Benque's Centennial...

Let me just issue one more welcome to the computer class at St. Francis, I received word today that this blog is the lesson tomorrow! Let me reiterate that if you have any questions or comments about ANYTHING you read here, please feel free to e-mail or post them below!

I wanted to post a comical "life in Benque" story which doesn't really have a point but is just a snapshot of Belizean culture. So, this past weekend was Pan-America Day (Columbus day for us U.S. citizens) and, as Belizeans are likely to do for a holiday of any sorts, they canceled school. Not only did we not have school on Monday, but Friday was cut short for "clean up Benque day", after mass on Friday we went out with our students to pick up trash. Now, consider this. Trash clean up is always an unpleaseant thought for me, but as an American raised in the states, I have a sense of civic duty towards it-- in American we consider littering to be sinful because we've been raised celebrating "Earth Day" and planting trees and recycling, etc. etc., etc... Basically, we know that littering is wrong and we'll walk a while with litter in our pockets to avoid littering in the streets. Not with these kids! Apparently, until recently, the way that trash was disposed of in Benque was simply leaving it in piles on the streets, we've now progressed to either burning it in our backyard or for having someone take it to the "landfill" where it's burned in a pile. Litter is something that is not tolerated on our school campus, but we're alone in our mission (when Mt. Carmel had a volleyball game "away" the other week, I went after one of the balls that had went into such a pile on the campus of Mopan Technical College, whom they were playing. It was scary, there was trash of all varieties in that pile!).

So, Friday, we are told that our students (who, despite the appearance of their town, are so paranoid about dirt that they will sit with their backpacks on their backs all through class rather than allow them to touch the floor and consequentally get dirty) are to spend three hours picking up trash after mass! I wasn't really sure what this would entail... All of the students got one rubber glove and a trash bag and we went to town, walking up behind the school. Well, my girls were very ambitous and they wanted to walk all the way to one of their houses. The hardest part was getting them to actually stop and pick up trash, they wanted to just keep walking. Forty-five minutes later neither I nor the teacher I'm working with have any idea where we are, but my students assure me that we're only about three minutes from Guatemala, and "Miss, can we go there for lunch?". Go to Guatemala for lunch? No! "Why not Miss?" Because, I don't have my passport with me (why am I explaining this to you... who asks if they can go to another country for lunch?) "Oh, miss, they'll let you through, we'll talk to the guards and they'll be ok". Well, needless to say, we did not cross the border for tortillas in Guatemala. Still, it amuses me to no end that we came that close!

So, all in all, we only spent about 45 minutes actually cleaning up Benque... I should have known that doing work like that on "Belizian time" should be divided to about a quarter of what is mentioned! so, that was our experience with picking up trash in Benque!