First Wave is here in Belize!

  

Volunteer Post: Brad

Greetings from Belize or should I say “Wata gaain?”

 I’m Brad, one of the volunteers in the first wave for Belize 2013 and we all want to share with you what has happened these first 2 days here in this beautiful country. After arriving at the airport we were greeted by our Country Coordinators Kyle and Kristina, then we all hopped in a taxi and learned some sweet Belizian Kriol. We got to the bus station to take our 2 hour bus ride to San Ignacio, a small but busy city near the border of Belize and Guatemala.

The city is pretty awesome. It’s a hustle and bustle and people are out everywhere just enjoying life. Our first full day here we got to go help out at an elementary school and paint a wall for them that had seen better days. The kids were curious as to what was going on and kept coming by and checking out what we were doing.  With so much paint and kids the inevitable happened and most of the kids walked away with paint smeared hands and uniforms. I don’t know if they didn’t quite get the memo of “Don’t touch” or they were just really curious. Either way we had half Belizian half Smurfian kids running around with blue paint on them.

 

After we had the school lookin fresh with nice shades of blue we got some grub at our local fruit market to make some smoothies. Our power was out so we didn’t get to make them but we still tried to scarf down some fresh fruit and plenty of water because it is HOT!

 

After lunch we did a city-wide scavenger hunt to find and take pictures of different places we should know while being here.  Some more than friendly people were willing to help us out finding the places we needed to check off. 

At the end of the day we enjoyed some relaxation time and got to know our group better by playing some banana grams, I’ll be honest, I was terrible. That has been our experience so far here in Belize and we’re looking forward to finding a lot more things to do and help out.

 

Trellany here jumping in real quick! Today we got to meet with Dave who is a local man with his own seafood shop! But we were surprised that he is actually from Scotland and met his wife here in Belize and lives here now with his kids and grandkids. He was so awesome and full of tons of advice and knowledge about anything we had questions about. He is going to be a great contact to have for future projects because he is well connected and knows everyone and their story here. So overall we left enlightened and even made a new contact for potential partner while we are down here.  Everything here is so great and wonderful and we can’t wait to get started next week digging in deep with more projects.