Happy New Year!

Today is New Year's Day on the Mayan Calendar. I hope it was a good day for all of you, because it certainly was for me! This is, like yesterday, not a very picture-intensive post, but we did a lot of great stuff today!

The day started by watching Katie run at the track while I studied my scriptures, then a few hours of paperwork and research to prepare for the exciting phase of the Succotz Revenue Project which we launched this afternoon! It has become important for us to make an in-depth profile of all the businesses in Succotz so we've decided to basically "tract" the entire village gathering business information. At one-o-clock Emily, MacKenzie, Katie, and I set off for Succotz to begin this venture. Emily and MacKenzie set off as one "companionship" since they had to leave together after 45 minutes for the writing class they teach. Katie and I covered the newly named Queen Elizabeth St, Church St, and Cemetery Ln. Between our two "companionships" we found and profiled 20 businesses in Succotz and we've only scratched the surface! We're going back on Thursday morning with a much larger portion of the team to try and finish off this profiling portion of the project. We actually took pictures of all the businesses today, but they weren't on my camera, so I'll post some of them probably on Thursday. Meanwhile, here's a picture of Emily and MacKenzie walking off to start profiling businesses on Jose Luis St:

Later in the evening after dinner with Mama Kay, several of us headed off the the home of the Medina's from the Santa Elena branch for FHE. We joined them for FHE last week and loved it, so we went back again this week. It will probably become our Tuesday tradition the rest of our time here (we have a team meeting on Monday nights, so they are doing their FHE on Tuesdays while we're here to accommodate us). They have a wonderful home that is probably the best I've seen in Belize. Going there feels like being in America again, both outside and in. They are among the very few to be so privileged in Belize, but they put it to good use and are very involved in their community and trying to bring about positive change. In fact, Sister Medina is currently running for public office to help make a bigger difference. If she wins, as far as we know, she'll be the first Mormon woman to ever hold a government office in Belize!

The rarity of seeing homes like the Medina's has been especially underscored the more I've spent time in Succotz. The Medina family lives in San Ignacio where a more thriving upper-middle class and even some wealthy people are more common. You may wonder why the HELP-International team chose to set up camp in one of the more well-to-do locations in Belize. It's actually because it is safer here and is in a nice central location to a lot of other poorer communities like Succotz, which is just 8 miles west. Now, San Ignacio still has lots of poverty, but places like Succotz are simply much worse off and thus demand a lot more attention. For example, last Friday night when we had the birthday for MacKenzie in Succotz, we celebrated at the house of one of the village council members we've been working with, Jose Luis. Let me detail his living conditions to you. He lives with his wife and two children in a home much smaller than any apartment I've lived in at BYU; they have an outhouse instead of a bathroom, and also an outdoor shower; they are one of the most well-to-do families in all of Succotz. I must admit that back in the states I sometimes thought of myself as "poor." I will never make that mistake again. As foreign as this world seems to me sometimes, the world I come from with its laptops, movie theaters, subsidized education, indoor plumbing, smart phones, medical care including immunizations, running hot water, etc. is just as if not more foreign to people here. Just one of those luxuries alone seems to many of these people like one of those things they will only ever dream of without any hope of every having. I have felt guilty for ever feeling "poor" or complaining about the dumb things I complain about sometimes. I don't usually go to bed wondering if I'll eat tomorrow. When I get sick I can see the doctor and get reliable and useful help rather than just dealing with even very serious problems untreated my entire life. I didn't have to stop going to school in 1st grade because my parents couldn't afford the $20 registration fee and needed my help with the small family business or farm anyway. Next time you want to complain about having to wash dishes, thank God that you have dishes to watch. Next time you complain about having to go to school, thank God that you are privileged to have an eduction. Next time you complain about cleaning your room, thank God you have enough room to clutter up in the first place since you aren't sharing the floor space with the beds of your other 5 family members. Next time your computer freezes or you lose some file, thank God that you have a computer and the knowledge of how to use it. I've met people who don't have any of those things.

God bless and have a good night.

Wayeb!

So, according to the Mayan calendar, today was supposed to be the most unlucky day of the year. The Mayans followed a lunar calendar, but they recognized that this did not match with the solar year, so the five extra days that don't match up are called Wayeb and they fall from July 21-25. These are unlucky days of limbo when Xibalba (hell) is allowed to unleash its worst demons who wreak havoc everywhere. The last day of Wayeb (today) is especially unlucky since the demons have to get the last of their evil out before being reigned back in the next day. Well, if today was the least lucky day of the year then that is incredibly good news, because I thought it was pretty good, so the rest of the year should be spectacular!

The symbol for Wayeb on the Mayan Calendar

Although it was a good day, it was another one of those boring ones where I did a lot on my laptop again. I worked a lot more on the Rainforest Haven website, which is coming along amazingly and also did further research and paperwork for the Succotz revenue projects. Tomorrow should be a really exciting day for that one, as about half of the team is coming to Succotz with me to tract out the businesses there and start creating our in-depth business profile of the village. I'm really looking forward to beginning the real work of this project! :)

Monday is also one of the days for our computer classes, and I'm happy to report that the advertising we did last week worked and we had four eager learners at our class today! Two of them had never used a computer in their lives! It was kind of weird but cool teaching things like what a monitor was versus a computer and how to turn each of them on. I taught how to use a mouse and what programs and files are and Maren started the class on typing lessons. We are excited to see them all again on Wednesday. We've planned a great 4-week course to introduce the students to basic computer knowledge, typing skills, Microsoft Office essentials, and the internet. It was exciting to see how much progress they made in just an hour today!

Our computer students use "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" 

Overall, it was another fulfilling productive day in Belize, even if this post is rather boring! I hope you all survived the days of Wayeb in relative safety and have a happy Mayan New Year tomorrow! :)

Just around the river bend

Okay, I've officially decided that taking a night off from the blog is an absolutely retarded idea because it's hard enough to try and describe just one day here in Belize in a blog post let alone two! But, here goes:

Yesterday began with the skit I mentioned on Thursday. In case you missed that post, three of our team members (Katie, Jake, and I) helped give a skit on Self-Esteem to a bunch of kids at a summer camp, in connection with the Cornerstone foundation--another organization we often team with for various projects. Here's the audience for which we gave the performance of our lives:

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of us actually performing the skit (which was REALLY cheesy--but don't blame us; we didn't write it), but I do have this picture of Katie hold the "Self Esteem Shield" (Exciting, huh?)

My part was easy. Mostly, I just pointed and laughed at Katie while throwing things at her.

Afterwards, we met up with the others at the orphanage we're building. For a very detailed description of our construction methods, see Monday's post. Meanwhile, in that post I promised to give you a better picture of the buildings the next time we're there. Well, I've kept my promise and have both inside and outside pictures for you. Now you'll know what I meant when I said they remind me of the Flintstones:

The one on the right will house 3-4 teenage girls. The bathroom & shower facilities are in the one on the left, which is designed to catch and recycle rain water (it's like a giant bowl).

The buildings in the first picture are a vast improvement over these flimsy and rotting buildings currently being used. Can you imagine having to live in a building like that? We are currently using this one to store our shovels and other tools when we aren't there, and that's about all it's good for. The new living arrangements should be quite a lot more comfortable! Here's a look at the interior of the new buildings:

 Going through the doors...

 ...you are immediately greeted by a living room area with some comfortable couches and a staircase which leads to...

...a little bedroom upstairs!

So, this is the building we're currently working on. The guy to the right with the backwards hat is Yan. He's from Holland and came out on Thursday with a British non-profit and heard about the orphanage project so he came to help us out that day. He's a pretty cool guy who has done humanitarian work in at least 3 other 3rd-world countries. He's octo-lingual (he speaks 8 languages, all fluently)!!!

 Katie, Pete, and Emily take a moment to smile for the camera.

 When completed, this smaller building will house the caretaker who lives on sight.

Sarah and Jake pack a bag with our special moist dirt concoction. Once again, for a more detailed explanation of the crazy construction process used to make these buildings, see my Monday post.

Emily has a dirt-funnel on her head. Does this make anyone else think of that song from "The Jungle Book," where the girls says, "I must go and fetch the water, til the day that I am grown..." :)

Well, after our time building the orphanage, Kyle and Megan decided to let our weekend start early in honor of the productive week we've had and even more so in honor of our team member MacKenzie's birthday! So, we headed to my favorite little village--Succotz!--and river tubed along the Mopan river! It was great fun. I don't actually have any river tubing pictures myself since I didn't really want to risk getting my camera wet, but Katie had a waterproof camera and tomorrow I'll get some pictures from her to show you all. 

After the tubing , be headed to the house of Jose Luis, one of the village council members I've been working with on the Succotz Revenue project, where we had a Belizean chicken barbecue in his backyard and played with his two adorable kids, like little Calvin here, who loved my hat:

The evening turned into a dance party, having fun dancing to the Belizean music, which is always an interesting techno-reggae driven mix of English, Spanish, and Kriol songs. As you know from yesterday's lame and short post, when we got back home I was actually tired (a rarity) and went to bed without blogging. Deepest apologies.

As for today, it started out on a somewhat frustrating note. Even though Saturday is typically our day off, this morning the Succotz village council was invited to a special meeting at the University of Belize for all village councils, but they were also going to have a special one-on-one sit down with the Belize Board of Tourism and the National Institute of Culture and History to discuss their current improvement initiatives and petition for funds with a proposal I spent hours this week writing with them and perfecting. They invited me to come along for the meeting and I was very excited to get an in-depth look into how the Belizean government works. Unfortunately, they stood us up! The big meeting for all village councils was cancelled and they forgot to contact a few of the councils to tell of the cancellation, so a small handful of councils were waiting there with nothing to do after paying to get all the way there and setting a good portion of their days aside for the event. Anyway, we were of course quite frustrated, but we used the time to have another small meeting amongst ourselves to discuss our game plan from hereon out. Then we headed west, I to San Ignacio and the council a little further to Succotz. Anyway, it was frustrating but we still feel very good about our proposal for the BTB and NICH; hopefully it will happen next week.

However, the rest of my day has been an absolute blast! After returning to San Ignacio, eight of us headed on a Saturday adventure (so, of course I wore my Orange Adventure Pants!). We went with our fun and knowledgeable guide Feliz on a jungle hike and cave tubing adventure. The jungle hike was the most gorgeous hike I've ever been on in my entire life, hands down. The rock ledges and exotic plants, the beautiful flowers, the smells--everything was amazing. Unfortunately, like yesterday, I didn't always have my camera with me since most of the hike I was in my swimsuit as we headed to the river where we would cave tube. However, once again Katie did have her camera with her and I'll get some pictures soon. I did take a few gorgeous jungle shots though, as shown below:

That braided vine actually grows that way! Crazy, huh? 

 It may look gorgeous, but it's a noxious weed.

 Not a weed, just gorgeous.

 Leaf-cutter ants! My favorites! A much better picture that I've managed to get in my previous posts on this subject. Be sure to click the picture and zoom in to get a good look at these crazy buggers!

Left to right: Katie, Jonathon, Kyle, Lindsay, Ashley, and Maren all prepare for our jungle adventure!

Okay, so tomorrow I will post a lot more about my Friday and Saturday adventures when I have more pictures to show you. It's really hard to describe how amazing the jungle and the cave tubing were. The caves are enormous. The Mayas used them anciently to send sacrificial victims to Xibalba (hell). Cheery, huh? Some of the caves still have Mayan artifacts in them you can see, though we went to a less expensive cave. :) It was still phenomenally impressive though, as you'll see tomorrow.

After the cave tubing and jungle adventure, after eating some dinner and going to the track with Katie (I'll describe that more in depth at a future date) the team got a karaoke bar almost entirely to ourselves and rocked the night away. It was such a blast with these amazing people I work hard with all week and then can have such fun times with on the weekend. I'll leave you this evening with some karaoke pictures:

Crowded into the van on the way there (you can't see the other 8 people also in the van!) Left to right: Pete, Megan, Katie, Jake, Maren

What's in a name?

If you saw yesterday's post, then you probably noticed that none of the streets in Succotz village have names! This is a hindrance to the creation of a map for tourists, so today in our meeting with the Succotz village council we discussed naming the streets. They had a few streets they had names in mind for already, and then told me to pick the other names according to my best judgment. So, I've been naming streets in Succotz after notable figures in Belizean history, Mayan gods, Belizean animals, and a couple other surprises. I'll show you an updated map with the names in a few days after they are ratified by the village council.

So, my day involved a lot more research for the Succotz project including a fantastic meeting with the village council that Kyle, Lindsay, Megan, and I attended. We finalized some plans for a crucial meeting with some government agencies taking place this Saturday. I'll be attending that meeting along with the village council in Belmopan in connection with a national conference for village councils. I'm quite excited as it sounds like a fascinating and rare opportunity to observe the workings of the Belizean government.

Later on in the day I went to the Cornerstone foundation with Katie and Jake to practice a skit on self-esteem we're presenting at a summer camp for children tomorrow morning. It's interesting stepping into some of the other projects for just brief snippets of time, such as working with some of the youth summer camps. These are fantastic programs focused on helping children learn about peaceful conflict resolution in order to combat the unbelievably high domestic abuse rates that always seem to be disgustingly high in high-poverty settings. The results of these camps have been very positive, introducing many children to ideas of peaceful conflict resolution for the very first time!

This is just one example of a project that has been going on that I haven't yet been particularly involved in. So far, since I've been in Belize, I've helped with the Micro-farm (Chicken coop) project, the orphanage project, the computer class project, and the Francisco wheelchair project. Furthermore, I've been a team leader on the Rainforest Haven consulting project and my personal favorite, the Succotz Village Revenue Generation project. However, that's not even all the projects our little team is working on here! We are also helping construct a diabetes lab at the Loma Luz hospital, constructing adobe stoves to make a cleaner cooking environment, creative writing classes, music classes, ESL classes, the aforementioned youth peaceful resolution camps, a business-consulting project with an organization helping provide support for widows, a rural health campaign project, and a "Soilet" construction project. I might be forgetting a few. The point is, HELP International is making an incredible impact on Belize this summer! (Not to mention the projects additional teams are working on in El Salvador, Fiji, Uganda, Tanzania, India, Peru, and Thailand.) It is humbling to think about being a part of it all! Such a blessing!

Anyway, thanks for allowing the tangent! Anyway, after skit rehearsal I came back for dinner, followed by a meeting with Jorge and Shamira about the Rainforest Haven consulting project. They LOVED the home page I designed and we made additional plans to be able to open the business soon. It may involve me and some other team members spending the night on the resort property some time next week. I'm okay with that. :)

It wasn't a very picture heavy day. Sorry, I know that makes 2 days in a row without very many pictures, but I do have a few for you. I should note that tomorrow already promises to be a particularly picture-friendly day! Meanwhile, here's a few from today:

This run-down building in Succotz made for some fantastic artistic shots. People in Succotz often live in buildings much worse than this.

Megan eats a Wia (sp?) fruit. Of all the local exotic fruits I've tried, this is so far the only one that I haven't particularly been a fan of. The inside is just way too gooey for my taste!

Night shot of our home sweet home! We occupy the upper floors of this building on the hills in the more well-to-do area of San Ignacio. I love this place! Sometime I should make a video tour of the interior for y'all.

Can you find the iguana?

NO! YOU CAN'T! Why? Because there isn't one in this picture. However, there IS a reptile. Hiding somewhere in this picture is a basilisk--no, not the kind from Harry Potter. These little lizards are super fast and can literally disappear faster than the time it takes you to blink! They can be scared away by the click of your camera button, so I was really fortunate to grab a picture. These are the little guys that are so fast that they can run on water, causing some locals to nickname them "Jesus Lizards."

Coding and Cartography

Probably won't be a very long post this evening because although my day was incredibly productive, it was really quite boring once you try explaining it to others. Most of my day was spent inside on my computer doing work that is vitally important to the projects I'm working on, but not very exciting.

The first part of the day, I created a home page for the resort I'm doing business counseling for, "Rainforest Haven." So, maybe I say this every time I create a new website, but I feel like this is my greatest work yet. While I'm not ready to show you the entire front page, as excited as I am about it, I will give you a slight preview of the top introduction bar to the home page:

I actually took and Photoshopped the picture of the large frond-leaf myself from a large potted plant in our living room! The background pic is actually from the resort. I am excited to show you all the rest of the home page, which turned out just beautiful! Hopefully the entire site will be ready in 2-3 weeks. So, while I was excited about the results today, the means to get there largely consisted of typing HTML code into Notepad (because REAL nerds never use editing programs! We code in the raw!!!) :-P

Later I did a little bit of shopping with about the half team, came home, and made lunch but not before first getting a Choco-banana from the vendor near our house (as mentioned in last Saturday's post)! Delicious! 

Eating a choco-banana while wearing my lucky shirt! 

Disneyland price: $4.00

Belizean Vendor: One Shilling (about 12.5 cents American)

We also ran into a man named Francisco on our way home who Lindsay is leading a social media project to get a wheelchair for. He has several severe physical disabilities and it takes him an hour to walk 3 blocks with a cane! We also filmed a segment for the YouTube fundraising video Lindsay is making for him. Here he is with Jake and Lindsay:

By the way, some of you may remember him from the fundraising video I made a few months ago. Watch it again and see if you can find him!

While out and about town we also distributed some flyers for our computer class, which we will begin again with a set curriculum on Monday. After that, we headed back home, as I mentioned before, and I was back at the computer again, this time doing more research for the Succotz revenue project I've been telling you all about. We made some VERY exciting progress and brainstormed some great ideas to help solve the revenue stream problem of that poor impoverished village. I also used satellite imagery from Bing Maps (see Monday's post) to start creating a map that will be very important in our plan. We are going to compile information on all restaurants and attractions in the village and put them on this map as a guide for tourists to draw them into the village more when they come through to visit the Xunantunich ruins. The reverse of the map will feature advertising space for some of those locations, the revenue of which will go to the village council to help make further improvements that will infuse additional capital into the village. This is just one part of plan to increase revenue in Succotz. Of course, for the map to be useful, we're going to need to coordinate with the village council to name all of the streets since most of them are currently nameless! We also will probably be installing street signs with the selected names in a few weeks. Take a look at my preliminary map (don't worry... it will be a lot prettier when it's done!):

I am, admittedly, not trained in professional cartography, but I must admit that making maps is really fun! It's also much easier when enabled by modern satellite technology. :)

Later in the evening we had our dinner from Sister Kay: heart-shaped waffles, sausage, Belize-style scrambled eggs (don't know what she did to them, but they were incredible!), and tossed fruit. Having "family dinner" together as a team is always one of the highlights of the day. We all get along so well and have such good times:

From left to right: Sarah, Emily, MacKenzie, Pete, Jake, Megan, Rin, and the hands of Ashley

Well, I told you from the start today that it would probably be a shorter, more boring post, and I seem to have delivered on that promise. But, of course, I have one last picture before I sign off for the night:

Can you find the iguana?

(Special thanks to Megan Swan for today's iguana pic since I was holed up on my computer all day!)

Minivan in a Jungle

I want to begin with a picture that tells more of the story of poverty in Belize:

What you are seeing is a power line held up by flimsy sticks in the ground, surrounding a large field where lots of children regularly play football (soccer)--essentially a tragedy waiting to happen. This is the best that can be afforded by the village of Succotz which suffers from serious revenue deficiencies despite being the home to the second-largest tourist attraction in Belize, the Mayan ruins of Xunantunich (see yesterday's post). This is only one of many examples of rather important improvements the village could make with more money. Increased revenue would also allow the village council to subsidize the education of the children in the village, increase funding to programs promoting public health, and improving various facilities.

My day started with a brief meeting about our computer classes at the Cornerstone foundation. We began distributing flyers today to advertise for the classes and hopefully will have lots more students there tomorrow than we did yesterday. I then headed to Succotz with Lindsay and Kyle to do some research on our revenue stream project there. That's where we saw these pitiful sticks holding up power lines. We talked with the village chairman again, as well as another councilman and some other residents and gathered some important information that will greatly help us prepare for our meeting this Saturday with the NICH, an important government agency that could drastically help or hinder this project. I snapped a few other pictures while in Succotz. Here they are:

Succotz has been a major recipient site for the Adobe stoves the team has made in the last few months. This is the quarry for White Maul that the team dug up to use for that project. It's a really amazing project you should learn more about by following the link to the "Sundance Romance" blog or Belize country blog for HELP-International from my favorite blogs list at right.

Can you find the iguana?

The Succotz Branch of the LDS Church (of which I'm a member) just got a brand new chapel 2 months ago! This gorgeous little building--definitely one of the most beautiful in Succotz--is a standing testimony to the blessings of tithing! I love seeing the chapels of the LDS Church: so simple and yet so beautiful and full of the Spirit in their welcoming design.

Gorgeous pic of a little thatch-roof hut in the distance.

So, before I got to Belize the forecast for every day was torrential rain and thunder storms. I have been here for a week now and not until today did I see such weather! As we headed back to San Ignacio from Succotz, we had a rather torrential rain storm that reminded me of the daily downpours of Florida. 

After lunch, I got back in the van with Kyle and Lindsey, joined by our amazing team member Katie who is our best engineer. We headed of to various far-off locations to do research for the chicken coop project, the Rainforest Haven consulting job, and another engineering project Katie is heading up called a Soilet (more info in a future post). We returned to the first chicken coop we built last week and had a wonderful meeting with one of the wealthiest men in Belize who is incredibly interested in philanthropy and wants to perhaps invest in making similar chicken coops to our small portable one in lots of other orphanages/foster homes like the one we built at (he also contributes lots of money to that boy's home).

Showing our chicken coop off to Abdallah (back, middle), one of the richest men in Belize and a leader in Belizean philanthropy and development work. He likes the design a lot. Katie (foreground, right) designed the schematic for the chicken coop merely from watching a YouTube video about chicken coops!

As much as Abdallah likes our chicken coop, we told him we have plans for a slightly bigger model made to incorporate rabbits and vermiculture (worms) into a self-sustaining system and cooperative system. So, our next stop was to visit some other chicken coops to give Katie some design ideas so she can design us just such a system. Some pictures of other coops:

This is a much larger scale coop than the one we built, but still only accommodates chickens. However, just next to this coop is another pen...

...with sheep!

However, the next coop we saw...

...had rabbits and is preparing to add worms! Yay! 

This was a very educational stop as it was at a resort similar to the one Jorge and Shamira are starting that I'm doing business consulting for, so I got some valuable information interviewing people there and looking around that will help me with that business project. We were glad that this stop was so helpful because it was not easily accessed: we had to travel about 8 miles through a very dusty, rocky jungle road. We usually traveled at about 7-9 MPH, so it took us an hour each way on the bumpiest ride of my life in a little mini-van exactly like the one my family in Longmont drives, except blue instead of white! It even breaks down about as often as that van and the driver's seat door doesn't open (sound familiar?) Needless to say, it was quite an experience! The jungles here are so thick! It felt like such an odd combination to be traveling through a Central American jungle in an Astro Van. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any tapirs or jaguars (this is the only country in the world where jaguars live in which they are NOT endangered, by the way). However, I did see this:

Can you find the dead snake?

So can the ants.

And with that cheery image, I must call it a night! :)