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Published: March 8th 2013
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Me by the Jaguar (AKA our tour guide's bus) Yet almost another week down...it was a busy one! Last weekend, we chartered a boat to Livingston, Guatemala. It's about an hour boat ride from Punta Gorda. When we got to Guatemala, our guide, Ishmael, was waiting for our arrival. We got on another boat and took a two hour ride up the Rio Dulce. The coast of Guatemala was so different than Belize and was super neat to see. We passed many small fishing villages and stopped in a yacht marina-two very different worlds. When we got to land, we took a tractor ride up into the mountains to Finca El Paraiso, the hot springs waterfall. The water was
steaming, as Gretchen would say. We stayed at a place called Casa Rosada, which was a bunch of small bungalows right on the coast. We had a fresh seafood meal prepared for us and had drinks in the hammocks on the dock. The next day we took another long ride to see the Mayan Ruins at Quirigua, one of the three world-recognized Mayan ruins in Guatemala. We had a tour given only in Spanish. Luckily, we had a few people who spoke some Spanish so I think we got the gist
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Finca El Paraiso (hot springs waterfall). The water up top is hot and the water below is cold. of it.
Tuesday we had cultural day to learn about all the different cultures of Belize. It was super fascinating-I had no idea that Belize was such a melting pot. There is a whole lot of history behind the settlement of the area, but that's really not my area of expertise (Perhaps I’ll read more when I have time OR when my internet works for more than two minutes at a time). It was neat to learn more about the culture of our patients. Even within the first week it was clear that there were several separate groups because of their clothing and their dialect but I didn't know anything about their social and cultural background. The Kek'chi Maya make up a large part of our patient population, but there are also the Garifuna, the Myopan Maya, Creole, East Indian and Mennonites. Each one has a really unique culture/ways of making a living. We spent the day touring interesting sites surrounding Punta Gorda, Belize. We saw more Mayan ruins and went caving. Caving was one of the most incredible things I have done. We swam deep into a freshwater cave with just our headlamps to light the way. Our
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Fellow Marquette PA Bethany and I at dinner in Guatemala guide was a tiny little Maya man and one of the first to discover the cave; he has been guiding people in this cave since 1974! I have no descriptive words that could do justice to how beautiful this place was.
We also went to a local home to learn how to make corn tortillas, weave baskets from jipijapa (a rainforest palm) and were served a delicious meal of chicken and jipijapa. To drink we had a tall glass (or several) of juice called Soursop, made from a fruit tree. It was amazing! Apparently it is hard to transport which is why we don’t have the pleasure of Soursop in the US. I also got the opportunity to meet a little animal called a Gibnut. It is essentially a HUGE rodent that barks. It’s adorable. It supposedly has very good meat and when the Queen of England came over to Belize a few years ago she was served Gibnut soup as a welcome. The media of course made a big hullabaloo about the Belizeans serving the Queen a rodent, but apparently she loved it!
I just returned from an overnight mobile clinic. Ten of us climbed into the
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The whole crew at dinner mobile, packed our supplies and headed to a faraway village. We got to our village by 11 or so and set up shop in the community center that doubles as the jail. Luckily, there were no inmates that night J The center was just a large cement building with two tiny lights that worked off of a solar panel. We saw patients all day and at 6:30 at night we gave a presentation to the village kids about “Body Systems”. The kids were so sweet and polite, but also very kid-like. I was surprised; the whole time we have been here we have seen tiny kids doing very big-person jobs. 6 or 7 year old girls carry their younger brothers and sisters everywhere and all the young kids are seen at the river washing the laundry. I saw a 4 year old boy who had cut his finger with a machete the day before and though he got teary eyed, he never screamed or pulled his finger away while I was bandaging it. They seem so calm and serious for their ages, but when they were in a large group the universal nature of adolescence kicked in. They were so
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Getting our drinks to bring out to the dock! Ishmael was our tour guide, our dinner organizer and our bartender... A regular jack of all trades. fun and quite engaged.
We stayed the night in the community center. We slept on foam pads on the cement and in mosquito nets. Our driver, Rudy, made us breakfast in the morning and we headed to another village called Aguacate. It was confirmation day so while we were seeing patients in the tiny health post we could hear the singing from the local church. We finished the day with another home cooked meal from the village health worker: Caldo soup and Cohune Cabbage. The whole lunch was an internal battle: I was quite certain the chickens squawking right outside the dirt floor hut were direct relatives of what I was eating but the level of hospitality that these communities show us is so humbling and touching.
Off to a private island this weekend for snorkeling and fishing and just hanging out. Our guide is boating over some Garifuna drummers for our entertainment. I hope the weather holds out-looks like there might be rain!
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