Author photo courtesy of Marilyn Dalrymple

Teacher Returns to Town in Belize Where She Turned Twenty One        

            The first time I came to British Honduras, as Belize was called in 1962, I was twenty years old and newly married to an anthropologist.  The airport in Belize (now Belize City), was by the side of a dirt road in the bush. 

            The customs official went through our suitcases item by item, stopping to exclaim over our belongings--Terry’s binoculars and laced boots, my typewriter.  He seemed particularly taken with my flower-printed bras and underpants, holding them up so his co-workers could marvel too.  

            While in Belize City Terry and I stayed at a small guest house, where we slept under mosquito netting and showered under the cistern in a room with rock walls and an open drain in the floor.  Some of the stones were covered with luxuriant black moss, so shiny they glistened.  One day while I was washing my hair, I flicked shampoo on a moss-covered rock and it moved.  They weren’t rocks at all.  They were tarantulas.  I didn’t wash my hair again until we reached Don Owen-Lewis’s house in Machaca Creek.     

            In those days the only way to get to Toledo District was by boat.  The Heron H. hauled cargo, the mail, and passengers to points south, all the way to Puerto Barrios in Guatemala.  Then she turned around and headed back up the coast.  We were barely out of the Belize City harbor when the tail end of a hurricane slammed us.  I spent a miserable night in my bunk, too apathetic to slap at the cockroaches that swarmed over my bare legs.  Terry had paid extra for a cabin, but all it had in it were two stained, naked mattresses--no pillows, no sheets, no mosquito netting, no nothing.     

            In spite of the rough seas, the Heron stopped several times during the night to pick up passengers.  Hurricane Hattie had destroyed a lot of the country the previous year, including the wharf at Monkey River Town.  While the Heron pitched and wallowed, people squatted on pilings--all that was left of the wharf--and handed children and packages to people already on board.  I was surprised nobody got swept away and drowned.        

            By the time Terry and I straggled ashore in Punta Gorda, I had only one desire in life:  I wanted the ground to stop moving.  Don met us in his four-wheel drive Toyota and drove us to his house over a one-lane dirt road with the occasional “passing bay,” a space where a driver could pull off to accommodate a driver coming from the opposite direction.  Don’s official title was Amerindian Development Officer.  He was funny and irreverent and I liked him immediately.  For the next week he made sure we were properly bathed and entertained, and that his housekeeper kept plates of food and fresh fruits in front of us at all times.

The foothills of the Maya Mountains. (photo by A. Terry Rambo)

  “Teacher” and some of her students. Maxiana is in front of me on the right.  (Photo by A. Terry Rambo)

            Terry and I moved into our new house--my first home as a newly-wed--in August, 1962.  While I taught the 3 Rs to every child in the village between the ages of five and fourteen, Terry studied the Kekchi Maya.  He was the first American anthropologist to do so, and I was the first white woman most of the Maya had ever seen.  I lived in that bush house--thatched roof, plank walls, doors made out of saplings tied together with vines, a dirt floor--and cooked over an open fire for the next ten months.  I was living there when I turned twenty one. 

            A religious procession from the Rio Blanco River crossing (no bridge then) into Santa Elena.  The village was mixed Kekchi Maya and Mopan Maya, although the women wore Mopan skirts and blouses because Kekchi skirts were too hard to get. (Photo by A. Terry Rambo)

My neighbors planting corn. (Photo by A. Terry Rambo)

             Fast forward to June, 2005.  The Belize City International Airport looks completely different--bigger, for one thing, and a lot more people.  This time, nobody is  remotely interested in my underwear.  The immigration official notices that my final destination is Punta Gorda--apparently Toledo District still doesn’t draw many tourists. 

            “So,” he says. “You been to PG before?”

            “Forty-two years ago,” I tell him.  “This is the first time I’ve been back.”

            His eyes widen.  He looks barely thirty--he could be my son.  A slow grin crosses his face.  “It going to be different.”

            I grin back. Yup.  The question is, how different?

            I have my answer when I arrive in Punta Gorda:  so different I might have lived in another country.  PG is still a Garifuna town, and the people are still laid back and very friendly.  All the streets are paved, which is a surprise.  The houses used to be unpainted and stand on stilts, so hurricanes wouldn’t carry them out to sea.  Now PG resembles any small coastal town in the Caribbean.   

Downtown Punta Gorda.

An old frame house that used to be on stilts.

   Don and his daughter Francisca, who was born the year after I left, and three of his grandchildren are at the airport to greet me.  Don is seventy-nine now, his hair white as dandelion fluff.  But I would have recognized him as soon as he opened his mouth.  His sense of humor hasn’t changed, and his Limey accent is as strong as ever.  (I would have been back years ago, but I thought Don was dead.  Thank you Belize Hank for suggesting the title of this account and for setting me straight!)                         

            In spite of a drought so severe that the rivers are drying up, the countryside is still green.  Although June is the beginning of rainy season, the sky is a brilliant blue and cloudless.  But what strikes me at once is the bush.  It was a great deal higher and more lush when I last saw it, and empty.  Now houses and little farms dot the landscape and the bush is little more than scrub.   

            I arrive just in time to eat dinner with the archaeological team spending the summer at Don’s.  Their base camp is behind his house in a separate building. 

Don’s house (and dogs and cistern) with the base camp behind it.

The focal point of any house--the kitchen.

Base camp.

Cutting high bush.  (Photo by A. Terry Rambo)

            I’m appalled.  “Are you telling me there’s no high bush left?”  High bush is virgin  rainforest.      

            He’s emphatic:  there is no more high bush in Belize.  (He is later proven wrong by someone using in-your-face, high-definition Google maps.)

            The next morning I wake up to hear Don yelling from the bottom of the stairs:  “Joan!  You have visitors!”    

            It’s 5:30 a.m. Groggily I climb into my clothes and trudge downstairs.  Seated at the head of Don’s table is a stately-looking Maya woman dressed in her Sunday best, her gleaming black hair looped into a figure-eight twist, wearing the heavy, rose-gold earrings that distinguish Maya women from women of any other ethnic group in the country.  Forty-two years ago, Maxiana was one of my students.  Now she’s a grandmother.

Maxiana in 2005.

Miriam.

            Maxiana remembers some English but says she’s too embarrassed to speak it, so Miriam and Don translate.   She has come to formally invite me to visit her house tomorrow, and probably to make sure I’m really here after all these years.  She says she and her two married brothers are the only people left of my former students and their families in Santa Elena.  Like many Maya communities nowadays, it’s a village of old women and children.  A few men still plant corn, but most leave during the week to work on the shrimp farms or at nearby resorts and only come home on weekends.

            Before leaving the States, I wrote Maxiana (thank you rpbelize!) to let her know I was coming.  Miriam wrote back to say her mother had married another of my students, and they’d had nine children.  Three died in infancy, a common-enough occurrence as the Kekchi still prefer to have their children at home.  (Most can’t afford doctors or hospitals.)  When Miriam was three, her father was bitten on the foot by a fer-de-lance, one of the deadliest snakes in the jungle.  He died the same day.     

             After Maxiana and her daughter leave, Don takes me sight-seeing.  He drives from store to store, picking up fresh eggs at one place, “biscuits” at another, and a locally-made snack of very thin, crisp, sweet tortillas at a third.  Two of the stores are owned and run by Kekchi who speak fluent, American-accented English.

An elderly Kekchi couple with one of their grandsons.  Note the knee-length Kekchi skirt.  The traditional skirts are ankle-length.

            When Don and I get back to the house he makes lunch--eggs fried with sliced cherry tomatoes, a traditional Kekchi dish, although they use more chile pepper than he does.  Then he makes us each a milkshake.  This one is juice-bar quality--fresh grapefruit juice, water with dried milk added (dairy products are still almost non-existent in Toledo District), and a ripe (raw, Chuck and cajungal!) plantain.  I have to laugh.  Don doesn’t have a telephone or hot water, but he has a blender. 

            We spend the afternoon reminiscing until the archaeologists come back.  Don’s TV only picks up two channels, both from Guatemala.  To hear the news in English, he listens to the BBC every morning at six.  He blasts me out of bed more than once because he has the volume turned up so high.  

            The next morning Francisca, who spoke Kekchi before she learned English (she also speaks Creole), drives me to Santa Elena to visit Maxiana.  When we approach the village we see the ice cream truck--the Belizean Good Humor Man.  Francisca asks me to buy her a sour sop ice cream cone. It tastes a lot better than the last ice cream I had in Belize, which was made with sweetened condensed milk.

On the road to Santa Elena--the ice cream truck.

Kekchi sales associates.

Santa Elena.

            Maxiana sees us drive in and stands outside her house so we know where to park.  Nearly all the women wear Western clothing except the recent immigrants from Guatemala, who still wear the traditional long blue skirts and don’t want their pictures taken. 

            When Francisca and I enter Maxiana’s house, she offers us seats on upturned plastic buckets (they have obviously replaced the wooden bancos of my day) and serves us sweetened coffee.  I ask her if she knows what has happened to my other students, and she says most of them have moved to San Roman.  Maxiana’s older sister, the woman I considered my best friend in Santa Elena (she taught me most of what I know about cooking over an open fire), is dead.  Maxiana says my house is gone; so is the school where I taught.

Maxiana’s house.  Except for this added-on front room, a typical Maya bush house.

            Then she retires to the kitchen, where she prepares a meal for us. By now we have attracted a horde of Kekchi children who hang around the open doorway to peek at the odd spectacle of a sac li gwink (white woman) and her Kekchi friend, who wears shorts and her hair in a pony tail but speaks their language as well as they do.    

            Maxiana’s oldest daughter arrives with her baby.  In profile, her face looks exactly like the carvings on the ancient Maya temples.

Maxiana’s daughter.

            Finally Maxiana serves lunch, treating me and Francisca the same way her mother would have treated honored guests--by giving us food and watching us eat without eating herself.  Maxiana and her family are obviously very poor, and even though the food is simple--freshly-made tortillas and eggs scrambled with spicy, store-bought Vienna sausages--I have the uncomfortable feeling that I am literally taking food out of her family’s mouth. 

            Afterwards I ask Maxiana if I can photograph her kitchen, which more or less resembles the one I used to have except that her fireplace is molded clay and mine was made out of river rocks.

Maxiana’s kitchen--dirt floor, a couple of bancos, and a comal for cooking tortillas.

Anything out of the ordinary still draws a crowd in Santa Elena.  Nearly all the children wear Western clothing.

Maxiana, Joan, and Miriam.

            I hug Maxiana and Miriam goodbye and promise I’ll be back.   

            Francisca and I stop at the Rio Blanco falls to cool off.  It’s now a National Park, but the rain has been so sparse in recent years that the falls have been reduced to a trickle.  When I lived here, the women bathed in the pool at the bottom of the falls and did our washing downstream.

Francisca at Rio Blanco Falls.

A high diver takes the plunge.

Washing stones--they used to be in the middle of the river.

            I ask Don about driving to San Roman, but he’s not enthusiastic and once I discover how much gas costs, I give up on the idea. 

            The rains start that night.  The electricity goes off while I’m using the bathroom downstairs, and in my haste to reach the flashlight I knock it off the chair and then can’t  find it.  The house is as dark as the inside of a pocket, and I have to feel my way along the wall to the staircase and up to my room.  I keep thinking about the coral snake Don  killed inside the house about a month ago.

            After breakfast he drives me to his farm, which he planted in orange trees.  But he’s leasing it to a Kekchi family because “I’m too old to be climbing ladders to pick oranges.”  He only moved to his present house after Hurricane Iris, which left his grove intact but destroyed his home and the old base camp.

Don’s citrus grove.

Cortes tree, Part I.

Cortes tree, Part II.

            After lunch I do laundry in Don’s toy-sized Guatemalan-made washing machine and hang my clothes outside to dry.  By the time I take them down they’re stiff as potato chips.        

            Since it’s Sunday and the archaeologists aren’t doing anything, we all pile into two cars and drive to see Nim Li Punit, an ancient Maya site nearby.  The ruin isn’t extensive, but it’s been beautifully reconstructed and maintained.  Nobody knows what the ancient Maya called it.  Nim Li Punit is Kekchi for “The Big Hat,” because one of the stelae shows a ruler wearing an elaborate headdress.

“The Big Hat” himself.

The ball court.

A ceiba tree, sacred to the ancient Maya.

            The next day Don drives us to the archaeologists’ site.  It rained again last night, and the site is muddy and thick with hungry sandflies.  At last--two things that haven’t changed:  mud and sandflies!

            It’s just past noon, not particularly good for taking photographs.  The linguist splashes water on a few of the stelae to bring out the details.  Standing next to him, I get goosebumps as he scans a series of glyphs (syllables of speech in iconic form) and translates them:  “This site was built in [the date] and commissioned by [the name of the ruler].”   The team has found two tombs so far, both looted, but they’re confident that once they start exploring they’ll find more.  The bush is still pretty formidable, even though it’s second growth.  Two days later they kill an eight-foot fer-de-lance.

A work crew chopping bush.

 One of the glyphs.

 A looted tomb.

Skiff to Placencia.

Placencia’s main street.

View from the dining room.

            On our return trip the bus isn’t air conditioned, so everybody has the windows open.  Belizeans let you board their busses and boats first, and don’t ask you to pay until you’re halfway to your destination. 

            That night I tell Francisca I want to take her and her family out to dinner so she won’t have to cook--she’s done a lot of running around on my behalf.  (I have already  filled Don’s truck up with gas three times.)  She chooses a local place right off the highway.  It’s family-run, and the owners, a young Creole couple, live behind the restaurant.   

            As we enter, the husband points out a line of army ants around the foundation. He wants to poison them, but he doesn’t want to do it while we eat.  (In the bush, these ants travel in swarms like an invading army and can strip the meat from your bones in a matter of minutes if you’re unlucky enough to be in their way.)  But he’s obviously afraid they’ll get into his house, and halfway through dinner the scent of insecticide floats in on the evening breeze. 

            The special is fresh grouper, served with coleslaw and more fries than I can eat.  The wife, who’s the cook, comes out and questions Francisca--is there something wrong with her fries?  Don’t I like them?  Francisca explains that we had a big lunch in Placencia.  The couple’s two kids go to school with Francisca’s, and the children ignore the grouper and the fries.  Who wants food--cable television has just arrived!  They sit mesmerized, staring at a kung fu movie with subtitles.    

            Don still does a little farming, nothing major.  But the next morning he sets out into the bush with his dogs, where he tracks leaf-cutter ants--known locally as wee-wee ants--back to their nest so he can destroy it before the ants destroy his garden.  He wears  black rubber boots, which the Maya men still wear whenever they work in the bush (to deflect snakebite), and carries his machete barehanded.

Don’s dogs and his boots.

             After lunch we sit around and talk, since this is my last full day in Belize.  Don tells me the noisy birds in the bush that shriek and chatter every morning are chachalacas.  But he mainly wants to talk about the Kekchi.  When outsiders, even anthropologists, talk about the “modern Maya,” they’re primarily interested in “educating” them away from their traditional practice of slash and burn agriculture because it kills the high bush. 

            But Don’s main concern, since his entire family is Kekchi or part Kekchi, is with the people themselves.  It’s a question I never thought to ask when I lived here, but what do you do with an indigenous people whose culture is so at odds with the culture of the modern world?  Do you encourage them to remain quaint curiosities, like the native Americans in this country, or to assimilate and become part of the Belizean melting pot?  And how do you give them a choice if there’s a price tag on education?   

            Don and Francisca drive me to PG the following morning so I can catch the 10 a.m. flight.  I’m sad to leave because I don’t know when I’ll see Don again, and I wish there were some way I could make sure Miriam goes to high school.  But mostly I’m sad because I waited forty-two years to come back.

Copyright 2005 by Joan Fry