festival of arts day

hello everyone! it is another more than warm morning in dangriga. yesterday was a great day - we went to the beach for the morning and it was wonderful. we went to the beach that is right behind vals (internet and laundry) by a little park. the water was very clear and we walked out probably 50 yards and were still just wading about up to our knees. it felt really good. i got a hot dog from a stand on the street for lunch and it was very tasty - the traditionally put cooked onions, ketchup, mustard and one other sauce on it, but i got her to just put mustard on mine yesterday since i tried it the authentic way a couple days ago. she thought i was really funny for just wanting mustard.

after lunch i went to tutor Dylan at Christ the King, since his family could not come on monday. he was so sweet! we got to sit upstairs in the shade and with a breeze which was nice, and we read together. he is 8 and has the most trouble reading than any of my other kids so far. i think i will try to go back and work with him every other day or so to see if he can get a little better before i leave. that is what makes two more weeks seem like a very short time. he had a wonderful attitude though and kept insisting that he was having fun with a big grin. so even if i was boring him to tears - he was still kind enough to make me feel good about it :) he also is very good at math, and he showed me some of his math problems after we got done reading.

last night our other tutoring sessions got cancelled, which means we showed up at 4 and the principal ms. young told us that it was the night of festival of arts, so most students and families were preparing for that all evening. (no one really uses calendars here or anything like that, and everyone kind of flies by the seat of their pants...and sometimes half an hour late, which i guess is what makes for the relaxed atmosphere!). anyway, we got to eat a lot of the catered snacks and frozen juice ourselves and took some back with us. ms. young also invited us to the festival of arts.

a big group of students went to the parish hall for the festival, and we stayed for probably an hour. there were dance performance by whole classes, there were poetry readings, songs performed, plays - everything. it was so great! the kids were so cute and you could tell they had worked so hard! we also got to see some of our kids from school.

we are off to make up our reading sessions from last night, hope everyone is doing well and that the rain has stopped maybe!

i will be going to Caye Caulker this weekend, which is where the 2nd largest barrier reef in the world is and we are going to snorkel through it. yes i will wear sunscreen. lots.

love to everyone, hill

my new watch has winnie the pooh all over it

good morning! we are on our way to lay by the beach and read until our tutoring and reading starts this afternoon. monday and tuesday went well. monday we went to Christ the King school and maria and i read a story book to standard one (like 1st/2nd grade aged kids) and they seemed to love it. we were in a little classroom with open windows and two kids in each old wooden desk. it is funny, kids are kind of the same everywhere - you can tell who the class clowns are, and the front row students who want to answer every question, and the quiet ones who pay close attention. when they want to get your attention or answer a question we would ask their hands shoot up in the air and they say "miss! miss!" it is very cute! yesterday we drove to pomona, which is the town about ten minutes inland, and read with families there. my family was stephanie (13), johnathan (11), steven (8), and abby (5) with their mother sharlotte. they were great kids, we read two books and wrote down words from the books and talked about things we remembered or what we didn't understand. abby isn't quite old enough to write well - so she drew pictures of the things she remembered. steven is very meticulous, and got out his ruler to draw lines on the blank paper he could write his words on. stephanie has beautiful handwriting and always remembered lots of words and johnathan is a wonderful artist and remembered lots of details from the book. their mother is very sweet, they live on a farm "in the bush" and the house they live in is the same one their mother was born in which i thought was kind of neat.

at night we have taken to sitting around outside and talking instead of always making the 20 minute trek to the pier at the pelican resort. the air feels so nice at night and it is less stuffy to sit outside while our rooms cool down from the day. we bought some bread and peanut butter monday in an effort to save money on lunch, but needless to say when i pulled the bread out tuesday, there were little spots that had been nibbled away and the other pieces were moldy. i suppose we will stick to eating out for lunch.

they say the rainy season starts like clockwork on june 1st, and the past three days early early in the morning it has rained pretty hard. it is kind of nice because it cools it down and the dust isn't so bad, but it also makes the air more humid and there is not as much wind.

we are off to the beach! and mom and dad don't worry i am wearing sunscreen and have even been taking vitamins every day :)

love to everyone, hill

the coolest thing i've ever done

hi to everyone! this weekend in San Ignacio was amazing! we had so much fun. first of all, our hotel had air conditioned rooms, cable television, a balcony, and a shower with a shower curtain - i felt like i was staying at the ritz. it was so nice to sleep in air conditioning with no bugs! friday night we ate at a place called Cayo Cafe and i had fried shrimp and hummus and a smoothie - it was great! saturday we woke up and had breakfast at the hotel and then our tourguides picked us up for the ATM cave. ATM stands for three mayan words that i've forgotten right now, but i have them written down. anyway, we rode in a van for about an hour - mostly on gravelly roads filled with potholes to the jungle.

a sidenote: traffice in belize is a funny thing. i feel like there are almost no rules to driving. there is no speed limit, people pass one another in two way traffic in very close proximity to oncoming cars, and when there is a narrow road - two passing cars simply keep driving halfway on the road and halfway in the ditch. for instance - as we were driving to the jungle, we were going down a hill and a huge truck carrying lots of huge logs was coming down the opposite side of the hill toward us. neither vehicle slowed down at all - i bet we were six inches away from a log flying through our window! lots of bus/van rides to various destinations tend to feel like rollercoasters here. and we all just kind of look at each other and laugh and hope the driver knows what he's doing.

anyway, once you get to your spot in the jungle, you carry the lunch they packed for you in a styrofoam container and a bottle of water and you hike about an hour through the jungle. we waded across the same river three times to get to the campsite. when we got to the campsite we ate lunch, went to the restroom in a jungle outhouse and fitted our helmets for the cave. the opening of the cave looks like it is out of a movie. i kept thinking the whole time that it wasn't even real - it seems like something at disneyworld maybe. anyway, you dive into a pool of cold water and swim about 20 feet into the entrance of the cave. it is AWESOME. the water is so cold! but it felt wonderful. we were in the cave for three hours, part of the time you are wading at various depths like to your ankles your thighs or your chest, part of the time you are swimming, part of the time bouldering, and part of the time crawling. it was so much fun. and it was cold inside which was even better. our guide's name was gonzo - and he was hilarious. he was very smart, he is mayan, and is a field archaeologist so he was giving us lots of history lessons along the way! as you get deeper in the cave (420 feet below the earth) you take off your shoes and only wear socks. this is where you see the mayan artifacts - there were lots of pots and 14 skeletons/pieces of skeletons. it was really cool. this is getting long so i will stop with the details, but it was a LOT of fun! i will have to tell y'all more about it when i am in person! all in all - it was objectively the most hardcore thing i have ever done. it was a blast. saturday evening we went to Eva's to eat in San Ignacio where i had some amazing quesadillas and an ice cold coke, and then to a little bar across the street to listen to music and watch soccer.

Sunday we went to xuanantunich to see more mayan ruins. these were also incredible, we climbed all the way up them and i took lots of pictures. it was amazing to think people had really been there so long ago and had build such huge structures.

now we are home sweet home in dangriga, where our rooms got cleaned and we got new sheets over the weekend which was really nice! and this morning at about 5 am we had our first rainstorm and it was LOUD - i felt like a little kid peeking out the window at it! i am off to buy a new watch at the grocery store, as mine didn't quite survive the water in the cave.

i hope y'all are doing great! happy memorial day!

lots of love, hill

today i bought a fourth of a watermelon for 1 dollar and ate it by the beach

hi to everyone,

today we had our first tutoring session! i was with keedia and her mother martha, martha has six kids and keedia is her youngest. we read "caps for sale" in the shade by the beach this afternoon and it was wonderful! keedia did a wonderful job of reading and her mother was very eager to help. some of my counterparts has much more rambunctious kids so i got lucky :) tomorrow we are off on our first weekend excursion to San Ignacio, a town in western Belize with mayan ruins and lots of caving. the plan is to do a caving trip where you hike about an hour to the cave, then hike through a river and eventually swim into the cave - so hopefully that works out! it will be great to see a different part of the country. a great thing about working with schools is that everybody gives us snacks, yesterday we got peach juice and mini coconut pies, and today we had chicken wings, breadsticks and punch.

so far the living accomodations have been good - although i did come in the other afternoon to find that my ziploc full of granola bars had been chewed into by a little visitor. i am telling myself it HAD to be a mouse, and could not possibly have been a rat. i was hoping the biology professor would tell me a gecko was the culprit but his exact words were "small mammal." yuck. anyway, the nature valley bars are now zipped in a different bigger suitcase and haven't been bothered.

i will be gone for the weekend so the next post will be sometime monday i think! but things are going well. and mom - there are TONS of hibiscus plants everywhere! giant bushes of them with red blooms. i am taking pictures of everything so y'all can see what it looks like here. it really is beautiful.

goodnight, hill

greetings from belize

hi everyone, i am going to try to keep this up every other day or so while i am in belize for the next four weeks. it is beautiful here. i am here doing a service project with the u of a, and my team is working with family literacy. this is our fourth day here, and we are learning to find the cool spots and the shady spots around Dangriga, the town we are working in. my favorite restaurant so far is King Burger, which has wonderful cheeseburgers and grilled ham and cheese. the best thing they have though is the fresh and very cold watermelon juice and orange juice. the orange is very sweet and the watermelon tastes like you literally just put a straw in a watermelon and sucked out the juice. today we got to take a taxi (that when we got in there was a tv playing the music video for shakira's my hips don't lie) to a little town called pomona, which is about 15 minutes away from dangriga. i got to read to three little boys, edwin who was 12, patrick who was 14, and jonah who was 11. they were wonderful. they all want to be soccer players when they grow up, and they told me i wasn't too boring. tomorrow will be our first day of tutoring at christ the king school in dangriga - this school is right on the ocean, and their uniforms are light blue and navy. ms. young the principal has picked out students that are slower readers for each of us, and mine will be kedia, she's 5 and adorable, and dylan, who is nine and very sweet. i am excited to start working with them. i am definitely getting used to the food, they have lots of great juices and fruits, and today i had rice and beans with beef from the market for lunch. we ate it on a little picnic table by the beach. we have learned to spend as much time on the shore as possible because there is more of a breeze. the people here are very friendly, everyone rides bikes all over the place, or just walks. anyone you pass always says "good morning," "good afternoon," or "goodnight." the man who owns our hotel, the jungle huts, is named mr. usher, he has three little daughters that we get to play with every night, they are really cute too. i had better go so we can walk back for dinner.
love to you all, hill