sounds of thunder, yelling rain and my alarm clock. All Peace Corps Volunteers had been summoned to the capital to wait out the threat of hurricane Felix and getting out of my village to the district town would be the first leg of my journey. Alerts of Felix were broadcast over radios across the country the day before and callers were panicking with the memory of a hurricane named Iris that had leveled the entire country just five years before.

Standing in the dark of the cold morning I watched my bus lurk out of the jungle around 5am under dark ominous clouds. The atmosphere on the bus was tense and anxious while a radio station scratched out warnings of the hurricane. The announcer was fielding phone calls from families trying to contact one another. Each voice shuddered with fear. I could hear their heartbeats drumming anxiety out of their lungs and forming the tremor vibrations that shook the inside of our tin-metal bus. Families piled into the aisles fleeing the thin protection of their thatch homes for the hope of cement shelters in the nearest town. Out my rainy bus window I watched the morning’s sun seem to battle with the dark powerful mountains of clouds trying to suppress it. Thunder roared and lighting sent startling flashes that pounded across the ground. The great godless sound on our metal bus gave all the signs that we were caught in a great standoff between earth and sky. I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow between dusk and dawn we had all been engulfed by some deep and potent evil.

I had been given the position of being our district’s Security Warden, which basically means in a situation such as this I’m responsible for getting the volunteers in my district to safety. Safety this time would be a hotel on the other end of a 6-hour bus ride in the capital, Belmopan. The Toledo district of Belize is the most rural and some of our volunteers in the district live 4 or more hours into the jungle. I had called each of their nearest telephones the day before and left messages letting them know to take the morning bus and evacuate their village for the district town of Punta Gorda. Messages like these are passed by word of mouth if the volunteer isn’t nearby, and well, it was likely that once I got to Punta Gorda, I would have to pay someone off for their truck and drive hours into the rain to pick volunteers up individually. Between the district town and any of the villages are countless low areas that could be flooded out by the night of rain. I had a rumble of anticipation in my stomach as the first threads of adrenaline circled around my spine.

After a couple hours on a pay phone calling village phone numbers muttering in various Mayan languages trying to collect our volunteers it was time for us all to get on a bus to the capital. Belmopan, the smallest national capital in the world, has one hotel that can hold all of us and is stable enough to sustain a hurricane. It would be reserved and waiting when we arrived and we were all expected to attend a briefing by our team of bosses in the hotel lobby. All the way north on the bus the radio screamed of folks calling in to tell their family that they were looking for one another or that they were trapped out of town. No one was calming and no one seemed to be ready. The voices were shouts of distress and they brought the snout of everyone’s fear to stare them right in the face. Everything looked as though this storm would be the big one. It was heading directly for us and would be a strong category 5 when it hit land.

About 4 hours into the trip our bus was passed by another from a competing transportation company. It crept by slowly while both traveled well above 60 mph. I watched the faces of the passengers in the other bus. Our isle was packed with those who couldn’t get a seat. The other bus was full too and the faces seemed as though they wanted to get off but had no choice but to hope for the best. As soon as their bus pulled back into the right lane our driver went for it. Already barreling around inside corners and over blind hills our driver seemed fueled by a rival anger, some sort of grudge that no one on the bus could comprehend. Both buses full of people sped on like frothing beasts. Men on the bus, Belizean men who have ridden these buses thousands of times began to yell and throw invisible objects at the driver. They pushed their way down the isle to stand next to him shouting.

“You MAD?! There are children on this bus! What if it were your kids?!” “You’re going to kill us all?!” We weren’t even pass the other buses rear tires when everyone on the bus began to stand nervously to gain a view from the font windshield. Panic boiled over and took over the bus. I saw an older couple across the isle squeeze each other’s hands tightly and look worryingly in one another’s eyes. The radio scratched while passengers screamed trying to get position over one another just as an unsuspecting truck came over the next hill.

I thought I’d take this entry to familiarize you with some of the characters that play consistent roles in this theater show that is my life in Belize. This cast is filled with such varying and vibrant faces that I sometimes feel as though I’m trapped in some Belize-adapted episode of the Simpsons where all the country’s demographics are quintessentially represented by my eccentric set of costars.

There is Noodle Man, a Chinese vendor owner that speaks absolutely no English, Spanish or Creole and sells huge servings of homemade vegetable noodles at the bus station in Belmopan for just $2 Belize ($1 US). Noodle Man is known far and wide by Peace Corps Volunteers as a cheap way to get the days nutrients while your traveling across the country and is a superhero of sorts for the cause of cheap living.

Next is Junior, a mentally challenged homeless man that walks around Punta Gorda (a town near my village) laughing and dancing at cars and people as they pass. Junior has lived in Punta Gorda his whole life and survived all his forty years on the charity of its townspeople. He is absolutely harmless and all day you can see folks pitching in by offering him quarters and groceries. Sometimes I imagine that Junior is an Oxford sociologist conducting research in disguise, and that he will suddenly stand up off the sidewalk, dust himself off and mutter something in a refined British accent. I won’t be holding my breath.

The Seaweed Man is a vender at the bus stop in Dangriga town. He hops onto every bus as it takes its ten-minute break hollering, “Ice cold seaweed! Put the Power Back!” The Seaweed Man stands maybe 6’3” with at least 6 inches of dreadlocks pointing out at all angles. The branches of his dreads scratch against the roof of the bus and strike people in the head as he makes his way up and down the bus isle. He makes great juice out of seaweed for $2 and to tell you the truth, I really do think it puts the power back.

Crack head Charlie is a name given quite literally to a crack head named Charlie who aggressively marches around Punta Gorda demanding money from anyone who looks better off. Crack head Charlie is a mean yet non-violent homeless man that people give money to despite his snarling exterior.

Eddie Expat is a generic name given to the expatriated North Americans that have wandered down to Belize trying to escape varying embodiments of “The Man”. Eddie Expat is a pejorative title given specifically to those expatriates who speak loudly about the faults of natives and do everything they can to border themselves from having any actual contact with Belizeans.

Rasta Smurf is an aging Rastafarian that lives in Punta Gorda. His name was a response to the large blue hat he wears to holds his dreadlocks and his tendency toward rambling allocutions much like those of Grandpa Smurf. Rasta Smurf is just as likely to offer some longwinded sidewalk prophecy about the future of Belize as he is to try and sell you weed. He’s an unpredictable and possibly senile character, but nonetheless a fixture in the quite seaside town of Punta Gorda.

The God Salesmen make up the endless string of foreign religious organizations that are thrilled to have found a country that speaks English and is ripe for the saving. They come in swarms, usually in the form of high school students from the central south of the US. These groups travel in expensive vans and travel out to the rural Maya villages where they can try to replace 2,000 years of Maya spiritual tradition and thoroughly embarrass Peace Corps Volunteers by racial association. Most groups bait villages with offers such as: Let us build a church and we will bring electricity to your village. The village accepts and soon ancestral tradition is forgotten while reaching to touch modernization.

The list goes on and on like a curtain call that just won’t end. I suspect that on some sub-conscious level I’m growing a strange affection for these quirky characters, so for now I’ll give them a quiet applaud and welcome them to the stage of my stay in Belize.

Once a year the Peace Corps asks its volunteers to outline the story of their health over the past annum. Opening my recent mail from our headquarters it was hard not to laugh out loud when I read the assignment and saw below it just five tiny lines to complete the task. Oh, if it were only that simple.

Over the last year there has been maybe two consecutive weeks when I was not stalked by one ailment or another. We all begin to accept that certain amount of general discomfort and forget sometimes the feeling of pure health. When you are healthy, you wake up refreshed, energized but eerily skeptical as though you are waiting for the catch. Each day goes by too silently but you eye every meal with suspicion as though the very next clink of your fork might be the cocking trigger of a Russian roulette game with your gastrointestinal tract. Trying to complete this assignment I began to look back on the last year with a bit of unexplainable nostalgia for all my ailments come and gone. Like a dinner-party host giving a goodbye address to a room of thieving and uninvited guests, I thought it fitting to start the next year anew by tossing away the memory of past afflictions with a middle-finger wrapped around my toasting glass in this farewell to all the illness I’ve known.

It was early July back in those wide-eyed times of 2006 when E. Coli had its first slow dance with my intestinal juices. Oh the adulterous fun we had, E. Coli; you a motile bacillus and I a boyish Peace Corps trainee just trying to make his way in Belize. Living in the basement of a stranger’s house during training you showed me whole days of nothing but the inside of a toilet bowl. I’ll always cherish the time you made me rush from the dinner table with my host-family to vomit off their back porch in shame. I don’t think my host-mother would ever recover from the insult, but E. Coli, you just wouldn’t allow yourself to be upstaged.

Next I’ll offer an honorable mention to that flesh-rippling heat rash who has been with me off an on during the last year like a loyal sidekick. You scurried up my chest eager for a home and taught me the importance of always keeping dry. I fed you ointments and concoctions but you just wouldn’t annul your love. It took a super-potent sludge made just for you out of toothpaste and Epson salts before you would relinquish your hold and recede below the skin and out of my life.

And how could I have spoken this long without giving notice to the scabbies that have ravaged my skin month after month like my own personal army of flesh-eating fans. I burned the pillow where I thought you hid but you just couldn’t stand to be anywhere but by my side. What fun we had waking at 3:00am so I could tear a knife blade across my skin hoping to satisfy your terrible itch. I bled, you fed and how will I ever forget you?

I’d like to thank the bone-crushing fever of an unnamed virus that took almost ten pounds from my body and never even returned my calls. What more could I have given you? Was it me or was it you? Don’t you remember the time I crawled helplessly to a shop for water and you had me puke your yellow bile into a gutter before a line elderly women? I hold you now in the single-cell archive of my immune system, my mysterious admirer.

What would my year have been like without the puss-ridden infected scar brought to my leg by a game-winning slide into home plate during a village baseball game? Your mark will be with me forever. The flies loved you and their larvae did too, if it weren’t for antibiotic ointment I’d still have you.

How could I possibly forget the H. Pyloric bacteria I cheerfully drank one sunny afternoon? You burrowed into the lining of my stomach until I could barely eat without jaw-clenching pain and survived an artillery of antibiotics before realizing that we just weren’t meant for each other. Every time I eat too many spicy foods and bend over in pain I’ll think of you and the times we shared.

I’ll ask for a moment of silence for all the lecherous ticks that found there way to my parts unknown. Where you came from I’ll never know, and where you went I’ll never show. You could have chosen anyone but you chose me. I'm flattered, really I am, but I just don't see how it could have worked. When it was time for you to go I swear I heard your tiny scream as I flicked my lighter and roasted you between the tweezers.

So I raise my glass to all your attempts and cheer each one of you for your effort, but I’m still here. And as a message to all you future microbic challengers lurking in the very drink I raise: I’ve got health insurance policy backed by the U.S government so get in line. I’ll be waiting.

The site was a broke down hotel room three floors above the streets of Livingston, Guatemala. The building was pressed between a narrow produce market and a row of wet fishing docks. Livingston became a hide out of sorts. On high-sun Friday afternoons I could hitch out of my village making it to the water taxi customs shack just in time for last boat leaving the country. It’s a 15-mile ride across the bay and under the spotlight of midday sun dolphins would race your boat or jump in its wake. Livingston is a small coastal town full of fishermen and convenience stores. It’s a town with a mood of constant passage, the type where no one takes the time to notice you on the streets.

In awkward Spanish I’d ask for the same 50 Quetzal ($7.50) room, number 308. Flashing a smile behind gold-rimmed sunglasses I had no idea just how the hotel clerk chose categorized me. I’m sure they fit me in as some strange ex-pat down here to fetch up either drugs or women. I wore an unbuttoned multi-colored shirt, a glimmering belt buckle with protruding silver bullhorns and swung from my shoulder a battered black-leather briefcase full of books, t-shirts and beer. I’d make sure to come off kindly but the hostess always seemed to retract while handing over the room key as though certain she were accepting some roguish liability.

The room was a sweaty cement cell with a single mattress, a crooked window leading to the street and a strong colony of rodents. At a small tienda across the street I could buy two cans of Guatemalan beer and the local newspaper to carry back to the hotel’s rooftop overlooking the bay. Sitting at a small table on the roof I could read a paper and drink from cold cans while watching the lazy movements of the bay. The town was buzzing with the weekday release of Friday evening and everything seemed to bend agreeably toward the bay. At this time of the afternoon, as the sun was starting to show its greater shades of red, I’d keep my eye on the fishermen walking the docks and sorting through the day’s catch. Each movement was a thousand years old and many times it felt better to just go sit nearby and be a part of their worn carpentry. Further out massive tankers and smaller yachts quietly crossed a mirrored calm and to my right the cracks and crevasses in the mountains Honduras were clearly visible by the sun’s afternoon shadows.

At dusk when beer ads lit the town with a polychromatic pulse I’d make to the streets to investigate whatever might be happening. Rapid Spanish pop music came from some nearby but unseen speakers, the girls in small mascara clusters tossed black hair over exposed shoulders while the boys sat on curbs sipping beer and beckoning. The distance settled in and I was pleased to be so deep in the clutter of my own creation, without any reasonable connection, without a way that wouldn’t be my own. The rusty hook of some interest would grab me on a way to a restaurant and I’d find myself following a noise or small crowd. A night football match was taking place in a cement court, everyone shirtless and screaming. I’d make some conversation, maybe join the game if invited and then disappear just before it finished when the energy and anger of defeat could enflame into violence.

Guatemala has a sense of danger that I felt comfortable to be around during those days. Outside of Belize I knew I was on my own and I felt a pleasurable sensation of my own resources being somehow closer to the surface when surrounded by this ill-tempered unknown. It’s a primal feeling that would cut the weekday boredom with the prospect of immediate hazard. The electricity of what could happen at any moment maintained my senses. Walking in the evening passing a small cantina on way to a restaurant I’d keep peripheral eyes on everyone around me while acting as though I’d walked this street a thousand times. The guy with the jeans and cowboy boots has a large lump in his belt toward the left side. I’d watch the scene from behind a baseball cap focused toward a newspaper or menu while I measured the various motives, threats and faces in the room. It’s always good to have a buddy in these situations so noticing the bartender was Maya I’d introduce myself in Q’eqchi, the local Maya language, to define myself away from the surly crowd.

“Chank chaq’uell?” (How are you?)

“Oos Oos, man, Ut laat?” (Good good, man and you?)

“Doing well, just got into town. How about a beer?”

In the reflection of a store window I might notice two men crossing my side of the street and I watch the eyes of the father passing me with his children to see if he is recognizing a danger by shifting weight to shield his two little girls. The night goes on glistening with the deep avenue grit of streetlights and salt air.

I’m determined that if you are able to keep your eyes open and accurately read the tempo of an area you can find a way to step into anywhere in the world and join the folds. Every group of people has is a pace in which they interact. Those who are apart of this rhythm can almost never notice it themselves but a cautious observer can read its indicators like blinking road signs. A man dips his head to take a drink of his beer and slowly turns and opens his eyes to smile at a friend across from him. There is a method in this tired gesture and plenty is spoken in these millimeter movements of shoulders sagging on frame. The man across from him heaves a sigh and nods an agreement while letting his eyes gaze wander toward the street. It is this timing, contours and momentum of everything around you. I take note of the cadence, syntax and tone between the bartender and the man he bums a cigarette from at the end of the bar. This is an unspoken and unknown art in the bodies of people as they speak loudly to one another through the smallest unconscious indications. To disappear completely one must envelope these gestures and execute them deliberately and appropriately. This chameleon strategy is not only an entertaining side curiosity but can be an important camouflage to keep the tempted eyes of an attacker distracted onto some more obvious target.

In my room late that evening, when the night has tipped beyond the cliff, I’m taking a shower under the copper pipe that juts out of the cement wall in my bathroom. The water is cold and strips the smell of sweat and street from my skin. A novel keeps me awake lying on my back listening to the evening’s drunks slur their last cries and recede into sleep.