a long over due blog entry.

Well as i suspected, i would be pretty horrible at updating this thing. So i will try my darndest to remember to update, but I'm better at responding to emails.

Ne ways here is a recap of the last month. . .

We arrived in Belize and after two weeks of JVI orientation in Cleveland Ohio began Phase 2 orientation in Belize. Which consisted of one week in Belize City, and two weeks in Punta Gorda Town Belize. Phase two (Belize City) was pretty chill, we hung out got to know our new community mates went to the beach, went on a short retreat to Banana Bank, rode horses, shared our life stories had some good laughs and some deep conversations. All the makings of real bonding lol. Then the four of us (pat, me, bobby, and Susannah) traveled down to Punta Gorda on a freezing cold air conditioned bus. After freezing our way down the Belisean coast we arrived in PG and where pat and i were introduced to our house. Our house, as i have told some of you already is amazing and shitty all at the same time. But its shitty aspects become endearing after about a night or two. We have a veranda which over looks the Caribbean sea, on which we have about two hammocks and four or five chairs. We have a bamboo bar in our kitchen, and instead of a garbage disposal we just throw all our compost out the window right in front of our porch. Its pretty sweet. Unfortunately our house is also a bagillion years old and made of wood, so the paint is completely worn off and our roof is completely rusted. This leads to most of our walls having direct pathways to the outside world via rotted sections of the wall. Nothing major but at night i can see how the millions of mosquitoes make their way into my bed. (I'm covered, by the way, in bites from foreign insects and such) We have a cockroach problem, but thankfully all the rats decided to leave while bobby and Susannah were getting us in Belize City, so there is no need for the traps we have strategically placed around the house. All in all our house is amazing and despite its poor condition i believe it will be an amazing place to reside for the next two years!

Phase 2 PG
I spent my first few nights in PG at a home stay with a Mayan/Creole family. The mom Mrs. Chaverria is a teacher at the school i will be teaching at and she was most hospitable, fixing me larger than life meals and making me feel more than comfortable and at home. She and her family took me to nim li punit (i def spelt that wrong), a Mayan ruin, where i saw an ancient ball court and some of the biggest stilas recovered in Belize. IT was pretty amazing, especially because i could recall a lot of the information i had learned in my Pre Colombian Art class and apply it to all i was seeing. On the way home from nim li punit, which means big hat in K'equchi ( the local Mayan language), we stopped at Mrs. Chav's aunts house. She lives in the village of Indian Village and was all prepared to cook us a meal, but the bus arrived to quickly and we had to make a quick exit in order to make it back to PG before dark. It was a great day!

After returning home from my home stay the Belize City volunteers arrived to PG for the beginning of Phase 2 week three. We ran a summer camp at the local parish, St. Peter Claver, and had a blast doing arts and crafts, sports, and games with the local primary school kids. At the end of the week we had an Olympics which they kids enjoyed a lot! It was a lot of fun for me especially because i will mainly be working with high school kids and this was a chance for me to meet the younger kids in the community, who come over our house a lot. I was also able to bring back some of my arts and crafts skills from the After School work I did Junior year of college.

At the end of the week we went to Baranco, a Garifina village, about an hour away. We were supposed to sleep in the Garifina temple, where supposidly spirits had been brought back from the dead. But thankfully our guide Kevin gave us his aunts house who was spending the summer in Belize City. I don't think i would have been able to sleep one wink in a Garifina temple. I should back track and explain Garifina. The Garifina people were slaves who escaped from one of the many slave ships traveling between the Caribbean and Africa in the 1800's. This specific group of people are spread out among the pacific coast of Central America and populate most of Belize as well as the Bay Islands of Honduras, the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua and most of the Caribbean parts of Guatemala, including Livingston. They have their own language and culture and traditions. We got the whole history from Kevin a teacher at the local school who has lived in Baranco his whole life. There are currently only about 100 people living in Baranco, which is down from the older counts of about 600. Most people move out to find jobs and live in the larger cities (or as i call them towns) like PG. It was a great way to spend our last weekend together as a community of 8 before the Belize City volunteers moved back to their home.

Last week was my first experience at my new job. It was orientation at Toledo Community College, which is a high school covering grades 9-12. I will the be the new Guidance Counselor at TCC this year. I will be teaching a course on Career Ed. as well as a Counseling course which covers every thing from self esteem to time management to sexual education. In all i will be teaching 13 separate classes per week and doing one on one counseling to students in need. I will also have to be responsible for one extra curricular activity, last years volunteer was the softball coach. (eek idk if that's really my thing) but i don't really have a choice on what i get to do, so we'll see how it goes! There was alot of drama at TCC last week but that's a different story for another day. So tomorrow if my first real day of work with students and the whole nine yards i'm a little nervous but am pretty hopeful i'll be able to handle everything.


Well that was the past 3ish weeks in a nut shell. A lot more happened, such as jumping into pools of clean water and hiking cerro hill and 530 am runs, but those are also other stories for other days. I'll try to keep this thing updated a little better over the next two years but i cant promise anything. While i keep spilling my guts on this blog, i would love to hear about everyone's lives so send me an email emweiss1@gmail.com or snail mail letters are always fun my address is
St. Peter Claver Parish
c/o Emily Weiss
PO Box 25
Punta Gorda, Belize Central America

That's all for now Keep smiling and keep loving

Em