Just Another Week in Belize

Adventure of the week: Cave Tubing...

Highlights of this adventure were spotting hundreds of butterflies (my new obsession), eating termites (they taste like minty carrots), discovering a bat cave with thousands of bats, floating through pitch black caves, and cliff jumping off some rocks into crystal blue water within a cavern littered with Mayan pottery.

My BBF (Belize Best Friend) Maren!

One of our service projects is to help a nearby village called Succotz attract more tourists. The people there live in extreme poverty and yet they are located right next to the 2nd largest tourist attraction in Belize, the Xunantunich Mayan Ruins. Our team is helping them by creating an online tourist information page full of info about all the little businesses in Succotz and the neat little things they do. We've been going door-to-door finding little shops like the one below, collecting information on them, and putting them into a database. One of the perks is that we've gotten to name some streets for them! (My suggestion was Palm Tree Lane, so we'll see if I can persuade them to use that one).

Other service projects that I worked on this week included: continuing construction on the orphanage (it's coming along so well!), tutoring locals on how to use a computer so that they can find jobs, helping with construction in a local hospital laboratory, and starring in a skit about self-esteem in front of a hundred children!I also got to help at the Belize Botanical Gardens by making educational games to give to little children who go there for field trips.

The gardens were full of thousands of beautiful native plants from all across Belize

The Black Orchid: Belize's national flower

Our country director's brother John came for a visit, so he decided to help us out for the day.

For our team member McKenzie's birthday we worked hard all morning and afternoon and then went tubing down a river, swung off of a fun rope swing, and had a delicious BBQ at a local's house before ending the night with dancing and cake!

We found a crazy bat-moth in the bathroom that sent all of us girls screaming for our lives!

In honor of the new Harry Potter movie I decided to post a picture of the shrieking shack that we walk past every day on our way to go running at the park.

And you can't forget its guard dog...Lord Voldemort himself!!!!

(It's actually a girl so we nicknamed her Voldemama).

Between my running schedule, 40 hr working weeks, and living with a house full of adventuresome party animals, I can honestly say that I pack more into a week in Belize than many people would pack into an entire month! And I'm loving every second of it!

I LOVE MY LIFE!!!!

Hey everyone! I apologize for making you wait in suspense for so long to get a blog post outta me but I promise to make this well worth your wait! I've been in Belize for 2 weeks now and I've been working and playing so hard that I'm finally exhausted enough to stop and write a post. This trip has already been an experience of a lifetime for me, and I still have a month left! Belize is a small country in Central America with a population of 300,000 people. I'm staying in a town called San Ignacio, which is just a few miles away from the Guatemala border. The people here are extremely friendly and most of them speak English. Belize is absolutely beautiful (as you can see from the picture above of me running on a dirt road through the jungle). I'm here for a total of 6 weeks working with the humanitarian group called HELP International, which is an amazing nonprofit organization stationed out of Provo, Utah. When I arrived I didn't quite know what to expect, but everything is so much more amazing than I ever could have imagined! I'm staying in a house full of fun, down to earth college kids who love serving others and going on lots of adventures. It only took a few hours of getting to know them for me to realize that they were going to be lifelong friends.

(Team Belize from the rooftop of our house)

The day after I arrived was a Saturday and they let me join in on an adventure like none I've ever experienced before. We began by hiking deep into the jungle while crossing the river several times. We eventually made it to the opening of a cave that the Mayan

s considered their portal to the underworld. A guide lead us through the cave as we swam through pools of crystal clear water, crawled through crevices, and climbed up waterfalls and boulders until we reached the ancient sacrificial area. As we gazed through the cavern we saw hundreds of clay pots and several skulls. But deep within the catacombs of the cave was the eeriest thing of all...an entire female skeleton still fully intact and completely untouched since she was sacrificed over a thousand years!

When Monday rolled around I was eager to get to work, and boy did they work us hard! First, we built an adobe stove at a family's home whose only income is selling tortillas. The people there make them over a little fire that fills their lungs and homes with smoke and destroys their tin roofs. The new stove is much more efficient, has large, clean surfaces to cook on, and the smoke is channeled away from the house through a pipe. The family we helped had three adorable little girls that we got to play with all day and and take to get candy.

We then moved on to an orphanage that we're helping to build, which is an engineering marvel! They make these structures out of dirt, concrete, recycled tires, sand bags. The thick walls make them extremely durable (can last hundreds of years) and keep them nice and cool inside. The entire structure is made at with any costs at all. As a student who aspires to become a structural engineer designing energy-efficient/eco-friendly homes, you can imagine how fascinated I was by these buildings!

During construction (above) What it will look like after (below)

One morning our country director came to me and said, "we're building a chicken coop today but we don't have any plans drawn up to build it with, just a how-to video on Youtube." The video was very vague and I had to do a few calculations in order to draw it all up, but I loved every second of drafting the plans. The best part came afterward when I got to go to the site, sit back, and tell all the boys how to put it together! Another girl who came with me asked me if this is what I'll get to do as an engineer because if it is then she wants to sign up, too!

I have some great news for everyone...Paradise truly does exist! And we found it!!! When the weekend rolled around it was time to start playing again. A large group of us headed down to the coast where we took the water taxi out to this place...

an exotic little island called Caye Caulker. Saturday we went on an all day snorkling tour. we got to enjoy an entire day on a sail boat and took three stops along the way to get out and snorkel. the second stop: shark ray alley! and yes, Belize it or not we swam with

sharks and string rays. But I have to admit something...they were only nurse sharks. which means they are bottom feeders so they weren't tempted to eat us. but it was

still pretty crazy. our guide caught some of the sharks and stingrays and let us pet them. It was one of the coolest things I've ever done! On our last stop we saw turtles, eels, an a bunch of gorgeous fish. This is a video of some things we saw as we swam back from the reef. It gives you a pretty good idea as to why Belize is said to have some of the best scuba diving/snorkeling in the World.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U42VGliBJM

Every day I have several moments where I stop and look around and think, "Am I really here right now?" This experience is so amazing that I can't 'Belize' it's actually happening to me! All I can say over and over again is that I LOVE MY LIFE!!!