Belize Day 3: Part 2
Trip Start
May 26, 2007
1
5
Trip End
Jun 03, 2007
Hopkins,
Belize
Monday, May 28, 2007
It really is a small world, isn't it? The fact that you can fly 2,500 miles south to a foreign country and still meet someone who lived just down the street from you is one of life's amazing coincidences.
We had recovered from the Pica Pica, grabbed some R&R by the pool, and eaten lunch. With an overcast afternoon stretching out before us, we decided to bike the short distance north into Hopkins village.
Bike rental at Hamanasi was free, so we couldn't really complain about their rusty appearance, ominous squeaky noises, and lack of gears (they didn't even have hand brakes - you had to pedal backwards to stop!) You basically went out to the bike rack, tried some bikes on for size, picked one you liked, and then gave the number to the front desk
David the wood carver
. They in turn gave you a key to unlock the security chain. No check-out procedure, no deposit, and no damage-waiver to sign... it was so convenient I didn't have the heart to comment on the condition of the bikes themselves. I chose a sad-looking 'chick bike', faded pink in color, because I'm short and wanted to be able to put my feet on the floor to stop if the reverse-pedaling-braking-system didn't work. Hubbie picked out a nice little red number that, unfortunately, also turned out to be a chick bike. Although he feared being laughed at by the villagers, I told him nobody would notice. (And anyway, what better way to strike up a conversation!?)
Now, I'm not a biking expert. Since I'm not so good with the whole gear-change-thing on bikes, typically a ride without gears makes my eyes light-up with glee. However, turning onto the red dirt road to the village, I yearned for the ability to give my legs just a little help. Biking on gravel, with dust billowing around you, and on what is essentially an outdated beach-cruiser for your ride, is no picnic - especially in 90 degree temperatures and high humidity. But I was off to experience 'the real Belize', and was not to be deterred.
In Hopkins, as throughout rural Belize, people really do live in the most basic of conditions. 'Houses' are wooden one-room buildings built on stilts to safeguard against wood-rot caused by the year-round humidity and the occasional summer-storm flooding. Most toilets (if they exist in any formal fashion) are outhouses from every traveler's nightmare, situated at the back of the property. There is no electricity and no running water in many homes, meaning no refrigerators to store fresh food and no way to power things we Westerners wouldn't dream of living without, like washing machines and TVs
Herve and Kathy Cormier
. Washing lines hang from roof-top to tree-top everywhere around town, waiting for an on-shore breeze to combat the pervasive humidity and, eventually, dry the clothing.Of course, being the laundry-dreading 'housewife' that I am, I was particularly sympathetic to the plight of a young mother, hair wrapped in a scarf, dripping sweat and scrubbing her kids' dirty clothes in a large, wooden tub outside her house. (It really put into perspective my pathetic frustration at waiting for the washing machine cycle to finish!) She exchanged idle gossip with another woman, probably her girlfriend, as her kids played in the dirt around her. I wanted to take a picture as we cycled on past but contented myself with shared smiles; it just seemed too intrusive and just a little patronizing to stop and photograph this most basic of household chores. Hey honey, look at the poor people washing their clothes by hand. Aint it quaint?
I guess I'll have to get over these reservations if I really want to develop my travel photography skills; professional photographers who seem to most successfully capture a sense of 'place' seem to do so best with photo-journalistic shots that capture local people going about their everyday business.
As this is a Garifuna town, throughout the village you could hear the upbeat sounds of Afro-Caribbean beats, mostly coming from the stereo of some rusty car idling in a front yard while young men slumped up against it in the heat. We were told this was a safe and friendly village and, as we passed we smiled and waved. They almost always smiled and waved in return.
I couldn't help thinking that, in the U.S., neighbors would come out of their homes to complain about loud music
Joss cycling in Hopkins
. In Hopkins, it seemed to provide the perfect soundtrack for neighbors and friends to come together in conversation; the simple, catchy melodies and steady percussion mirroring the village's sense of laid-back contentment. The phrase that came to mind was the Jamaican "No problem!"Our first stop was "David's Woodcraft", a thatched-roof gift-shop on the outskirts of town that set itself apart by being in an unusually good state of repair. Inside was one room lined, from floor to ceiling with shelves featuring handmade wooden crafts - from vases and bowls to statues of fish and eels. There was nobody inside but two young boys came running in through a side door after they saw us enter. Through a back window we could see a third running into another shack at the back of the property and set on the beach. "My dad is coming!" said one of the boys breathlessly. "He's just getting dressed from a shower!"
'Dad' was David himself, who sauntered in, looking weary, apologizing for his unkempt appearance and complaining about the heat. "Whew! It's damn hot. We need some rain!"
"Oh, don't say that!" I exclaimed, hoping he didn't have some karmic ancient power over the weather
King Kassavas
. He could rain-dance after my honeymoon!"My plants," he said, pointing to some rather parched leaves through the back window, "my plants are dying. It has usually rained by now but we haven't had rain yet this season."
Looking out past the shack he had emerged from, which I'm guessing was his home, and onto the ocean I (in my ignorance) frowned. "You've got a whole ocean right there. Why don't you just use the water from there?"
Hubbie and David guffawed at my suggestion. "No, no! The salt in the seawater just makes it worse. We need rain!" I guess that made sense and I should have figured that out myself but by then I was done with his pleadings for the heavens to open in the middle of my vacation and so tried to distract him by pawing some of his merchandise.
"Everything is hand made from local wood," he told us. "Most of these things I make myself and some of the things, like the masks, I have a local artist make and I sell it for them. Everything is priced U.S. Dollars." Of course everything is priced U.S. dollars. As we had heard, shop owners would purposely leave the dollar symbol off price-tags so that they could interchange between Belizean and U.S. dollars depending on how they sized-up your net-worth and how good of a negotiator you were.
There were some lovely items but it was only day two of our vacation and too early to commit to any souvenirs yet. So we said goodbye to David, promising to come back later in the week and (stupidly) wishing him rain for his plants.
It was about 3 o'clock as we reached the center of town and the local school was just letting out. Kids in yellow and brown school uniforms, a left-over from British Colonial rule, spilled-out onto the main street, carrying books and riding bikes. (I later learned that most families are too poor to purchase backpacks for their children and so there is a local organization that asks tourists to buy, leave-behind, or ship-back a backpack for donation to a local school child. I need to look them up.)
We followed the sound of drum beats, thinking we were heading in the direction of the much-recommended Garifuna drumming center, but instead found the school building itself. A two-story, yellow breeze-block building standing in the middle of a dry and barren plot of land, it looked dead on the outside but sounded alive on the inside with music from the school band.
The Garifuna childrens' big, white eyes stared at us curiously as we cycled slowly past, soaking up the joyful, untainted atmosphere of smiling children rushing home to play. Some of them were on bikes too and we followed them through a shortcut in the brush and back to the main road.
One little boy, obviously from a fairly well-to-do family since he had a backpack and a bike, was pedaling particularly hard because an older boy had hitched a ride on his handlebars. As I assessed whether to pass him on my chick-bike, his backpack opened up and his school books fell onto the floor. I was forced to stop and watch as he got off to pick them up, huffing and puffing with their weight.
"Those look really heavy!" I said, smiling to show I was a friendly stranger.
"Yes," he agreed earnestly and eyeing me with caution.
He seemed to be waiting for more. "Do you like school?"
He got back on his bike before he answered, presumably to make a quick getaway from the nosey white woman. "Yes, I do."
"Are you a good student?"
"Yes." He was smiling proudly as he said this.
His friend jumped back on the handlebars, a clear sign it was time to move on. "Good for you." He smiled and rode off, leaving me to hoof-it across the dirt shortcut and back onto the road, catching up with Hubbie who was no doubt rolling his eyes at my feeble attempt to 'connect' with the local kids.
I have been to several developing nations at this point in my life now and nothing succeeds in touching me more than the children living in these places. My Westernized mind-set automatically equates poverty with misery and I always feel firmly put in my place when I see the happy, smiling, faces of children living uncomplicated and carefree lives. I am reminded how little we humans really need to thrive and of how Western culture can invade the innocence of childhood.
While mothers and their kids in the U.S. are right now at loggerheads over shooting pimps and hoes on their PlayStation II vs. doing homework, Belizean children don't even have a room of their own, electricity, or running water, let alone a TV set, a game console, or a laptop computer. The world of blogs, MySpace, YouTube, iPods, cell phones, American Idol, Paris Hilton, 50-Cent, Brangelina, and other pop-culture icons that are close to the heart of American kids, is completely alien to them. Yet, they seem to be doing just fine: enjoying climbing trees with their siblings and friends, frying bugs with mirrors, playing tag, and fishing in the ocean.
Contrast this with some of my trips back to England where, when traveling on the tube in the afternoon, I have winced at the every-other-word cussing and generally aggressive, rude, and negative 'eff-the-world' discourse of the London school kid. It's not that I'm a conservative prude - far from it. It's not the cussing itself, or that it's inappropriate for kids (which it should be). What bothers me is the fact that these kids already seem so angry with the world, as if they've already seen, heard, and taken everything worth having and that everything that remains is boring, stupid, and against them. I believe in childhood wonderment and although I'm sure they'd appreciate a warm shower and a cold coke from the fridge, it's this I've seen in the eyes of children in rural Belize, Jamaica, Kenya, Turkey, and Egypt. There's something to be said for not being subjected on a minute-by-minute basis to all that the western world throws out at you.
But I stray from travelogue to social commentary...
If you're looking for interesting arts-and-crafts shops, tacky souvenir stands, bars that serve fruity drinks with umbrellas, and gourmet restaurants with views across the Caribbean at sunset, let me tell you now: don't come to Hopkins. There are barely any stores to sustain the locals, let alone a shopaholic westerner. The town's only two Supermarkets are owned by Chinese families and have only been in existence for a little over a year. Aside from David's Woodcraft, there are a couple of small craft spots in the front of people's homes and restaurants (other than King Cassavas bar) looked dubious in the cleanliness department, their menus geared toward cafeteria food, Belize-style. This is not London, Paris, Rome, or even Looneyville, Texas (yes the place really exists). What Hopkins is, however, is a great way to glimpse what life is like for regular Belizeans.
(You can see the full range of Hopkins' commercialism here: http://www.cometohopkins.com/other.html - amusing that the town where most people don't have running water actually has its own website. Another one of those crazy realities of the modern world.)
All this made it even odder that, when we decided to stop into a cute-looking gift-shop called Gifts from the Sea, we interrupted a white couple from Citrus Heights, eating their dinner.
Herve and Kathy Cormier retired to Hopkins five years ago. They had no prior connections with Hopkins or Belize but, after much research, found it was one of the few safe but inexpensive places left for them to retire to where they could live-out their dream of having a home overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Indeed, at the back of their shop were two doors which opened right out onto the beach and a palm tree framed view of the ocean.
After realizing our connection (we live in Fair Oaks but their home in Citrus Heights had been just streets away from us) they offered us a glass of home-made Coconut Wine (delicious!) and sat us down at their table for a chat.
What was truly intriguing about Herve and Kathy was that they weren't the typical road-warriors or nomads one would normally expect to see immigrating to a developing nation. Probably in their late sixties (although I was too polite to ask), they seemed like they'd had a fairly normal and uneventful life in California, bringing up two children, and holding down steady jobs. In her oversized white t-shirt-dress, flip-flops, and with her frizzy bleach-blond hair, Kathy looked like the kind of woman you would expect to see at the check stand in Target, not behind one in Belize. Since moving to Hopkins, however, they had not returned once to the U.S. Despite the huge change in climate and lifestyle, it seemed they didn't miss a thing. Their bold move awakened my own sense of wanderlust yet, at the same time, made me realize that the spirit of adventure isn't reserved only for those of us under 50.
We also met Ben, a young Mayan man (probably in his late teens or early twenties) who rented a room from them.
Ben had a round baby face, a sweet smile, and hidden behind it all, great ambition. He grew up in a traditional Mayan town in Southern Belize, not far from the Guatemalan border. When he was a child, to help his family earn money, he would carry goods on his back across the Belize-Guatemala border like a human mule. While his family had modest ambitions for him, Ben wanted more for himself. When he was too old to go to the local schools he could have dropped-out like many others to work in traditional agricultural jobs in the village, but he got up early every morning to go to school 90 minutes away in the town of Punta Gorda.
When he outgrew the school in Punta Gorda, he realized that he had to move out of his family village and find a job to fund his continuing education. Alone, he camped on the beds of family and friends in Punta Gorda, and then when he couldn't find work there, north in Monkey Town, and finally on up into Hopkins where he met Herve and Kathy. Recognizing the admirable drive and earnest ambitions of this young man, they agreed to try him out for a job in their gift shop. After several weeks, they agreed to give him room and board in exchange for his work at the shop, and profits from any craft items he produced to fund his education.
During his time with the Cormiers Ben has become like a second son. When they all went out fishing on their boat and Herve's hip dislocated, Ben drove the motorboat back to the beach (even though he'd never driven one before) and threw him over his back in a fireman's lift, to get him back into the house. Without instruction of any kind, Ben also built a little tiki-hut slash beach cabana (which now proudly sits on the beach in front of the gift-shop) which looked professionally built to me, although he was very critical, saying that he had learned so much he could definitely do it better next time. Finally, and again without any prior knowledge, skill, or instruction, he hand-channeled a path from the ocean to the beach, and then dug a well to bring running water to the Cormiers.
"How did you know how to do all these things?" I asked him incredulously. "Did you learn some of these skills back in your home village?"
He shook his head. "No, I just have an idea and then I figure it out as I go along," he said with a smile. "I like figuring it out and getting better each time."
Now Ben goes to the local vocational college where he is learning car mechanics, cooking, and hospitality management. I know, odd bedfellows! He told me that he wants to be the Manager of a large resort some day and, when I asked him which one, he indignantly corrected me, saying "No, my own resort. I want to build and run my own resort."
Ben was truly the most inspirational and memorable person I met in Belize. I so admired his 'just do it' self-determination and entrepreneurial spirit in the face of a family and culture that did nothing to nurture or support it. I told him (and truly believe) that he will build his own resort some day and that I look forward to staying there.
