Fix It

(Hey - we have two blog entries this week, so be sure to check out the one right after this for a taste of "real" Peace Corps life.)

Sunday was a fun day for the fix-it man hidden inside me. I went with our neighbors, Rafaela and her son Anthony, to her home village, Big Falls, near Punta Gorda. She owns property there, and she is renovating her building in hope of renting it as a commercial site. It has a good location right by the road.

The future Copa Cabana of Big Falls

It has a distinctive red zinc roof. There is a large room that could be a store or restaurant or night club and an adjoining kitchen, bath, and storage room.

The current project is electricity - no pun. The meter was tacked to the cinder block building with concrete nails and doesn't meet code. We used U-brackets and concrete anchors to screw it to the building. When we finished I thought it was ready to be hurricane-tested.

After the work was completed

They have not yet hooked up the water connection, so Anthony went across the road to pump a bucket of water to flush the toilet.

In Belize, it's usually the women who pump and carry the water.
We enlisted Anthony's help for this special situation - his mom is
8 months pregnant!

We went into Punta Gorda town to get larger brackets and more screws and also got lunch. It was spicy fried chicken in a place that was air conditioned. Wow!

I like the "timeless" clock tower in PG. None of the four clocks work, they all tell different times, and none of them are correct - except each is correct for one minute twice a day.

The clock tower and the town center

Back in Big Falls, Rafaela also owns a house across the creek, and we went to see it after finishing the electrical work. She has a renter there who was baking journey cakes (pronounced johnny cakes) to take and sell. The woman and her daughter (or granddaughter?) rode with us to Bella Vista (it's on the way back to Dangriga) where her son lives. We also visited with Rafaela’s brother before heading back home. I am not sure what her next project will be. She does parts as money becomes available for the work.

Rafi's house in Big Falls

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Weekly Dose of Pet Pictures

Murusun Mesu is growing! He seems to be the catalyst for a lot of interaction between dog, cat, Steve and Cathy!

Like No Other Easter Celebration You've Seen in the States!

I hate it when I wait so long to write in the blog. I'm sure I'll leave our some "good" stuff. Here goes -

It's been a very busy two weeks. Steve spent a good amount of time working on plans for the Community Health Workers' training manual, and I put together an outline and gathered graphics for one of the first chapters. Mix that in with Peace Corps (Volunteer Advocacy Committee and WID/GAD - that a gender issues committee) and training manual meetings. Steve and I made four bus rides to Belmopan in five days! I also taught Zumba and some aerobics classes, HFLE classes, too. (See, right there in a couple sentences I covered a week's worth of activities. Details have flown from my head!)

The week before Easter really heated up. As I mentioned, the Dangriga Youth Alive group was planning a big carnival-type event on the beach at WhyNot Island for Easter Sunday and Monday. In Belize they observe Good Friday, often called Holy Friday. But THEN, I guess because Lent is over, they celebrate like it's New Year's Eve.


Steve launched into making some of the "money" games. Some of the wood he used was what we call Masonite. Belizeans call it beaverboard. We needed one board that was punched full of holes. Back in the States, we'd run over to Home Depot to buy some pegboard. Here he used his drill on the beaverboard to make punchboard. I painted it, drew swirls and a sign for the name. Aidra made the little rolled up pieces of paper which indicated what prize the kids would win. Voila!

He also used more beaverboard and the ever-present mahogany 2X4s to make a cornhole game (we called it Bean Bag Toss) and a mini-backboard for basketball. Aidra made beanbags. (Actually they were bags filled with with dried corn. She called me up to ask if we could use something besides beans because she liked the beans and wanted to eat them. Made sense to me! I like beans, too. Seems a shame to waste them for a game.) We used a laundry basket and colorful bouncy rubber balls for the basketballs. Remarkably all beanbags and balls made it through lots of use in two very active days.

Adding the name to the cornhole board

Note the T-shirt. It was supposed to look like
the graphic above.

We were operating on NO budget. Uncle Harry's Hardware and everything else store donated paint (used for the games AND the T-shirts). Aidra's sister, Daytha, went all over town to get companies and individuals to donate prizes for all the non-money games. (They also donated money; this was, after all a fund-raising event.) And she got some GOOD stuff - night for two on one of the Cayes, cases of drinks (Guinness, Fanta, other), bottles of rum for the "carrot" at the top of the greasy pole, gift certificates for different services. BTL gave several cards worth $20 each for use on cell phones. What a go-getter.

Aaron Ferguson, the Community Liaison officer and leader of the Police Cadets, pulled together the sports games - Greasy Pole, Water Pyramid, Tug 'n War (Belizeans don't say Tug of War) Kayak races. He also arranged for the DJ, our only expense. I'm hoping they won't pay him the entire negotiated price since he was four hours late for the first 8-hour day !@#$#%#!$

Greasy Pole. Can you see the bottle of rum at the
top? Actually there are two! It took the 8 different
teams an hour and a half to finally retrieve the prizes.

Two Girl Guides leaders, Tanisia and Paula, organized the kids' games, MORE Tug 'n War, watermelon eating contest, sack race, the ever-popular Lime and Spoon, among others!

Both days were very successful, with hundreds of people coming out for the festivities. Enterprising food and drink vendors provided snacks. Some of them paid a daily fee to sell at the beach bash. The beer distributor (who provided a huge tent for free, also gave us 20% of their profit. Yay, Bowen and Bowen, the distributor - and Belikin Beer!

I won't know what the take was until our debriefing meeting on Friday. Will report in the next blog entry.

Steve is in the States for a week, left on Monday. He's there visiting his kids and grandkids. Shout out to Chris, Jim and Kaleigh, and Laura, Jason, Jack and Olivia!

Here are a few pictures to give you a flavor of the Beach Bash.

Kids' games

Fergie. Nobody calls him Aaron - either Fergie or Ferguson.

Steve worked ALL DAY Sunday. I'm such a lousy photographer,
it's a shame that the only picture I have of him he's sitting down.
Yes, that's Rafi and Anthony, our neighbors.

Swimming at the mouth of the river, right beside WhyNot island,
where the Beach Bash was held.

Best friends, Jada and Filippa, just got their faces painted :-)

Aidra and Daytha, with Daytha's daughters, Shinoah and Malicka

Meghan VanDeventer, another PCV, helped manage the
money games.

At my post with the poster paints. 

Home-improvement projects on a shoe-string budget

Cathy and I are very grateful for the tools sent to us by my sisters and Cathy’s son. We have a great collection for basic projects.

Cathy teaches Zumba classes in the park by the sea and got a speaker-amplifier donated since she serves in the Peace Corps. Unfortunately it is heavy and has tiny wheels suitable only for rolling over smooth floors rather than Dangriga streets which have an occasional pothole. The break-through on this project was a set of bicycle training wheels from the cycle store. The wheel brackets are held to the wood frame with lag screws, and a couple of bungee cords secures the unit to the frame. We had to pay for the wheels ($16 BZ) and the boards ($9).

The shelves in Cathy's "crafts room" are made from one beautiful mahogany board, one foot wide and cut in two equal lengths. The boards are supported with crates and plastic buckets. The crates were donated by a friend here and the buckets were purchased at the Saturday market. This was our big splurge - $40 BZ.

Before we had any chairs we would sit in bed and read, but we couldn't lean against the window screens at the head of the bed without damaging them, and the lighting was not good after dark. So we made a headboard for the bed with three cross pieces attached to two uprights that are tucked into the valance to keep them in place. Mahogany, of course. They also provide support for a clip-on light to make it easier to see when we read in bed. Cost - $35.

Lighting in the kitchen was limited to an overhead fixture and a low watt bulb in the hood of the stove. Fortunately there are several duplex outlets that lend themselves to added lighting. For the counter next to the stove I mounted a light bulb socket on one side of a wood scrap and a surface mounted switch on the other side and suspended it from the under side of the cabinet. A short extension cord completed the connection. A similar set-up over the sink is shaded by a board that keeps the light from shining directly into the face of the person washing dishes. We paid about $5 for the wood, and $4 for the electrical parts.

We borrowed two of the sliding closet doors for tables. One is supported by three plastic sitting stools, and the other is supported on two crates at one end and by a small shelf unit made from a scrap board on the other end. Cost - $0.

I helped build a doghouse for Princess and her 7 puppies. A neighbor two houses down donated some scrap boards that looked like they had been used for a concrete form, and a neighbor across the street donated two pieces of galvanized roofing metal (known here as “zinc”). I cut the boards (mahogany, no less), and the dog owner, Anthony, drilled the holes and drove the screws. The only cost was for the screws - donated by Nancy and Carol.

We teamed up the same way to build three raised garden boxes for Ms. Loretta, a friend of Rafaela (Anthony’s mom and our landlady). The wood was rough cut and still wet, but it has beautiful grain and color. Ms. Loretta paid for everything.

Most recently we got an idea from Linda, another PCV who has been giving art lessons to Cathy. She wanted a drawing board made from Masonite. It works well for watercolor, graphite and colored pencils, and other art media.  The drawing paper can be mounted on the board. She suggested one small enough for carrying in a back pack and another larger one with a handle cut out for easy carrying. Masonite was $25 for a 4' X 8' piece.