sky and schools

Within a day after I posted last week I received an e-mail from a college buddy I had not heard from in years, a response to the blog from a person I don’t know in Alaska, but who is hoping to move to Placencia next year, and an email from one of my best friends in Portland, whose moniker on this site is FloydMonet. Among other things, he asked me what I like most about Belize.

( I will note at this point that last week, I spent an evening responding to that query as well writing a long missive about the food here, and then it evaporated in cyberspace or in my computer’s innards. It was frustrating after spending a evening on it, I am just now getting back to it. And this one I have created in Word, and will transfer to the site.)

What I like most about Belize is the sky. It is really incredible. We are in the rainy season, which means more clouds than usual, usually bringing rain sometime between midnight and 5 AM. I go up on the roof every night to watch distant lightning, or after my eyes have adjusted, to look up at the milky way, and millions of stars. This morning I woke up at about 5:30 and the sunrise was so spectacular I grabbed my camera and went up on the roof and shot this picture of the sunrise.

Then I looked west, and took this picture of a cloud in the west that was catching the sun.





This evening I took this picture of the sunset.



I know, I know, I’ve posted lots of sunsets and clouds on this site. And the pictures I post, while pretty, don’t really do justice when you consider that I’m only taking a picture of a small slice, although a relatively big one with the lens I’m using, but still a small part of this astonishingly beautiful scene from horizon to horizon.

About the local schools – The schools in Belize are a church-state partnership, which means no one really takes responsibility for the results. The church is either the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church, depending on the local school. But these aren’t schools connected to a local parish, they are connected to the national church in some way. The “state” is the national government.. But it gets worse.

The schools generally sit on land owned by the church. The school buildings are built by the state. The teachers are hired by the church, but are paid by the state. The teachers have to belong to the church, in part because they teach religion in the schools. The state is currently trying to start a commission to review teacher qualifications and get involved in the hiring process, but the Catholic Bishop is very resistant.

I’m not sure if the principal is hired by the church or the state. Our Rotary Club painted all sixteen classrooms in the Seine Bight school this weekend, which how I learned this info. In my discussion with the principal, I asked him if they taught evolution in science, and he replied that they encourage teachers to keep their opinions out of the classroom, which tells me that he is hired by the church.

Here is a picture of the school.

Belize is a third world country, and the primary taxes are a 10% sales tax on most things, business taxes based on gross receipts and duties on imports that can be as much as 34%.
The government struggles to build the infrastructure the country needs, and support a population, many of whom live in poverty, which includes many residents of Seine Bight. There is no such thing as local property taxes, so there is no local financial support that isn’t voluntary.

I say this because the state pays the teacher salaries, but not much else. It is up to the principal and teachers to raise funds for classroom materials. I looked at textbooks in two rooms, both were textbooks about the United States, both dated from the late 70s. The school is concrete, the rooms are boxes without anything to baffle sound, and I am sure are extremely noisy when occupied. The floors are unfinished concrete.

On the other hand, one of our clients is a family from Edmonton, Alberta, a major city in Canada. They have a daughter in the Seine Bight School, and are pleased with the education she received last year, and felt it compared favorably with Edmonton schools in many, though not all, ways.

Keila, our autoCad technician, came up through the Belizean school system, and has done well by it. I will try to remember to relate it on the near future post. And I’ll (re)write about food!

I become a fireman...

Last Sunday I joined the Placencia Fire Department, which will be setting up a substation in my village of Seine Bight. This all sounds impressive, but you may not remember the picture of the fire truck, so here it is again -

This is actually a very practical rig, especially in Placencia village, where a major fire destroyed several businesses and homes several years ago. It was fought with a bucket brigade. This machine can travel on road or beach, basically to get the pump to the water's edge, where it can be set up, and we carry enough hose to go about 200' . That's not far enough where the peninsula is wide. We need some form of a tanker truck, as well as a lot of other equipment. So you may be asking yourself - why doesn't the town have a fire dept?

Well, the issue goes back to Belize being a backwater British colony. Large tracks of land were granted to the English elite when the colony was primarily a source of mahogany. Property taxes were kept very low for these absentee owners, and the primary support for the colony came from import duties. That tax structure remains the same today. The national government is the only taxing authority. I've priced out having my restaurant directory printed in the states, where it can be done much cheaper than here, but when you add the 10% General Sales Tax plus the 34.795% import duty, the playing field levels out. The duties help support the government, and also stimulate manufacturing in the country.

Although there are village councils, they are dependent on the national government for funds. And there aren't many - it is a poor country, and they only support fire departments in the bigger towns. For us, that's Dangriga. It took their truck an hour to get to the big fire here a couple of years ago. That's when the Placencia Rotary Club sprang into action, and formed the VFD, and remains its primary means of support.

Back to last Sunday. We trained, which meant about 6 of us, set up the pump, ran out the hose, and pumped a little water. It was useful to me to learn how it was all supposed to be set up. But it wasn't useful on Monday.

I started home from work at 5 or so, and as I was passing through the village, dodging pedestrians, bicycles, dogs, kids, and the occasional car or truck, I heard someone yell, FIRE! I looked at the source of the holler, and a member of the dept called out that there was a fire about 2 miles north of town. I got through the village as quickly as possible in the described conditions, and headed north - which is the way home. A few minutes later I found a woods fire on both sides of the road - the woods being palms and scrub growth. There were 3 or 4 people fighting it with shovels and a five gallon bucket, and the truck wasn't there. Since I was wearing sandals and shorts - not ideal for fighting fires, I rushed the mile home, changed into jeans and my most protective footwear - sneakers, grabbed the only implement we had, a pitchfork, and headed back. Met the truck, which was trying to find access to the beach. The effort proved futile, the fire was out of range of our hose. Fortunately, on the ocean side of the road there was a lot of standing water because it is the rainy season, and the wind died at about 6:30, so we were able to snuff it out. We thought another crew had snuffed the fire on the lagoon side, but as I headed home at 8 or so, there was still active fire, so I and another guy put out what we could see.

So I joined and trained on Sunday, and fought a fire on Monday. Now I'm working to see if I can locate used equipment in the states that can be shipped. We didn't even have axes or saws to cut down the palms that had fire in them. No Indian pumps. This certainly is a land of opportunity!

We lose a good man..

Those of you following this blog as I relate this adventure may have clicked on the onedayisle blog that I have followed for the last year and a half. It was one of several written by the minister of the First Parish Church of Portland, Maine, Unitarian-Universalist, started when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was an extraordinary man, and a good friend. He was a remarkable combination of high intellect, humor and playfulness, and emotional presence. He had a wonderful vision of what the church could be in the life of Portland, and had he remained healthy, I suspect it would have come about.

But the cancer took him. He returned to his roots in the west earlier this summer, and on Monday I received an e-mail that he had passed away last Sunday morning. It was a shock - he had remained so positive about his prognosis, and you don't want to believe that someone who had as much life in him as Tim did could go before he had finished doing what he wanted to do.

I should note that he came up with the name for this blog. I wanted to use saltydog, but it was taken, or saltydogchronicles, but that's been done, and it is a bit of his humor that brought out saltydogtales. Thanks Tim, wherever you are!

Feet X 2 + $ X2

A few random thoughts and observations....

Belize is the former British Honduras, but little remains of that culture, like the metric system, which is not used here. I suspect because of the preponderance of Canadians temperatures are referred to in Celsius rather than Farenheit at least in conversations I've been in. But I'm in the construction business, among others, and measurements are in feet and inches.

And speaking of feet, for many years I have taken off my shoes in my office and been in my stocking feet. Now that I wear sandles all day, I take them off as well, and work barefoot. Must say I really like it. My feet are getting tougher, so walking in the driveway the pebbles are barely noticable. The most prominent barefoot person in the village is the owner of Wassen's Store, which sells groceries, housewares etc etc as described in the last posting. He's also the president of our Rotary Club. I have never seen him with shoes on. There seem to be no rules about being barefoot or shirtless in stores, restaurants or anywhere else. It does surprise me to see so many Creoles wearing sneakers or boots. Of couse many are barefoot, as well. Most ex-pats seem to wear flip flops. Although I shower every morning, I think I'm going to have to soak my feet at some point to truly clean them.

The exchange rate between Belize money and US is 2 to 1, 2 Belize dollars to 1 USD. Belize does not have a $1 bill, instead having a $1 coin that is brass in color and is an octogon. They also have pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half dollars. That said, you rarely see pennies, dimes or half dollars. I say this based on some experience, because I have to process the receipts of the butane business and the bus line, so a lot of currency passes through my hands. People have so little use for pennies that storekeepers rarely give them in change - they round off to a nickel. Change in my pockets illustrates this - I have 6 $1 coins, 3 quarters, 23 nickles and 3 pennies. Belize has $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills in regular circulation. All the money has the queen on it. The paper currency has lots of security features to prevent counterfeiting, but on the other hand, it is made from a soft paper and I think it deteriorates quickly. Tomorrow morning I'll deposit about $3000 BZD and I'm sure several bills will be pulled and taken out of circulation. The bank will take US dollars as well, but if they are ripped or damaged, the bank won't accept them. So I guess they remain in circulation like musical chairs - at some point it is so worn out it can't be used by the last person who gets it. US bills are in circulation here, but coins are not accepted. It is easy for folks who use US currency to visit here because it is so easy to calculate the local cost if you have a pocket full of USD. Other Central American countries are a whole different ballgame.

In fact, Belize is very easy to visit for English speakers, because English is the official language is is spoken my most people. That said, Spanish is also widely known and spoken, so Spanish speakers would have it easy too.

Well, so much for feet and money. Time for bed.