Happy Holidays!!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

It's Christmas Time in Belize City

The holidays are upon us and Belize City is coming alive with the Christmas spirit, fi true! When it started getting cool in October everyone said “It’s Christmas time!” and the decorating and home renovations began. Stores are holding their annual Christmas raffles, shops and houses are decorated with lights and trees, and people are busy shopping for gifts.

Our schools held their Christmas parties on December 11th and the children enjoyed a day filled with dancing, turkey dinner, ice cream and surprises. They came decked out in their colored clothes to show off their style. It was a fun day and yet again, we came home stuffed with more plates of food as all the teachers like to share their meals and treats with us.

Children celebrating at St. Luke:

Silliness at Trinity:

Today, we watched the annual Love FM Christmas Parade where our very own Mr. Stanley from PC plays Santa! The parade is great - it starts right near our house and features several school marching bands and ends with Santa atop a firetruck. It’s so fun to share the holidays with our Belizean family, but we certainly have our families and friends from home in our hearts and hope you all have a safe and joyous holiday season – and that you stay warm up north :)

This Santa tosses beads into the crowd - he tossed some to Ginnie, but she gave them over to one of her students who happened to be right next to us

The marching bands were excellent

Santa atop the fire engine tosses candy to the crowd. Isn't it great to see Santa passing by all the palm trees? Christmas in the tropics is quite fabulous!

Another Year Has Gone By...

Another term has come to a close with a week of exams, high energy Christmas parties, and the annual staff outings for each of our schools. While the students and teachers prepared for and took exams, we continued to work in each of our libraries. Ginnie’s is just beginning and Anthony’s is in a period of re-organization. Ginnie’s been very busy (with Anthony's assistance) cataloguing over 4000 books sent to Trinity in a donation coordinated by Mount Ida College and contributed to in large part by the students of South Elementary School in Hingham, as well as by her mom’s coworkers in South Carolina, and family and friends. The books are excellent and the children are so excited to have a library opening up in the next term. Right now, we are still in the midst of important aspects to the project – seeking funds for the shipping costs and for materials to add much needed shelves, chairs, and tables to the space. For now, all the books are organized into levels and we’ll do a modified check-out system where teachers and I pick out books for students to browse and select for use in class until we have a functional library where students can browse shelves. Throughout the cataloguing and organizing and labeling process, children come into the library and ask to look at books. They love having them and we are both so excited to have both school libraries really user-friendly and accessible to all teachers and students. We are both very grateful for the donations and for the time several high school students from Wesley College have put into helping with our organization projects. The students working at Trinity stamped and labeled over 2000 books with color-coded and alphabetized stickers – they were quite a huge help!

In addition to all these books, we’ve continued to work with teachers on activities and ideas for their classrooms and even presented a workshop on a balanced literacy approach yesterday – the last day of the term – for the teachers and administrators of St. Luke! It was a great workshop that gave teachers time to practice planning a day following the balanced literacy block plan using library books as a major resource! Anthony really deserves all the credit for coordinating the workshop and the plan of the sessions since he spent several days putting all the materials and ideas together. It was a lot of fun to work together yet again on a workshop and our program manager, Austin, said he likes our tag-team style of presenting and was disappointed he was unable to attend this one. Anthony did yet another great job working with the teachers and modeling a lee bit of goofiness with his santa hat, opening joke, poem, and brainteaser. It was fun to work together yet again.

Teachers participating in our activities

Later that evening, we each joined our school staffs for the annual staff outing. Trinity went to Old Belize and St. Luke went to Bird’s Isle. We enjoyed a fun night with the teachers, school wardens, and principals, and had great meals with lots of laughs. Ant’s party even had a dance-off - those ladies at St. Luke love to dance fi true! It was a fun way to close the term and kick-off vacation!

The staff of TMS - and, yes, we are wearing jackets because it is cold! (It dropped into the mid-50's last night, that's cold for us now) Oh, and one of these days Anthony will find a way to round up all 30 people so he can get a staff picture, too!

A Special Night Out in the City

On December 5th, the Belize Family Life Association sponsored a performance of excerpts from The Vagina Monologues as well as some pieces written by a local writer, Ms. Myrna Manzanares (also the director of the show), called The Vagina Speaks Out. Ginnie heard the ad on the radio and immediately began contacting people to plan a night out for dinner and the show. She was joined by some friends from the city and some other PCVs. It was a fun girls night out – we met for dinner before and then made our way over to the Bliss Centre for the Performing Arts where we met up with our lone male attendee (though there were plenty of men in the audience, he was the only one from PC to make it to the show) for an art exhibit and the performance. The show was amazing and it was made even better by the audience commentary and interaction. Theatre in Belize is something we definitely love!

The art exhibit was a special one put together in honor of the show. The two artists were charged with taking everyday objects and painting them in such a way as to interpret a vagina. The artwork was beautiful and one of the girls even bought a piece. It was all a nice, subtle way to show respect for a woman's body and to add to the message of the night.

The show was held among the several events planned for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, an international campaign dedicated to the elimination of acts of violence against women throughout the world. This year's theme was "Human Rights for Women <--> Human Rights for All." Through education, outreach, and activism women and men continue to become empowered to end gender-based violence.

The fantastic performers

YOGA & Holidays at YES

Ginnie has continued to work with YES and the Center for Teenage Mothers. For the majority of the past few months all of the staff participated in a counseling course, which I joined in on whenever I could. It was a lot of fun to spend a few hours with the women of YES and get to know them better. The goals of the course included helping the staff feel more comfortable working with and addressing the special needs of the girls we serve. We had some intense debates and discussions about hot topics and it was a great new way to interact with my Belizean co-workers.

As far as CTM (Center for Teenage Mothers) sessions go, the counseling class forced them to move to a day I was unable to attend, so I just got back into sessions in late November with a yoga class for the moms. It was quite a learning experience for me since we had a large group of new moms and moms-to-be in the class and I had to quickly find adaptations for different trimesters (fortunately, we have a yoga for pregnancy book in the office that made it a tad easier). The moms said they felt relaxed after the session, which was the goal. Some of the babies are old enough to follow along, so they joined in the poses, too! It was a lot of fun for everybody; there were definitely a lot of giggles.

The final session of the year was held on December 5th with our Christmas party where we participated in a KK (which I finally discovered stood for Kris Kringle – not sure what took me so long to put that together, it just wasn't clicking!). We played games (including quite a fun version of pin the nose on the Rudolph), listened to Christmas music and exchanged gifts. Earleth (the Outreach Coordinator for YES) also rounded up all the moms and babies for a group photo – it was a process, but it worked (and doesn't everyone look fabulous?)! The pumpkin pie cookies went fast at this party, too, so I think they are officially a new dessert I must make for holiday gatherings for years to come.

I’m looking forward to 2009 with the moms because Earleth supports the idea of a leadership series of workshops for the moms! We are calling it Teen Moms GLOW for now, if we come up with something catchy that includes leadership and moms, we’ll give it a new official name. It’s somewhat of an emerging leaders program, but with a focus on leading as a young woman and a mom. We’ll cover all sorts of topics from personal leadership style to financial management to positive discipline and much, much more! It’s one project I am really excited about for the coming year.

Club GLOW - TMS Chapter

One expectation of participants in this summer's Camp GLOW was for the girls to return to their communities and start a Club GLOW Chapter. The girls of Trinity met with me in August to create a recruitment and activity plan for our chapter. At the start of the school year, we met with the standard 4, 5, and 6 classes to invite girls to join us for an open meeting to talk about the club. Our first open meeting was held after school and we discovered that a better time for most girls would be during lunch (we have from 11:30 to 1 for lunch so the girls eat first then come to club at noon). We have met weekly for the entire first term.

At our first official meeting, the girls generated a list of the qualities of a leader – and they certainly have great insight into leadership, noting such factors as serving as a role model, helping others, and always trying your best. All the girls signed our list of qualities to commit to exhibiting them in their daily lives. From then on, the girls came up with a list of topics they are interested in learning throughout the year and we have had sessions on puberty, using computers, and several art activity sessions. The girls also like to just talk sometimes, and we’ll spend some meetings on open questions (they write anonymous questions and put them into a question cylinder {recycled oats containers really come in handy for lots of projects} and then we read them and have discussion) and we’ve talked about why people are sometimes unkind, what friendship truly means and also some other lighter topics like what we’ll be doing on the weekend.

This year, six of the girls had their first ever sleepover party at one of the GLOW girls’ homes. Her mom was so incredible and the girls ate and ate while watching three movies (of course High School Musical being one), had a pillow fight, and played games. They couldn’t wait to tell the whole group about their night and all that food – these girls can eat, I’ve seen it! Our final sessions were focused on fun and stress relief since the girls were in the midst of exam review and exams. On December 1st, we began with a discussion of HIV/AIDS in commemoration of World AIDS Day then the girls made journals with the kits we received in the donations sent along with Darcy and Heidi from the folks at Mount Ida. The girls LOVED making their journals and many brought them in the next day to show me they’d begun using them!

This week was our final meeting of the term and the girls had selected to have a tea party – with kool-aid (because most don’t like tea), cookies, and mini-peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. A very unique sort of tea party, but a great time to hang out and celebrate the first term and the holiday season. The girls devoured the food! One girl said she was dreaming about eating healthy sandwiches and cookies from Ms. Ginnie; I told the girls the week before that I would bring the sandwiches and cookies because I wanted to give them some healthy snacks. Fortunately, they enjoyed them – granted a few girls were a bit curious about the oats in the applesauce/banana/oatmeal cookies, but they still disappeared in just minutes! Where they put all that food, I don’t know, but I am glad they could have such a treat.

As you can see, Lizette is anxious to get to those cookies

Club GLOW has been one of my favorite activities for the past three months and I am really looking forward to what more these amazing young ladies will come up with in the next two terms. I’m so proud of all of them and am always excited when they come to visit me during breaks to tell me how they are doing or to just hang out and talk.

The GLOW Girls of Trinity Methodist School

A Good Read

THE LAST FLIGHT OF THE SCARLET MACAW

Typically we refrain from writing blog entries that promote the books we've read while living in Belize, but we couldn't resist with this particular one. "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird," written by Bruce Barcott, is probably one of the single best books that we've both read in Belize (and there have been many, many books). The story is based upon real life events that took place in Belize from the early 1990's to around 2005. Its main focus is centered around the controversy that arose when current government officials along with local and international hydropower electric companies attempted to build a dam in the area of Belize known as Mountain Pine Ridge. The corporations had convinced the people of Belize that the new dam would provide the additional power necessary to lower the cost of electricity across the board. At the current time Belize was only harnessing about 40% of the power it needed to run things and as a result, they were forced to buy additional kilowatts from Mexico at a much higher cost, which was in turn, passed on to the consumer. Even today, Belize continues to have some of the highest electricity costs in the world, due to lack of developed infrastructure, human resources, and other shortages. The controversy surrounding the story, however, is this new dam. It will essentially wipe out the last breeding ground for the scarlet macaws (currently listed as a threatened species due to loss of habitat, hunting, poaching and various environmental issues).

A member of the parrot family, the scarlet macaw is perhaps one of the world's most recognizable tropical birds. It feeds mainly on a diet of fruit and nuts and can live up to 75 years. Females will typically lay 2-3 eggs, which have a gestation period of 28 days (after hatching, chicks will flee the nest in about 90 days, and leave their parents after 1 year). Many of the chicks do not survive to adulthood due to their vulnerability to predators ranging from hawks to jaguars. Sharon Matola (Director of the Belize Zoo) has done extensive studies and observations of the macaws in Belize, specifically in the rainforests of Mountain Pine Ridge. She's been credited as being one of the first people to witness many behaviors of the bird outside of captivity. As it's habitat was threatened in the Macal River basin, Sharon Matola stood up and fought everyone and anyone related to the construction of the dam.

The book is an amazing story of Sharon's fight to save this bird. Since we spent so much time working directly with the zoo last year, and were fortunate enough to see Sharon in action with the animals that she loves so dearly, we had a special place in our hearts for this story. Not only does the piece deal specifically with Belize at the time, but it also talks in great detail about people, politics, geography, and how often they have meshed throughout the country's short, but eventful history. For all of you who have been reading our blog, sending us letters, talking with us on the phone, and providing support and encouragement, this one's for you. It's a picture of the Belize that we live in, a history, both past and in the making, the one that we often try to describe, but sometimes don't have the words. The story will help put Belize into perspective.

Currently the book is available in hardcover only, but in mid-January they will be publishing a paperback edition. Give it a read if you can, let us know what you think, and once again, thanks for reading.

Giving Thanks Peace Corps Style

Over the Thanksgiving holiday many volunteers came together in Belmopan to celebrate Thanksgiving, enjoy a nice home-cooked meal together, and give thanks. Each district was responsible for providing various dishes, desserts, and appetizers for all 80 or so attendees, and Peace Corps took care of the turkey (5 or 6 in all). Our district was responsible for desserts and since pies are difficult as well as quite expensive to make here in Belize, we decided to make dessert faves into cookies of sorts. Ginnie made an amazing and quite popular pumpkin pie cookie and Anthony made oatmeal applesauce cookies. It seemed as though there was food to feed a thousand hungry souls. Everyone ate until they were quite literally stuffed. When all was said and done, as ravenous as we had been, we were still left with a table full of many appetizer, salad and dessert plates, as well as a few pounds of turkey. As in years past, Peace Corps gathers these foods and donates them to a shelter in Belmopan. Sooo, although we were unable to take part in the traditional day-after custom of building ginormous sandwiches from the leftovers, food was put to good use. We had a wonderful day and enjoyed the opportunity to spend some time together. Afterward, Josh came home with us to Belize to continue the fun with a meal at a PCV fave, Riverside Tavern, and to check out the entertainment options at the Princess. Once there it was off to the lanes for some bowling and then a lee trip into the casino for the highly addicting 5 cent electronic roulette game where we ran into Ginnie's counterpart also out for an evening of fun. Below are some photos.

We hope that you all had a wonderful holiday and wish everyone a safe, happy, and memorable holiday season.

Table centerpieces at Nicole's Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner

Our beloved Nurse Jackie (c) chats it up with a few volunteers

The appetizer table spread (potatoes, salads, mac and cheese, etc.)

Some desserts made by PCVs - bread puddings, cookies, pies, and cakes

Mr. Stanley continuing the turkey carving tradition. He carved all 5 birds!

One of the many decorative centerpieces at the George Price Center

Some fellow PC staff members - Ruth and Kent

Ginnie's amazing pumpkin pie cookies

The welcome sign at George Price Center

1st, 2nd, and 3rd year volunteers

Josh, Anthony, and John

Ginnie and Nikki looking perky...cheers

Check out these fancy shoes...perhaps some bowling is in order

Look who we found!

Check out these scores (not sure what happened with Ginnie on this one, she did better in the first game, really and look at Anthony's and Josh's almost turkeys in honor of the holiday!)

So many choices...which one do we roll with

Scott, April, Josh, and us, after our holiday bowling adventure

AHHHH!!!!!! Look out, Ginnie!