Kids go to school to learn, all over the world.
This Monday morning is a new week at a local primary school. Some kids, I observe, are smiling while others are not overjoyed, but most children all over the world go to school where they grow up and are introduced to what is necessary and proper to become functioning adults.
Cursory research states that 2/3 of the population of Belize are teens or younger, education is compulsory to 14 years, 70% of the teachers have professional training , a sizable minority of children don’t go past primary school. The best schools are run by the Catholic church who, some say, should never be allowed around kids.
Education opens futures for people, but the future here favors well financed foreigners with MBA’s who take calculated risks, have financing, study trends, and use money to make money.
Poverty, limited finances, and lack of education are all legs of the same creaky stool that keeps people depressed for a lifetime.
These kids, from where this ex teacher sits, look content,are sent to school with backpacks, a clean uniform, and, hopefully, homework done last night before bed.
While school tries its best to civilize them, there is little doubt that parents are still the prime reason behind kid’s early success or failure.
Those kids who succeed here, at this school, will stay in school longer and won’t stay on this island long.
In a world economy, good jobs seem to naturally go to the most skilled.
Sunday is FunDay at Crazy Canuck’s.
Three to seven, the Cover Ups hammer out reggae, Santana, Jimmy Buffett and pop songs from last year and yesteryear. As the band powers up, an investment conference concludes with a drum roll and attendees shut notebooks on establishing money havens, protecting capital, and growing nest eggs.
Reggae is a music of choice in the Caribbean.
When the song is over the lead singer reminds me that singing is spiritual and takes him to a different realm and sometimes he goes into a trance. During a band break he chats up a stunning black girl at the end of the bar and he isn’t looking at her with spiritual eyes.
Reggae has its own sound. It takes a while to understand the words, but that will come.
Places move at their own speed, and, San Pedro Town isn’t going to speed up, just for me.
Reggae and waves compliment each other.
You don’t have to understand what they are saying to enjoy their melody.
There are several water taxis in Ambergris Caye. The Belize Express goes to Caye Caulker and Belize City on a two hour schedule, and Chetumal, Mexico and back once a day.
Inside the enclosed boat we are shaded from intense sun.
We follow the reef as we head north back to San Pedro Town from Caye Caulker. Sea colors are blue, green, with white crested breaking waves to our left.
When you see a moving boat coming towards you, you look at it with relief.
Looking at stillness too long changes things between your ears.
“She likes details,” Bruce Cooper says of his wife.
Their gallery, in a rented shop on main street in Caye Caulker, presents her art. She paints and he runs the business end of their collaboration.
“We sell original art, prints, and small stocking stuffers, ” Bruce tells me as we talk about New Orleans, the proliferation of guest houses on this island, the fact that his business is for sale due to aggressive web marketing by competing worldwide tourist destinations.
“We are losing 3% of our visitors a year,” he tells me. “I have been working since I was seven years old. I want to retire and go fishing.”
Bruce walks with a swollen foot brought on by diabetes.
I slip my purchase into my cargo pants as he makes a sale to a lady that has already bought two prints earlier in the day.
Selling art in a wood shack in the Caribbean sea, with a breeze rustling simple curtains hung on shuttered windows, seems better than cooking your brains out on a boat in bumpy water with a plastic bag full of stinking cut bait waiting to go on your hooks.
Art and business can co-exist.
It looks to me like Bruce’s work is as close to fishing as he is going to get in this lifetime.
A few blocks from the water taxi pier, Aunties has a Trip Adviser sticker on the front window.
A little Chinese lady behind the window, in an apron, manages customers, makes change, keeps the kitchen help on track. The menu is simple, cheap, good food any day of the week.
Stewed chicken with rice and beans, potato salad and a drink is $10 Belizean or $ $5.00 U.S. The chicken falls off the bones and rice and beans is tasty. Fruit punch is better in the heat than beer.
I eat lunch at one of the picnic tables out side and watch customers.
Auntie makes me feel at home, even if she is a chicken.
Caye Caulker is pronounced “Key Caulker”.
This small island is to the south of Ambergris Caye on the way back to Belize City. The Belize Water Express brings you to the miniscule port in thirty minutes and a round trip ticket from San Pedro Town is $25.00 U.S.
This is a slice of paradise instead of the entire pie. It is smaller, more Caribbean, less developed than San Pedro Town. On a Sunday there are dive shops open and some bustle and you see a mix of young and old in the streets, rasta men and foreign girls hanging bras and beach towels on the front porches of bungalows.
There is inexpensive local food sold on the beach out of old black pots. A row of vendors where the Belize Water express ties up sell conch shells, jewelry, beaded bracelets for wrists and ankles, ironwood sharks and manta rays, pot pipes, and Belize knick knacks. There is a liberal sprinkling of dread locks, golf caps and the coconut smell of sun tan lotion is everywhere.
Older visitors here are retired or getting ready to retire; younger folks are looking for their edge.
This is what San Pedro Town used to be before the northern invasion.
There is no lack of bars in San Pedro Town.
They come and go like tourists. Some are successful over the long run and others collapse under their own weight.
The Legend’s location is good, out in the countryside with an unimpeded view of the barrier reef at the end of a long sandy path.
The new restaurant is going to feature barbecue and Kristi wants a clean bar, a bar ladies can feel safe, a bar without riffraff, a bar with bottom lines and profits. There will be live music and Special’s nights. Residents on the north side, many of whom don’t like to go to the south side, have already got a buzz going.
Whether the town will support another watering hole is up to the drinking Gods, but Kristi has a plan, money, and drive.
Working in the kitchen, we don’t even have to turn on fans to get good ventilation.
The trade winds spin the blades for free.
Painting in Belize today is just a lark. When you have worked with your hands for a living, it is hard to stay away from a construction project, even when you are just a volunteer.
Real estate is booming in San Pedro Town.
Jack says, ” if you own real estate and aren’t keeping it rented you are doing something wrong.”
Chez Caribe is his old wood and concrete two story house. He lives upstairs and rents six small units downstairs, and, if the price is right, his place upstairs. Chez Caribe looks like it should be in a Tennessee Williams play and is shaded by towering coconut trees that drop coconuts with a thud.
Old timers here have seen the town population rise by twenty five percent a year but the total of local residents is only ten thousand. Most of the wealth is brought here by pirates from the north ; bankers, salesmen, investors, double dippers, retirees, businessmen, gold diggers, treasure hunters,divers, real estate developers and land men, con artists, ex-pats.
Tennessee Williams would have found some of his characters here but this place is not conflicted enough for his vision. A closer read for this truth would be Carl Hiasson or Jimmy Buffett where hedonism doesn’t come with a guilty conscience.
I am staying behind door number 4 – the Chez Tortuga Suite. Airbnb is a business model that lets people turn their own house into income and use space that would otherwise be wasted.
It is nice afternoons to lounge on the front porch and wait for coconuts to drop, but you need insect repellent. I felt a mosquito land on my calf yesterday and once he filled up he could barely get back into the air.
If coconuts hit you on the head they will part your hair.
Living in paradise comes with costs.
The ocean is a grocery store.
At the end of piers, the tips of jutting land, on bridges or banks, in small boats and large, men shop for dinner.
Early today three men are casting from the end of a pier at sunrise. They have been up all night and one lifts the top off a five gallon paint bucket and shows me his catch – six red snapper.
” You take them to a restaurant, ” he says, ” and they will cook them up for you. “.
They cast their lines out thirty feet and weights carry the baited hooks to the bottom. When the line pulls taut they wait. Sometimes you have a bucket of fish in half an hour; other times it takes all night and a pack of cigarettes to fill your cart.
” Captain Shark’s is the place to get a pole, ” the talkative one tells me.
This morning I find bait and tackle at Captain Shark’s across from Maya Air next to the Hyperbaric Chamber. The store has fishing gear but also boating and diving items. It costs fifty Belizian to walk out with twenty pound test line, extra weights and hooks, a bag of frozen sardines for bait, and a Yo-Yo, a gadget used to hand cast and retrieve your line without tangles.
It will be a sad day when they ask for a license to fish from the pier.
It is a crime to lock the grocery when you have hungry men.
At the end of the pier it is quiet.
A few birds face the wind and move reluctantly.
It will be hot this afternoon, humid, and the clouds will go away till night when the winds blow them back, like un-anchored sailboats.
Early mornings are a good time to be about when people are asleep and dreams are still in their beds.
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