Missions – Ray of Sunshine Travel

Buenos! Welcome back to the second installment of Belize blog posts!

I’ll start off with a little bit of background about Belize, since I didn’t really cover much in the first post. It’s an itty-bitty country that shares borders with Guatemala and Mexico; roughly 400,000 people call it home. Belize is unique in that it’s the only mainland country in Central America to have once been part of the British Empire. It was known as British Honduras until the ’70s, and didn’t formally gain independence until the ’80s, though it’s still a part of the Commonwealth. For this reason, English is the official and most widely spoken language here and is taught in schools. However, there are several immigrants from surrounding countries, particularly in more rural areas, so Spanish is much more dominant there. As a small farming community, the village we’re staying at definitely falls into the rural category. One of our host families speaks only Spanish, but in our other family, the dad and the three boys can speak varying amounts of English. I’m really thankful I took three years in high school and that it came back quickly!

Some other interesting facts: currency is the Belizean dollar, which converts to about fifty cents to one US dollar (yay for easy math!). Here’s what it looks like:

One of Belize’s biggest industries is tourism; there are several resorts along the coast, and it’s well known for snorkeling along its beautiful coral reefs. Its government is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, which is a mouthful! Basically they elect a prime minister and a Senate and House of Representatives, but King Charles III holds the title of King of Belize. Unfortunately, corruption in the government and police is pretty widespread; bribes, under-the-table dealings, and illicit favors are pretty common.

Though we’re a ways from the equator, weather is pretty toasty here; highs in the low nineties and humid, and lows in the low seventies to upper sixties. I’m praising God that I finally feel like I’m adjusting; it’s also helped that it’s been cooling down as we move into the rainy season, and we’ve had a lot of nice cool breezes too. We’re technically on Central Time, but Belize doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time, so we’re actually matching Mountain Time right now. It gets light about 5:30 and dark at 6:30.

Okay, back to our time here! Monday morning we walked around the town and invited any kids we saw to Kid’s Club – think a VBS-like program – that we would be putting on later that day. We still had a week before school started, and there’s no church on Mondays, so we took advantage of the time as an outreach opportunity. We chose a lesson and planned it after lunch, then put it on around 2. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures, but it was fun! We played a bunch of games, performed a skit, had some discussion questions, learned a Bible verse, and colored.

While we were prepping for Kid’s Club, we got a text saying that our second host family had returned from vacation and that they were planning on picking us up that afternoon, so MK and I rushed to pack up our stuff after church and bid goodbye to the other girls.

Upon arriving, two very excited little boys came running out of the house and gave us big hugs. We soon met the rest of the family: M, our host dad; L, our host mom; and the boys, J, A, and E. Here’s M with the boys:

And here’s L with MK and A!

This family has been so sweet to us, and we’ve had a lot of laughs with them! The boys are definitely ornery, but they can be really sweet too. We frequently affectionately refer to them as the “chicos locos”!

We were treated to a beautiful sunset, along with some banana bread and coffee.

Our house measures probably about 15 feet by 25 feet. MK and I are fortunate enough to have our own room; we share a full sized bed and have a wardrobe to keep our clothes and belongings in. There’s a kitchen, a dining room, and then one bigger bedroom that the rest of the family shares. The shower and wash area are detached from the house – you can see them in the above photo – and the toilet is a pretty standard pit toilet a significant distance from the house – good from an odor perspective, a little more challenging from a middle-of-the-night-need-to-go perspective! We have clean running water from a spigot attached to the outside of the house, and while we’re a little too far off the main road to be hooked into the main power grid, we have a couple of solar panels that generally allow us to have lights at night, charge our phones, run the washer, etc. – so long as we don’t use too much or have multiple cloudy days in a row! The feature I least expected was wifi, though it seems nearly every home here has it – it’s been such a huge blessing for communicating!

While that first evening was really nice, it unfortunately got challenging pretty quickly. I woke up around midnight to find poor MK getting sick. I spent a good chunk of the next few days helping to take care of her and trying to keep her as comfortable as possible in the unrelenting heat. It was definitely a rough start, but praise God that we’re both feeling nearly 100% again! I think one of the biggest positive outcomes of the whole situation was that we became closer very quickly and more dependent on each other and more vulnerable than we would have otherwise.

The rest of my time those first few days was spent learning how chores were done and watching the boys while M and L ran errands. Dishes are done outside at the sink, since there’s no running water inside the house, and if it’s a cloudy day or nighttime, clothes are washed at the sink too using a good old-fashioned scrub board. We do try to wait for sunny days though so we can use the washer! The machine wrings the clothes out, and then we hang them on the line to dry. Here’s what it looked like after getting back from their vacation!

M has a farm on the property – he’s kind of in between crops at the moment, but he primarily has tomatoes and zucchini. Here’s a couple pictures from around the farm:

Church is usually held five days a week here, with two different services on Sunday, but we took a couple days off as MK was recouping and the family was recovering from vacation. Some of us went Wednesday, but the boys were clearly pooped!

Thursdays church is held at a member’s house; that was the first day we were all able to go as a family, and it was really nice. They served cinnamon rolls afterwards, which me and my sweet tooth really appreciated! M frequently helps with the music, and the boys love to help too.

Friday there’s no church, so we did another Kid’s Club. We had more kids this time, which was fun, but I was pretty pooped afterwards. Thankfully we had a little time to worship as a team and just take a moment to recenter. After returning home, we walked to the store with L and the boys and just enjoyed hanging out.

Saturday morning we were supposed to take a bus into town as a team, but I woke up not feeling great, so I decided to take some much needed rest at home instead. Thankfully I got better pretty quickly thanks to some medication, enough that I was able to go to church that night.

Sunday we had church in the morning, then I helped L with making lunch. The team came over for a bit and we got to have Bible study, then we all walked over to the church and helped the women prepare a bunch of food that was then sold to church and community members. It doesn’t sound like that happens every week, but we’re not really sure what the occasion was! We had a lot of fun helping with empanadas and salbutes though.