A Little Bit of Everything: The Catch Up Post

So I suppose an update on this sucker is long overdue. Sit back, relax, grab a snack; this is likely to be a long one..

Before I move on to more recent occurrences, I want to mention a few things that I missed last time. The first week we were here, before Maria left, we had lunch with Candy Armstrong, the District Education Officer for the Cayes. It was really great getting the chance to speak with her, and I hope to make it over to San Pedro some day so I can pick her brain about the Belizean educational system. Also last week, Ben and I met Dane, one of the founders of Ocean Academy. He donated the land that the school is built on. Once construction on the school began (in 2008), the building was done in 90 days. Pretty amazing. Dane seems like a pretty fascinating guy, and we’ve already had some interesting conversations. In addition to filling the roles of founder, administrator, and even janitor, Dane teaches windsurfing at Ocean Academy, and he offered to let Ben and I give it a shot. I definitely plan on taking him up on that offer at some point. Apparently once you try it, you’ll know if windsurfing is for you or not within the first 20 minutes. We’ll see how that goes..

Last weekend we spent at the Split getting sufficiently fried. (I’m telling you, spray sunscreen is useless. I’ve never used it and not ended up with weird cow splotches all over my body, even when I spray and then rub it in. I think I’ll be sticking to lotion from now on..). It was really nice just hanging out, reading, and swimming. It’s an awesome spot for swimming and snorkeling, and the water temperature is just about perfect. As most of you know, I’m kind of a sucker for figure skating (especially men’s figure skating), so I watched U.S. Nationals coverage both Saturday and Sunday nights. On Sunday afternoon Ben and I had a meeting with Joni, the third and final founder of the school that we hadn’t met. It was good to sit down and talk with her; she had a lot of great ideas for my class. She didn’t think an open-ended project would work well for OA students, so she suggested that the students organize a Spring Fair as a way to learn about event planning, etc. It would also provide a perfect platform for the students in my class to teach Peace Games to students from the primary school and other children in the community. So that’s what we’re working toward. Some students are interested in restarting the school newspaper, so that might be a great complimentary project to the Spring Fair. After the meeting I definitely felt like I had more of a direction and more clear-cut goals. Now comes the tricky part: actually implementing them. Also on Sunday, my Belizean phone, which was provided by Peacework, decided to go for a swim in the Caribbean. Resurrection efforts are ongoing, but at this point, the outlook is pretty bleak.

I got my official Ocean Academy teachers uniform last week. It consists of a teal and black, sleeveless, button-down top, and a knee-length black skirt. Both made of some sort of lovely polyester. I’m not supposed to wear flip-flops, and the only closed-toe shoes I have with me are Converse, so I’ve been wearing brown gladiator sandals with my uniform. It only looks slightly ridiculous. The uniform’s not so bad though. It’s kind of nice just getting up and putting on the same clothes every morning. The only downside is that once I started wearing the skirt to the school, the sand flies attacked. I counted over 50 bites from the knee down on just one leg the other day. I look diseased, and they itch like hell (I woke up a few times the other night, rolling around because of the discomfort). Ben has bites all over his legs AND his arms, so he’s been scratching like a madman too. Thankfully, after work a few days ago we ventured into Caye Caulker’s one and only pharmacy and picked up anti-histamine pills and anti-itch cream. We both took a pill when we got home, and the swelling and redness of the bites began to go down almost immediately. It was definitely sweet relief. Those sand flies are nasty buggers.

At the beginning of last week, I had to go around to the four classes and pitch my Leadership Project class. Since the direction that the class is heading in is still subject to change, it was a pretty weak pitch. Even so, I ended up with the largest elective class. Sixteen of the school’s forty students are in my class. I think having a larger class will be good, but we’ll see. On Thursday, I taught my first class. It went pretty well. We began by making a classroom contract (which all of the students signed), and then we spent the rest of the 50-minute period playing a game called Commons. I had the class get into pairs and find three things that they had in common, which they then shared with the class. Then the pairs got together to form groups of four and had to find four new things they had in common. The groups of four became groups of eight and they had to find two things in common. Finally the entire class had to find just one thing they had in common (their commonality: they all eat chicken). We debriefed the game afterward, and it was thumbs up all around. I was glad they all enjoyed it, and some of them even expressed that they would be interested in teaching the game to primary school students, which is great news. I teach again on Tuesday (unfortunately, I was only able to get two class periods per week), and this week will be “Teamwork Week”. I plan on having a teamwork brainstorm, giving them a quick introductory survey (so I’ll be able to track their responses/progress), and playing Human Knot. If we have time, I’d like to break the class into project groups and get those going (the projects will probably be newspaper and Spring Fair since students have expressed interest in both).

Over the past week or so, I’ve been talking with members of the school community, trying to get a feel for the Community’s perception of Ocean Academy and its students and the kind of reputation that it has. Unfortunately, the school’s reputation is overwhelmingly poor. Not because of the faculty or the facilities, but because of the type of students who attend the school. OA was founded on the inclusive principle of accepting anyone who wanted a shot at an education. As a result, many of the students who attend the school now spent several years out of school, often on the streets. The community perception of OA is that it’s a school full of drug dealers and dangerous kids. The school, which is providing such a great service to the community by giving these at-risk kids a chance at an education, has garnered a negative reputation as a result. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Fortunately, the community’s perception is slowly changing as OA students have begun to become more involved in the community. One of the things I want to do while I’m here is get the students in my class out into the community as much as possible, through volunteer projects as part of the Interact Club (more on this later), and their Leadership Projects.

I started my scuba class last week! We’ve only done the academic learning part of the course so far (which was comprised of watching a film and lots of reading), but this week we actually get to get in the water. We’ll have a swimming test and our first confined water dive on Friday, and on Saturday we’ll complete our first open water dive out at the reef! I’m super excited, and still amazed that I get to become PADI certified (forever) for free! How lucky am I?

Ben and I are still hunting for used bicycles and cheap food. We’ve made some progress in locating the latter; on Saturday we found a tiny café nearby where we had the best meal since we’ve been here for 20 BZ (aka 10 bucks! For both of us!). I had an amazingly delicious burrito the size of a small child and Ben had some crazy jerk chicken (which looked like it was literally the whole chicken) with two sides, and we each got ½ liter drinks. What a deal. We’ll definitely be frequenting that place. Unfortunately, we haven’t had any luck finding bikes yet, but we’re still looking!

There’s a new volunteer at the school named Adi. When we first met, she thought I was European, which I took as a compliment. (Is that bad? I love the U.S. and all, but I’m just glad I’m not perpetuating a negative stereotype..) Anyway, Adi is a marine biologist from Israel. Ben and I went snorkeling with her at the Split on Friday morning. It was awesome being able to snorkel with someone who actually knows what they’re looking at (I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention in Oceanography..). Apparently she’s going to teach us to free dive at some point. This might be a bad idea, since I can hardly hold my breath more than 20 seconds..

I’ve been entertaining the idea of applying for a research grant while I’m here. It seems like I’ll be pretty busy at the school, but I think working on a research project would allow me to delve a little deeper into the country. I’ve been looking up possible topics, and I think I’ve finally landed on one; I want to research what it means to be Belizean by examining the role that race and ethnicity play in society. This is one of the most diverse countries anywhere, so I think it’d be super interesting research to do. Plus, it’d give me a legitimate excuse to visit all six districts (which I’d like to do anyway). I’m going to work on drawing up a proposal and finding a faculty sponsor this week, hopefully.

So I realized last week, as I was floating on my back in the Caribbean after work, that I might possibly have the best co-op ever. Sure, I’m not getting paid, and I’ll be horribly in debt by the time I get back to Boston, but never mind that. I get to live on a beautiful tropical island, work with a great group of people (both students and staff), try crazy things like scuba diving and windsurfing, and make as much of this experience as I want. I just feel ridiculously lucky.

I think that’s all I’ve got to say for myself right now. This post is a little scatterbrained and all over the place, but I think it covers just about everything I’ve missed. Kudos to you if you made it all the way to the end. :)

P.S. The streak is way over. We’ve been seeing cockroaches here and there, but the cockroach spray that we have seems to help keep them at bay. I did see one crawl right out of the drain in the sink as I was brushing my teeth yesterday. Not okay.