Punta Gorda in a Coconut Shell:

FOOD:
As many of you know one of my great loves is food, so I have been checking out the food scene lots since we got here. I absolutely love the dishes; it’s so hard to not eat out all the time. It’s really cheap and even if you eat out it’s not like fast food back home but it is fresh and good home cookin. Rice and beans is a staple here, you pretty much get them with every meal. There is an amazing ice cream shop in town that I have become obsessed with, I make an appearance there at least a couple times a week. The owner just laughs every time I come because I used to go with Trisha and Katie but now I feel no shame in going to get some by myself. We get most of our groceries at the local market that runs on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday mornings. We get lots of fresh fruit (bananas, pineapples, tangerines, apples, plantains), vegetables and fish. We will be eating the fish a lot because it is cheap, quick and easy to make. Our mom’s would be proud though; we are starting to step up to the cooking situation and are actually creating some great dinners. With three of us we all just pick a job in the kitchen and get to work, we even cooked a great brunch for some friends the other day after church.
Some dishes I have tried:
Gibnut: the ‘royal rat’. We actually had this in San Ignacio; the boy who caught it dragged it into the kitchen and showed it to us. It looks like a dog, really big, but also we discovered, delicious! I would have to say the best meat we have had since we got here, extremely tender and juicy!
Amaradelo: we had this in Marian’s restaurant above our apartment. Like every other meat in the world pretty much just tastes like chicken, a little rubbery in texture but still good.
Iguana: on Monday Trisha and I were walking up to our apartment building and heard all the little girls yelling on the roof. They screamed for us to come up and look at the iguanas. We had no idea what was going on so we went there and two iguanas were running around and trying to escape through the holes in the walls. I guess Marian’s husband had picked them up for her to cook and they got out of their bags. It was hilarious watching the little girls freak out about them running around, and watch them squirm as he put them back into their bags. The next night Marian cooked up the iguana and iguana eggs for supper. It was really good and I guess we were lucky to get it because they only get it once year since the iguana is an endangered species.
Plantains: These basically just look like giant bananas but they are another staple of almost every meal. You slice them up and fry them in lots of oil, not too healthy but tasty. Trisha doesn’t like the texture which Katie and I are happy about because she gives hers away every meal.
DRINKS:
Ideal: all the children drink juices in a bag at lunch and bite off the top to open it. Ideal is the main juice that the kids drink and I tried it for the first time the other day for a student’s birthday. It’s too sweet for lots of people, but too sweet isn’tin my vocabulary.
Belikin: This is the local beer and it goes down way too smooth. We aren’t sure if it’s the beer itself that’s so good, or the fact that we usually drink it by the ocean in the hot sun after a day of teaching.
DANCING: since I am a dancer as soon as we got here I wanted to check out the various styles of dance in PG. This is an extremely culturally rich area and great music and dancing is everywhere! We went to a pub on the beach last weekend and one of the locals showed us music videos of “Punta Rock”. This music is typically created with only drums, a conch shell and a singer. We watched the dancing on the videos and it looked like lots of fun and the bartender told us there would be a live Punta Rock concert in town that night. So we headed down there and hit the dance floor with some of the locals. At first it was a little tough to keep up with my partner but I eventually caught on and had a blast! It’s all in the hips and very fast, some of the partner moves are similar to salsa and we had to tell some of the locals that we weren’t comfortable with how ‘close’ the dancing gets at times. They respected that and we all ended up getting the hang of it. I can’t wait to find some Garifuna dancing in town, it’s supposed to be incredible to watch so I am doing what I can to see where I can watch some. I am still working on setting up a dance club here. Clubs are difficult to start because all the students go home for lunch and it’s hard to get things started after school. But, I will do my best, I have a feeling these kids could teach me more about dancing then I could ever teach them!
THE LOCALS: We are still adjusting to life with the locals. For the most part they have been extremely friendly and welcoming to us, but we are starting to become a little more cautious with what their intentions are. It has been an educational experience to be a minority in this place and I am so glad that I decided to these because it is unlike anything I have ever experienced. We are wondering if the locals will adjust to us walking around town or if we will always feel so out of place. We feel though that everyone in the community, especially the teachers have really begun to welcome us into the school. The librarian is doing a volunteer program here with two other people our age and we have gotten pretty close with them; they live right down the street from us.
THE KIDS: Basically the kids here are amazing! They are really well mannered and love to teach me about their language and culture. It’s crazy how excited they get about some of the things that I have done with them like drama games or new songs. When I was doing relay races with them in Phys. Ed. they were laughing so hard that they could barely run. Several kids have a lot of responsibilities at home especially if they are the older siblings and it really shows in how they respect their teacher’s and peers. Every time they say something they start and end it with Miss, which is what they call us here: “Miss, can I borrow a pen Miss?” Pretty funny. They also get attached really quickly to you, leaving letters on my desk or inviting me to outings with their family. It’s crazy some of the things these kids can do. Most of the boys are able to do about three back flips in a row no problem and they are amazing football (soccer) and basketball players. I have had them teaching me some Creole everyday and they are all over that. They love hearing about Canada and sharing information about their culture, they really take a lot of pride in their culture and that’s cool to see in young kids. It’s a mix of lots of different cultures in the classroom including Mayan and Garifina.
TEACHING TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS: Although I absolutely adore the kids here I have had to be strict coming into this practicum. I remember John Poulsen always telling us, “you need to go in like a lion and leave like a lamb”, and it has never proved to be so true. These kids are used to negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement is a brand new concept to them. Since the class sizes are so big (min. 28), and we use more student based activities then these students are used to, we have all experienced some classroom management challenges. After the first couple weeks of teaching here though I have set some routines and rules with a reward system in place and they are responding really well to it. I am so fortunate to be doing this practicum because although it has had some challenging moments I know I will come out a much stronger teacher in the end. I have been implementing drama, movement and group work whenever possible and they are really responding well. One classroom management technique that all three of us have discovered is reading to the kids. I can’t believe how much they love to be read to, as soon as I start they all instantly stop talking and listen.
CREOLE: All of the kids speak Creole, English is their second language but all of their schooling is taught in English. They don’t have any problems understanding me, they describe it as me sounding like when the read from a book, but at time I have a hard time understanding what they are saying. Since Creole is considered broken English it’s not really that hard to understand because it’s fairly similar. Sometimes I have to have some of the locals repeat what they are saying but I generally can tell. I am having my kids teach me a new phrase everyday so that I can hopefully know lots by the end of my four months here. Here’s some of today’s Creole lesson from my student Delbert:
How you doing today?
How you dido?
Good morning.
Maning.
It is hot outside.
I (pronounced ‘e’) hat outside.
It’s a pretty day today.
Da wa pretty day tode.
MY THOUGHTS: I am so happy that I decided to do my final practicum here in Belize. I feel like I am getting so much out of this experience not only as a teacher but as a person. It’s so important to see the way that different people live around the world, and I have fallen in love with this country. Everyone truly lives life to the fullest here and I find they have such an inspiring respect for the environment and people. Just looking at the way they live life here it has made me realize a lot about how I live my life. My practicum alone has been extremely educational but I now realize how much you can learn from traveling. Traveling alone is schooling in itself, learning and taking in the different cultures, being taught about the land and the plant life. This place has really got a hold of me and I am starting to realize how difficult it is going to be to leave, I guess I will cross that bridge when I get there.
Honestly having the most incredible journey I have ever been on, till next time, “slow down mon!”