two weeks later... still striking.

Today makes it officially two weeks that Mt. Carmel High School has been closed. This was the first morning I woke up and didn't even think about comming into school, all the students have since stopped comming in uniform (although the fourth-formers are comming in for tutoring for their standardized tests) and are just waiting to hear what happens. Please pray for us down here, it's gone from annoying to downright discouraging. All of us are here because we want to teach and it's hard to see why we're not able to do that right now!

In the meantime, we've been entertaining ourselves in a variety of ways. I'm reading a lot, and have spent some one on one time with a couple students. I had the opportunity to visit a students house a week ago and that was a real treat. You tend to forget how different life is here when you're in a house with indoor plumbing and a shower heater (which we just had installed this last week!). Anyways, my student invited me to her house for this traditional food which I don't know how to spell, but it's corn meal and chicken and beans all cooked together with lard. A little heavy in the stomach but a special treat around here. I met her mother, who only speaks spanish and her father, who speaks perfect English but allowed me to flounder in spanish for a couple minutes before he let on. Her family raises orchids and sells them abroad, so their whole backyard is full of them. It was really neat to see the different varieties. The one thing that I was chagrined to notice is that while we had just installed our shower heater that allows us to have warm water comming out of our faucet, their toilet and shower was in the middle of their backyard, in a little shack. It's so easy to forget where my students come from!

The church is being renovated so we've also taken to scraping paint off the church to assist the seminarians. It's possibly the most mundane task ever-- the paint comes off in particles the size of dust... so it's a long difficult job. The most interesting thing to see is the way the Belizian kids will just run up and down and jump off the scaffolding, in their bare feet! These kids are little monkeys!

And, speaking of monkeys, we went to the zoo a couple days ago. It's a scary sign of how little there is to do when I'm seeking out wildlife to look at, but it's actually really cool. All of the animals are in their own habitats, there's no concrete or obvious caging. You really feel like you're in the wild! We were standing about two feet away from a huge crocodile and jaguar-- all that separates you is a little electric fence, unlike a zoo in the states that would have massive canals, cages and bulletproof glass!

So, that's the news from Belize... Please pray that this country is able to find a peaceful resolution to everything so the kids (and teachers) can get back to school!