Day 2: What a day! Our first day on the site was spent with Jam, who took us around showing us everything. He showed us the construction site, a beautiful house on stilts designed by Jam and modeled according to sacred geometry. This will be the first house on the property. He showed us a number of Mayan mounds that need excavating, as well as three of the caves that, when explored, are sure to be filled with ancient Mayan artifacts, mostly pottery. We saw the milpa (farm plot) which is currently growing bananas and plantains, and our first task will be planting more fruit trees of a wide variety on the milpa. A big problem for Belize is slash-and-burn farming, where entire hillsides of rain forest are cut down and burned by uneducated locals in order to grow a year's worth of crops that use up the soil's nutrients and erode by water, becoming useless and therefore abandoned. The eco-village we're helping to create is completely organic and the milpas are refertilized in a way that makes them indefinitely sustainable.
Throughout the day Jam taught us a ton about the medicinal properties of the local trees and plants. We have pictures of each, but unfortunately the internet connection here at the library is too slow to load them. We'll add them soon with captions.
We hiked around the property for a while, howling back at the howler monkeys, and gathering calcite and rhodochrosite crystals from the newly forged roads on the property. Jam also took us on a little excursion across the river to a beautiful hidden waterfall, part of the Pine Forest Nature Reserve. The water flows down from the Mayan mountains so it's so clean it's almost drinkable. How refreshing that was!
It's the rainy season now, which really only means that throughout the day you get sporadic showers. It's been mostly sunny though, and we're already quite crispified. It's hot and humid, but not uncomfortably so, and the mosquitoes are really not as much of a problem as we anticipated, although sweet blooded Alyssa has already had to deal with a variety of bites. Eating bitter herbs (which go well dissolved in rum) and rubbing copal pods on the skin helps a lot. Copal is one of the most sacred of Mayan plants, and the copal oil is used for ceremonial incense among its many uses.
This was also the first day of the annual 9-day Benque Viejo festival, and there will be fireworks going off each night. Good timing!
Pictures from Day 2
No comments:
Post a Comment