Making Cents

There are a few things I have learned about myself since arriving in Belize almost seven short - or long, depending on the mood I'm in - weeks ago. For instance, given the right weather conditions (rain) and presented with self-deprecating, but hysterical nonfiction - Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, Jeanette Walls - I love to read. Also, I really love bananas. I knew that I liked bananas before, but I usually found them a tricky fruit to buy: they go bad easily, and I never figured out the right number to get. Looking back on it, I feel as though they are a fruit taken for granted, force fed to sweaty kids after a soccer game, dried and put as headliners for trail mixes, and not to mention anchoring the responsibility of the the mix-in ingredient for fabulous berry smoothies everywhere. Whatever happened to enjoying just a plain banana? Luckily, in Belize bananas are so cheap even volunteers can afford them! And even though I usually have one for breakfast, one for a mid-morning nosh, at least one for lunch, and perhaps one for dessert after dinner, I still really love them. Oh, and lastly, in light of the humidity here in Belize I have also learned that against previous beliefs, using deodorant actually does make a difference.

Despite all of these profound insights, there are many lingering questions I have from what I have witnessed of life in Belize. You can ride with your newborn child in the back of a pickup truck, but you can't ride your bike the wrong way down a vacant one-way street (the police man made me turn around!); it costs $.60 BZ for a stamp that will send a letter to the US, but if you come in with an unstamped letter addressed to the States with only one piece of paper in it, they will claim they have to weigh it and it may end up costing upwards of $3.00; and most notably for our neighborhood, it seems that the "rivalry of the Jones'" is made manifest in sound systems and karaoke machines - how loud they can be played and who can play them later into the night. Such competing clubbish noise usually comes in the form of Caribbean reggae-rock, but if we're lucky, they'll throw on the "kid's songs" titling "B-I-N-G-O" and "the Happy Birthday song" or such classics as Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Upon looking out my window at midnight last week during a sing a-long rendition of "Oh What a Night" expecting to find other disgruntled neighbors switching on lights and peering out windows, all I saw was a young woman, baby on her hip, swinging and stepping to the beat in the middle of the dark street.

Beyond the virtually unpredictable patterns of weather here (even weather.com has given up and just resorted to predicting thunderstorms here for the next eternity - I mean, come on, give us some credit!), there are a few more serious, even daunting aspects of Belize as I am experiencing it which are proving to exhaust my over-analytical, figure-it-all-out, make-things-efficient (right, Mo?) kind of mind.

First off, the violence. The gang activity seems to be at some kind of a high; we hear gunshots on a fairly regular basis and just in the last two weeks, there have been six reported murders. While the violence hasn't yet extended beyond the realm of those involved with the gangs (to the best of my knowledge), the vulnerability of the young boys in our neighborhood to join such groups is scary. As Americans, it is certainly not our place to be organizing or advocating for peace here, but we have been looking for groups to be on-board with who are in similar pursuits. And then - SMACK - we run right into what is perhaps the root of the problem: there are none.

We know many, many, many passionate, inspiring, capable, and influential people here in the city who also want an end to the violence, but who, deservedly so, also don't want to invest their already stretched resources to what seems to be a lost cause. All of this leads me to the next set of paradoxical, philosophical, rhetorical questions and concerns brewing within me...

What the heck am I doing here?

Recently, as I have finally started to feel the weight of my immersion in this culture bear down, I have had the wild sensation of simultaneous contradiction: every day that I spend here getting to know people, places, foods, and work, I feel more and more foreign - not just my skin color, or my clothes, or my language - but my reality. I could have left everything buy my passport at home and still, I would be an American volunteer. Solidarity, and even "accompaniment" as JVI likes to call it, seem light years away when I hear of a shooting that happened last night in front of the city's only post office or when someone at work knows the brother of the nephew of the cousin of the guy who was killed in some random bike drive-by. For now, this is a part of my life here as it is affecting me and my surroundings, but as for growing up afraid to walk the streets of my neighborhood or trying to resist the lure of joining a gang, I just can't relate. And because of this and so many other invisible barriers, I can't imagine myself as a part of any solutions in this problematic world. And so, I beg the question: What the heck am I doing here?

At sunrise last Saturday morning, I had my monthly "one-on-one" check-in with my roommate Maria (what an American thing to do, by the way - who else in the world makes a rotating schedule of reflection times with your roommates?). As she spoke with the wisdom of a more experienced second year, I gobbled up every last one of Maria's words explaining things about her experiences thus far that I never could have imagined, in ways I never could have considered. Like me, she is frustrated by the limits on each of us in acting for change here, but geez, she had a refreshing attitude, professing something along the lines of: "I truly believe in the greatness of humanity." Now, that seems far-fetched when crime is rampant, and a city of under 200,000 people is recording six plus murders in two weeks; but yikes, what an outlook. By the end of our conversation, the two of us baking in the mid-morning sun, Maria said something I never would have agreed with until, of course, she said it: "Life here just makes sense."

I suppose I'm still working on understanding that, what with the poverty, the violence, and the Ace Hardware store down the street (same orange lettering on the sign and everything!), but I have adopted it as, if nothing else, a hopeful mantra. Sure, there's a lizard that lives in my shower and a Japanese photocopier at work that doesn't print double-sided and jams if there are more than two pieces of paper in the MP Tray, whatever that is (ya, and try running off 200 copies of the Church's weekly bulletin! You will want to kick something, I guarantee it. Or you may start crying...Don't judge me.) And then there's the fact that Belize celebrates two independence days in September - one for the day they were almost liberated and one for the day they were actually liberated; same difference. And here I am, a sense-less volunteer, counting how many plain bananas she has already eaten today. But somehow, things are starting to add up.