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Published: April 26th 2010
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I arrived in Punta Gorda, Belize thinking I would stay there for a day. it started raining. i was so hungry. it was also Easter Sunday, and the catholic church next to the place i was staying was having a bbq chicken- ass bumpin music- soccer tournament celebration of His ressurection, so I went over and bought a plate of bbq for $5bz and sat with the big huge beautiful chef and ate it. i ended up staying in punta gorda and environs for about a week.
a mindblowingly beautiful cultural mix of creole people, garifuna people, mayan people, spanish speaking people, and people from all over the world who have come here and never left. punta gorda seems like a sleepy little town until you stay for a few days and realize it is actually quite big and full of life. i made a really great friend there who calls himself King and has painted inspiring words all over the outside of his house. we took lots of walks together... through the jungle, around the town, etc... and it is wonderful to walk with someone that everyone seems to know and like cuz then you get to meet a
lot of other peeps too.
So, anyhoo... San Jose Village. well, unlike in El Salvador where most of the indigenous people where scared out of living in thier traditional manner because of government sactioned slaughters and torture, there are many Mayan people living in the trajectory of thier traditional way of life in Belize. there are a bunch of Mayan villages within a few hours bus ride from Punta Gorda, and I went to one of them for a couple nights and days.
There is a very small and unadvertised ecotourism project being run by a collective of people from San Jose and other villages. they give you a place to stay (sometimes with a family but in my case in my own little thatched roof hut) and you eat all of your meals with a family and many people speak English (the national language of Belize) and it is affordable and all the money you pay goes directly to the community. tourism on the whole is strange and sometimes questionable, ive decided, but then again there are certain projects that actually do seem to foster solidarity and cultural exchange rather than consumption and exploitation... and this is
one of them. So this is my plug for the San Jose Ecotourism project. i promised them i´d do it. if you are in Belize, go there!! email me for info.
anyhoo....
the bus on the way to San Jose broke down. there were about 15 of us stranded on the hot hot hot side of the road, I definately the most hopelessly lost out of the bunch. I made friends with the only other person who wasn´t speaking Mopan. Durham. as in North Carolina. He spent much of his childhood in the US and they lived in LA and his brother was a crip and was shot in the head. Durham was super sweet and liked to talk and was headed to San Jose to visit his little baby daughter who lives there with his ex-wife. which answered my wondering of whether creole people and mayan people intermarry much around here. So, me and Durham caught the bus to another village and then walked the 2 hour dirt road to San Jose.
the best parts about San Jose were the meals, which i ate with families there at the village. usually, a little kid would come
to my hut to fetch me for the meal, and he´d lead me up dirt roads to his family´s house. the meals were super simple, a stack of hot tortillas with a little plate of beans, maybe, or eggs. and sweet cofee´water. one or two room wooden houses with thatched roofs. no electricity, little gas flame lanters made ochre light. hammocks. the mama or grandma of the house was usually crouched or seated next to the cooking fire, making tortillas with impressive speed and agility. sometimes she would come and join us at the table, but usually not, a cultural way that was a little hard for me to feel comfortable with... it is interesting and kinda hard, but really beautiful to have a conversation with people who live a life that is so very and vastly and mindblowingly different from your own. makes the world feel very big.
while i was at San Jose i went for a hike in the jungle with Felipe Teck, the ecotourism project coordinator, and his friend Pablo. they swung thier machetes and we trudged about three hours through the buzzing, squawking jungle to Gibnut cave, in which these guys found mayan relics
and cave drawings about 30 years ago. in order to get into the cave, you have to get on your belly and squirm through a claustrophobic but only about 10 foot long tunnel. there are pretty big rooms in the caves, and they are cool and moist and all stalactity. he he.
Felipe Teck also showed me a lot of medicinal plants along the trail. my favorite one was the one that a woman can mash up and make into tea if she is worried about something... for instance, he said, if her husband drinks too much and is an asshole and she is worried about it, she can drink the tea to stop being so worried. hmm, i thought...
that nite, after the hike and dinner with the Pop family, i sat in the doorway of my dark little hut and watched the action at the church across the field, which was holding service that night. this was the baptist church, though in this town of 1,000 people there are SIX churches... baptist, nazarene, catholic, jehova´s witness, pentacostal, and mennonite. weird. anyhoo, the baptist church was happenin that night... loud, clangy, completely out of tune piano and
percussion and scream.singing. They had generator.powered flurourescent lighting, and i could see people filing in and kids running around, people going in from the dark muggy night. from where i was seated i could see in through the door to the pulpit, and i watched and listened as the preacher delivered the baptist service in the Mopan Maya dialect. wow. mixed up world.
when the morning came to take the bus back to punta gorda, one of the buses was still broken down by the side of the road, so the one bus that was running that day was extremely packed. squished up against eachother, everyone smelling like soap and tortillas and body and wood smoke, we bounced and sweaked down dirt roads as the sun rose... and back into punta gorda.
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