Day 8: The night before, in addition to the new volunteers, one of the two main investors of the Better in Belize project, Looey, arrived with his good friend Geoffry and his two sisters Candy and April. Looey and his sisters are from Canada like Jam, and Geoffry is from Barbados. Looey is a real estate agent, and is the head of the Belize division of Remax, the largest real estate company in Belize. It's nice to know that the person in that position is so eco-conscious. If you want to buy some property down here (it's pretty inexpensive), or even better-a lot on the eco-village, go to the Belize Property Center website.
Looey arrived with a lot of things he wanted to get done on the eco-village, and we were ready for our first day of real work. Unfortunately, it was also the first day of real rain. All the volunteers went down to the lower milpa with our machetes and started clearing all the plants that weren't supposed to be there, leaving the banana trees, corn, breadnut, macal, pineapple, papaya, almond, cashew, chili, obel, yuca, mango, lemon, orange, avocado, and grapefruit trees. After lunch, Alan, Alyssa, and Jam went back down to the lower milpa and started gathering materials to make a little shelter for people working on the milpa. We chopped down huge cohune palms for the roof thatches, and give and take trees for the posts. Both are types of palm trees. The cohune produces cohune nuts, which are used for their oil. The give and take tree grows tall and straight, and the trunk is covered in sharp, somewhat poisonous spikes, which we had to strip off before using them for posts. In the process, Alan learned the true meaning of the name "give and take" tree. While stripping the spikes, he pricked his finger pretty bad on one. Luckily, Jam knew that the reason they are called give and take trees is that although they can "give" you a pretty nasty prick that will hurt for days, you can also "take" the remedy to the poison out of the top part of the tree where the palms come out. Since we had chopped the tree down, we found the remedy, pink fuzzy stuff, and Alan rubbed his cut on it and the pain subsided almost immediately!
That night after coming home from the jungle, we all had a lot of fun drumming and dancing (Geoffry is quite an excellent drummer, and Jam busted out his flute collection and Vietnamese mouth harp). Later, Jam treated us all with some fire spinning, both staff and poi, and Geoffry used his lighter fluid to blow fire! Later, Mathias wowed us with his juggling skills, and Geoffry was doing sword dancing and generally being his crazy self. Fun night.
Pictures from Day 8
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