quirky things about Belize

Living in Belize can be quite frustrating.  Things take a lot longer to get done then you can ever plan for, things are hard to find, it is ridiculously hot (the forecast for the the next week is 90's every day!).  To stay relatively non-cynical, I try and notice things about Belize that make my day a little lighter.  Here are some amusing things you can find in Belize:

1.  Randomly, there is a great appreciation for lawn art, specifically bushes carved in the shape of something.  Birds seem to be the most popular.

2.  Horses are still an acceptable and rather normal means of transportation.  It's not unusual to drive by a farmer riding his horse on the side of the road, or to find a couple of horses parked in the shade by the market.

3.  "Babes" is commonly used by men and women, (usually) without any bad connotation.  I am always tickled when I am being serious and businesslike at a bank or somewhere, and the large creole lady in charge comes up and says, "Yes babes, how can I help you?"

4.  Continuing with the non-PC Belizean slang,  there is a large Asian population in Belize, and most of the grocery stores and chinese restaurants are owned by this community.  Belizeans thus refer to all grocery stores and chinese restaurants as "the chinese." (I have to admit I was rather appalled by this when I first came here and stuck to 'grocery store' but... it is a cultural thing and not meant maliciously.) Also, the favorite thing to get from chinese restaurants is fried chicken (I don't know either).  So this is a common phrase: I'm going to the chinese, do you want a fry chicken?

5.  Police methods are a bit different in Belize.  Instead of  hiding on the roads and catching speeders and other rule breakers sneakily, Police set up check points on the highways to make sure the cars are properly insured and licensed.  This is what I like to call the Belize radar detector:  Someone stands in the back of a pickup, facing forward over the cab.  If he sees a checkpoint up ahead, he bangs on the roof of the cab and the driver stops and turns around. 

6.  Instead of police monitoring vehicle speeds, we have speed bumps.  I would say about 70% are marked in some way, with a sign or with yellow paint.  The rest... you have to have sharp eyes, or know where they are.  This is probably only amusing to people like me who have a weird sense of humor, and find it funny when a non- local comes zooming by and hits a speed bump...

a guide for a new farm girl

So my hard drive crashed last week... things are backed up, no worries, but I will be using my husband's computer for a few weeks which means no pictures.  Instead, I've decided to write some lists.  First up:  things you should know about if you suddenly find yourself living on a farm.  Useful!

1.  Close the gates.  ALWAYS close the gates.

2. Both male AND female cattle can have huge horns.  Use other....signs... to tell them apart.  Or your brothers-in-law will never let you forget it.

3. To catch a chicken:  wait till they are roosting somewhere at night.  Grab them by the feet and hold them with their heads hanging upside down.  For some reason this calms them and they hang there quietly.  My theory is the blood rushing to their tiny little brains allows them to become suddenly philosophical.

4.  Never learn how to do the following: drive a tractor, use a lawn mower, milk a cow.  If you don't know how to do these things, no one can make it your job.  This theory was confirmed when I found my poor nine-months-pregnant sister in law milking the cow one morning.

5. Rubber boots are essential.  They may not look super cute, but I am always thankful when I am wearing them.  This has been a hard lesson to learn.  It goes something like this: "walking in my cute new shoes, la la la... SQUISH!  #*%& COW!"

6. To herd cows/ goats/ chickens/ horses in the direction you want:  stand in the place you want them to walk away from, wave your arms around in the air and make SHH SHH SHH sounds.  You only feel like an idiot the first 50 or so times you do this. 

7. To hold a baby cow while it's mom is getting milked:  Grab it's head between your legs and hold on for dear life.  Be warned: it is very hard to hold a calf once it is older then 4 days or so.... and if you don't know this, someone will try to get you to hold an older calf and then fall down laughing when you get tossed by a tiny little cow.


8. Learn the differences between these: cow, bull, steer, ox, mare, gelding, stud, foal, colt.  Lesson-- a cow is not always a cow.

9. Close that gate.

A short history of me

I started keeping this blog to give my family some idea of what my life is like, but now it looks like more people then just a few friends and my mom are reading, which is great! (Thanks Grace for the link!) And I bet people are wondering, why does this girl keep talking about goats?  And where the hell is Belize anyways?  Below is a bit of a sketch of my life, to catch everyone up.

-I grew up in a small town in the States, but NOT on a farm.  The last few years have been a bit of a crash course.

-I went to college at Franciscan University of Steubenville, which is an awesome place. (And for FUS grads, cause I know you are wondering, I wasn’t in a household.  I was in Honors, though.  That’s probably why I still feel compelled to read books and then write about them.)

-My senior year, I went on a medical mission trip to Ecuador.  It was the first time I had ever seen extreme poverty close up…. and when I got back I knew things had changed, and I couldn’t keep living the same way.  I decided to take a year after graduation and do mission work.

- But Hey!  It turns out it is really hard to find volunteer positions abroad in medicine (my preferred field) when you just have an undergrad bio degree.  Luckily, my friend Alison also had a life changing mission trip experience and was headed to Belize… and asked me to think about coming along.

- Yeah, the Belize thing is a teaching position—like teaching actual high school students.  I was not very interested, to put it mildly.  But nothing else came through, so I decided to try one year.

-I’ll give you a sec to google Belize.  I didn’t know where it was either.  I was told everyone spoke English, so I figured I was set!

-Haha.  My first semester was spent teaching 70 sophomore boys biology.  Much craziness ensued… and then I decide to commit to a second teaching year.

-Later that year, all the teachers in the entire country went on strike, and school was closed.  Bored, a bunch of teachers and I start spending time at the farm of the agriculture teacher… named Daniel.

-We start dating when I return for a second year.

-I went back to the States for 2 years, and we dated long distance. Then we get engaged.

-In one week, I graduated from my Physician Assistant program, move to Belize, and got married.  That was quite a week.

-We built a tiny, tiny house on Daniel’s family’s farm… and over the years have acquired cows, horses, chickens, guinea hens, rabbits, and an obnoxious amount of goats. Life here is very, very different.

-And that brings us to now….

So any more questions? Leave a comment  and say hi…. I’d love to know who is reading.  And if I know you already, what's new?

what I have been up to

* I started a new blog which unfortunately has a very similar web address to another photography blog.  Sigh.  Anways, it's www.belizephotos.blogspot.com-- note the S or you will end up on someone else's site.
Enough about that.  The reason I started it is to force myself to learn more about photography.  I love looking at pictures I take, but I'm not super enthusiastic about actually learning how to use my camera and editing software. Hopefully this new challenge will help  Also, on this blog I tend to try and tell a story with my pictures.  Often I have a single favorite picture (like above) that I never get around to working with, and maybe this will fix that.

* I ran over a goat.  WITH MY CAR. The goats love to mill about in the road, but they generally will slowly move out of the way of cars.  Last week one decided not to bother, and since she was directly behind me I didn't even see her.  I heard a loud, panicked goat scream, figured out what might have happened, and quickly stopped reversing.  When I ran back to see what had happened, the now-quite-dusty-goat got up, shot me an evil look, and sauntered away.  She is fine. 

* On the running-things-over topic, one evening I was driving towards home, and about 400 feet from my house a 4 foot long snake started crossing the driveway.  I panicked, stopped, and then called Daniel and asked if I could run over the snake.  He said, "....well, I guess so."  (he doesn't share my ability to rise to instant panic level when confronted by a snake).  The snake looked at me, I looked at the snake, and then I slammed down the gas.  When I checked my rearview mirror, no flattened snake.  Of course, then I started to really panic because what if the snake somehow flipped up into the under-workings of my car? I drove the rest of the way home, sat for 5 minutes to psych myself up, and then leaped from my car and ran to the house.  Daniel says the snake just moved really fast and I missed it, which is an equally disturbing thought cause holy cow, how fast can a snake move??  I'm going to stop thinking about it now.

xunantunich horseback ride

Santiago has a horse-back riding business, Hanna Stables.  I'm pretty convinced the entire reason he does is so he has an excuse to buy horses all the time.  Santiago loves horses.  His horses eat better then he does :)

 Anyways, one of the tours he does is a ride up to Xunantunich (the Mayan ruin near our farm).  I asked if I could tag along one day, because taking a slow ride through the bush, across the ferry, and up the hill to Xunantunich seems like the perfect way to get there.

The first part of the ride goes on paths through the farm, and then we rode a bit on the roadside till we reached the ferry.

Then we lead our horses on the ferry and went across!  Only in Belize.  The ferry man knows Santiago, so he let us ahead of all the tourist vans and cars waiting.  It was fun.

Horseback really was the perfect way to go up the hill.  Slow enough to look around, but not too much sweaty effort on my part.

I've been up to Xunantunich a few times, but this day was particularly perfect.  The sun was out but not burning, and it wasn't too crowded.  We tagged along the end of a tour group as they discovered a whole family of howler monkeys in the trees behind the ruin, and ended up getting really close to the monkeys.  I have some pictures which I will not be posting... lets just say male howler monkeys maybe should consider wearing pants....

book review: the Power of Habit

This is how much I liked The Power of Habit:  I borrowed it from the library, and I took notes.  I decided notes are not enough, so I bought a copy for myself.  I've been enthusiastically sharing this book with friends, and I'm making my husband read it.  This book melds two things that I love:  science  and translating that science into life.  

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, is a book about habits-- what they are, how they are formed, the consequences of habits, and (most interesting to me) how you can change habits and create new ones. I came across an excerpt of this book for this online NYT article about how Target uses statistics to figure out the exact buying habits of each customer, and then predicts future buying habits.  This sounds dry, but Duhigg makes it fascinating.   It is quite eye-opening as to how much humans are creatures of habits-- Duhigg says one study found "more than 40% of actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits."   40%.  That is a lot of life to be floating through on automatic. Habits can be little things, such as always turning right when you enter a store, or more complex, such as backing your car from the driveway.  They can be harmless, such as always buying the same toothepaste, or destroy your life, such as gambling. Habits shape our individual lives, public lives, and lives in a community.  Sometimes, changing even one habit (called a keystone habit) can influence everything else we do in our lives without our conscious effort.  The point of this book is to teach us to recognize the huge impact habits have on our lives.  Duhigg emphasizes although we might not consciously perform our habits, once we learn about them, we are no longer blind and we can choose to change them.  

This book is just good. It is an interesting subject, well researched and supported by studies.  Duhigg provides fascinating case studies and examples to illustrate each point.  Most of all, it is a useful book.  I  love the last chapter, in which Duhigg provides a step by step plan to change habits, summarizing all the points throughout the book.  I am a person who loves my routines (which is not necessarily bad), but it is too easy for me to fall into familiar patterns and never try anything new or fix things that need work.  This book opened my eyes to how many things in my life have fallen into routines-- especially things such as how I interact with others, or what I do when I have free time.  I've taken notes and plan on using the methods he explains to create better habits for myself... up first-- a clean house! 

a visit to the museum of belize

I've wanted to visit the Museum of Belize for a while, mostly because I'm fascinated by the fact that it used to be a prison.  Look how gorgeous this old building is! You would never suspect it was a prison.  Besides the Mayan ruins, there aren't many historical buildings in Belize.... probably because wood doesn't last too long in the tropics, especially when said buildings get hit by hurricanes.

The bricks were brought over as ballast in ships, then recycled into buildings.  I haven't seen many more brick buildings in Belize, so perhaps all the bricks were used here?  Who knows.  But it held up well during hurricane Hattie, when most of Belize city was flattened.

This was a cell.  I could stand in the middle and touch both walls.  Apparently for punishment the window was covered, and the cell would be dark.

I found this prison menu from 1870 quite interesting-- apparently they weren't big on fruits and vegetables back then, which seems strange because of all the fruits and veggies that grow so easily here.  The only veggie was the onions added to the soup on Sundays!

The museum also has some Mayan artifacts, though the majority of things are in museums in other countries (I was actually quite surprised at how few artifacts there were).  Mayans valued jade-- but I had no idea they actually inserted jade into their teeth.  I cringe just thinking about the anesthetic-free drilling that must have been involved.   

This is cool- it is a prehistoric GIANT SLOTH leg bone, found about 15 minutes from where I live.  I wish we still had giant sloths here.

The other reason why I've wanted to visit this museum is their bug and butterfly collection.  It is impressive-- made even more so by the fact that all of it was collected by a mom and her 3 sons.  The only disappointment was that the labeling was very general, and didn't give specific names.

I would love to know what these are called.  They were beautifully iridescent.

 

These are some of the variations of the Sulfa butterfly.  They are very common here.



And some of the many, many bugs that can be found in Belize.  For my amusement, I put a little butterfly stamp on those bugs that I have personally encountered.  See the one on the bottom with a purple stamp on it?  That is a tarantula wasp.  It eats tarantulas. I saw one dive bombing a tarantula in my front yard once.  And we won't talk about my encounters with scorpions (marked with a green stamp), I have to mentally block it else I'd probably run screaming to the airport. 

what to do for entertainment when there is no cable

"listen have you considered getting Netflix?  Cause I'd really like to watch Downton Abbey, like all the other chicks..."

update...

So did I say we have 2 chickens???

Yeah, make that 7. 

Needless to say, we were a bit surprised to find our hen herding her babies into the yard.  She had sneakily hidden her nest, and we didn't know anything about it.   The count as of today is 6 chicks, 6 baby goats, 1 baby horse and 2 baby cows in the fields surrounding our house.  It feels like some strange daycare facility, complete with regular bottle feedings. 

Meanwhile, the chickens are plotting.....

that's right human, just come a liiiitle bit closer.....

inevitable

 

Despite my well documented dislike of chickens, we now are the owners of two bantam chickens.  And even though he is 1/3 the size of a normal rooster, this guy is the king of our yard.