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Greetings to you from the Barbers in breezy Belize.
This has been a week of settling and observing. I believe that we will have a few more weeks like that before we feel adjusted. We have been using a map to get around and trying to note which way the traffic goes on each of the streets as there are many unmarked, one way streets in Belize City. Some of the streets are becoming familiar to us like Allenby/Raccoon, Northern Highway and Central American. Most of them we are still exploring.
We have started to settle the house but have not decided what to do about shipping our belongings from Iowa because it seems to be very expensive. We have spent some time getting to know the caretakers for the property that we are renting. There is Antonia and her two grown children (Henry and Maria) and Maria has four boys and a daughter. Maria’s children range in age from 13 years old to about 1 ½.
Our kids have lots of fun playing with them even though the little ones speak only Spanish. The palapa is a favorite place to play. It is like a large cabana between our house and the sea. Carlos is the 13 year old and he speaks English quite well; he is a great help to us in translating when it is needed. The kids have invented games and our girls have gone crab hunting with the boys which is quite a site to see.
We have lots of crabs in the yard to choose from and bird-watching has become a favorite evening activity for me. We have a nest of orioles near our bedroom window that make a very good alarm in the morning. We also have a good supply of house geckos that keep the bugs at bay. However, we still have plenty of mosquitoes and sand flies outside when the breeze dies down.
We have been at the boys’ school every day this week except last Tuesday which was Administrators’ Day. We were told that in Belize Administrators take the day off; so we went to Caye Caulker with Pat Schrock. That was a very fun excursion and the kids finally got to go swimming. Pat and I also went to a workshop put on by the Ministry of Education last Monday. In the course of the week, I think I got most of the boys’ names memorized and something about them to help me converse with them. That is very important to me.
