Last week we travelled to Belize to renew Gaby's visa, which as a tourist visa needed renewing after 90 days of being in the country. Due to Central American trade restrictions these can only be renewed by travelling to Belize or Costa Rica and the latter is sadly too far away to do in the weekend!
We set off from our little orange house at 5am, nursing only 4 hours of sleep due to last minute packing and our bags filled with too many clothes (standard), bananas and peanut butter sandwiches. We caught 3 buses from which we saw different parts of the country for the first time - both poorer areas than where we live and a surprising number of coastal holiday resorts - to the Guatemalan border. At one point Honduran police stopped our bus, body searched all the men and glared at our passports for an unnecessarily long time before letting us continue on our way- a slightly intimidating experience as they all carry huge guns. Following a fair amount of confusion after being dropped off in a mountain village seemingly in the middle of nowhere, we realised we were at the Guatemalan border and were finally able to get stamped out of the country. Feeling like we'd partaken in something highly illegal, we hopped on another bus - this time a tiny mini bus which must have been loaded with nearly double the number of people it should have been carrying! After being stamped into Guatemala (this involved the bus driver disappearing with our passports for 10 minutes - a sufficiently long enough time for us to convince ourselves he was definitely selling them on the black market) we whisked through the Guatemalan countryside to the port town of Puerto Barrios. From here we took a water taxi to Belize! 11 hours later we had made it!
Border crossing antics and the police pulling us over!
Straight away we could see and feel that Belize is a very different country to Honduras. In addition to it being English-speaking (a former British colony) the atmosphere was much more laid-back - think Jamaica and reggae stereotype - and the country is much more ethnically diverse, with people having settled there from all over the world. We spent 2 nights in Punta Gorda where we exhausted the town of everything there was to do in only a few hours, learnt to take the words of Belizeans with a pinch of salt (after being told about several events that didn't take place and followed a sign to an art gallery that didn't exist) and found a very nice restaurant where we saw some Belizean drumming! The next day we took a bus and another water taxi to the town of Placencia where we spent 1 night. Quite amazingly I watched a documentary about the peninsula where Placencia is located in S2 geography and had decided I really wanted to go - something I'd forgotten until we arrived! Here we saw mangrove swamps, visited the beach, watched a fishing competition, saw dolphins in the bay, visited the tourist shops, befriended the locals (shout-out to Brenda the lobster lady) drank cocktails and went to a foam party to celebrate Independence Day! The country was brilliantly decorated with blue and red flags for the 21st and everyone was in high spirits. I can hardly believe that Belize has only been independent of Britain for 34 years! We were however a little sad that the celebratory parade that was supposed to start at 10am in Placencia still hadn't arrived in the town by the time we had to leave for our water taxi at 5pm. A couple of times on our trip we had 'it's a small world' experiences, firstly when we met someone who had been away with Project Trust 12 years ago to the Dominican Republic and secondly on the bus back to Placencia in the dark when we met a Scottish lady who had grown up in Blairgowrie.
By the time we'd made it back to our Honduran home the next day we were absolutely exhausted but pleased that our first Central American travelling experience had been such a success! 
mangrove trees - I am a fan
To my amusement I learnt that there is a species called the 'Wahoo' fish! You don't want to be thinking about these when swimming!
On the evening of our return from Belize we went over to see the children at Miqueas and were surprised by the almost royal welcome back we received, so many hugs and so much excitement! However, we were a little miffed to learn that in the our absence from the home we had been replaced by new residents...2 pigs, Mami Rosie and baby Flash!
Our work here continues as normal and between physiotherapy, English vocab and phonics classes, supply organisation, football training and homework help I think it's great that I've got a lot of variety in my schedule! It's a good feeling when my 5 year olds aren't in class and one will turn to me and point out the window 'it's cloudy' or 'look, bird!'.
Teaching doesn't always go so smoothly -tantrums and sulks are frequent, yesterday one of the boys split his head open in class and will now have a matching eye scar to mine and today I looked away for 2 seconds and turned back to see two of the children had each severed off a big chunk of eachother's hair with scissors - but the little things and noticeable progress make it worthwhile!
This week for the first time I also started giving English tutoring to one of the Tia's that I work with. This turned out to be good fun and it's a nice change as it's so different to working with young children. I am hoping it will also help me to further improve my Spanish which is slowly getting there...I can mostly iffily get across my point and converse roughly, although I find listening and understanding the response much harder. There's still a long way to go!
Making shape faces!
Tackling phonics head on!
2nd grade working hard!
Thursday's mornings at the school continue to go well although progress is much slower here as we only see our classes once a week. This also makes getting to know the students and their abilities quite hard too. Last week half my second grade class were off sick and when I arrived there were 4 or 5 parents, 2 younger sisters and a dog sitting in the classroom along with the 9 pupils (no idea why, I don't understand Honduran schools). It was very bizarre and I only wish I'd taken a picture! I'm also currently making 'English word of the week' class displays for my classes at the school and at Miqueas. There's always something to do here!
This weekend one of our friends from another project, Hugh, came to stay. It was nice to have him to visit and he even showed us how to make tortillas (an art Innes and I had not managed to master after a failed attempt with the wrong type of flour. We were the laughing stock of the Tia's). On Saturday after our morning classes we went to the local cinema at the 'mall' to see 'Everest' and we were all pleasantly surprised by how good it was. The 'mall' is just one example of the immense wealth disparities in Honduras - being a large americanised, high quality shopping centre it sits just across the road from a neighbourhood of small, shabby and poorly built houses. I've actually been surprised that there is such a significantly sized and growing middle class here living alongside profound poverty.
After the cinema we headed back to our village to watch the local church parade for 'national day of the Bible'. It was nice to see the Miqueas kids walking with the children we know from school and a lot of adults in the community we recognised or knew from the church. It was a colourful event and most people marched with signs with bible quotes, there was dancing and a Honduran marching band (they love their drum bands as much as we love our Pipebands in Scotland)! Although I'm not religious, and I think it is unlikely that I ever will be, living in such a Christian community and country has been one of the biggest differences from home and so far I have found it very interesting to learn about!
Honduras certainly feels like home now although the country is ever full of surprises. Only the other week we caught a bus home where a man was running up and down the aisle dressed and painted as a clown and telling jokes to earn some money and on Friday I put a handful of precious postcards and letters into the trust of a lady at the post office who had never heard of Scotland, so if these make it home I will be amazed!
I also received my first piece of post!
Lots of love to everyone at home, I have no idea who or how many people are actually reading these posts so feel free to leave a comment and say hi! Here's to 10 more months in Hondy!
No comments:
Post a Comment