Growing Rice in Belize

This is a rice field. Although the camera is not level... the field is. On Thursday we took a trip to Blue Creek to see how rice is grown and processed. The farm we visited has 2000 acres planted in rice. The fields are rectangular and "small" so they can be level plots. This helps the water irrigate the field evenly. How do you plant 2000 acres of rice?

With planes! Interesting.

Where are the weeds? When they drop the rice seed from the planes they let it sit on the 3 inches of water in the field for about two days. The seeds slowly float down to the soil. Then they drain the water off and let the roots find their way into the dirt. After about 10 days they flood the field again to keep the weeds and bugs out.

This field has been cut. They plant in January and cut the rice from May through June. After the rice is cut, they level the field again and then flood it. The water keeps most weeds and bugs out.

This is Mr. John Peters. He is one of the co-owners of this 2000 acre rice farm. Here he is showing us two different kinds of rice. One has a very rough hull and the other has a smooth hull.

This is the pump that draws water from a drainage ditch and pushes it out into the fields. The concept is: if you bring the water up to a level that is higher than the field, by gravity it will spread across a level field. When you turn off this flow of water that is raised up, the excess water from the field will drain back into the ditch.

What beautiful fruit. Has anyone tasted this? Or know the name?

This combine is HUGE!

Everyone got to sit inside.

A pose in the shade of the combine.

A pose in the sun...(Jaheed and Rayan missed this trip and Alejandro was at his gardening internship.)

Mr. Peters explains how the rollers take the hulls off of the rice. A side note about the T-shirts: Aren't they nice? :-) We will muck them up on the last day of school signing our names and writing good luck phrases on them.

At the end of the tour Mr. Peters gave us 40 pounds of rice. When we got back to school we split it up into 4 pound bags and each child got one. I cooked it up Saturday night to feed to the boys for Boys Bible Study. It was wonderful! This brand called "Uncle John's Rice" is not pastey and it is super clean. Rice in Belize is sifted for rocks and hulls. The small pieces of broken rice also fall through the sifter. Some rice processing plants sell the crummy rice plus pebbles plus hulls for 25 cents a pound. (The good rice is about $1.50 a pound.) So the shop keepers buy a bag of each and mix them and then sell the mix for $1.30. They make a huge profit...but the result is most of us in Orange Walk rarely see clean rice. When you buy the rice in the shop you have to spend about 30 minutes sorting it by hand to remove the pebbles, hulls, bugs and other pieces of crud. This rice is completely free of "crud". It's delicious. All the parents commented on how clean the rice is. I'm glad we got such a big sample. What a generous gift.

After lunch we played a short while on this neat swing at the Blue Creek School playground. The whole contraption reminds me of a horse walker.

You pretty much just sit and hang on.....

while someone runs around in circles pulling everyone. Sulmi laughed the whole time whether she was in the swing or doing the running. It was a good break before heading back to the van and our hour drive back to school.

Friendship Bracelets

I love a half day at school. This past Wednesday we had a half day and Sulmi, Gineli and I invited Kristel and Elizanie to come over and make friendship bracelets. The bracelets were challenging but it was fun.

It was easier to work with two kids at a time than to help everyone at once...so two watched TV or played with their phones while the other two made the bracelets.

Sunday Afternoon Swim

My Sunday morning routine begins about 7:30 when Kristel and I drive the van all over OW picking up the Deaf people who come to church. This last Sunday she invited Kelsey to come and they were both at my gate about 7:15. It was already hot. The sun was getting an early start on it's climb to 95 degrees (in the shade). As I peeled my legs off the seat and got out of the van to greet Sulmi's parents at her house, I told Sulmi...when church is over, let's go swimming. Sulmi, Kristel and Kelsey chimed in with a few arm pumps and broad smiles, "Yeah!!!"

A little later in the morning drive we arrived at Elizanie's house. Kristel said, "Can Elizanie come swimming, too?" (We now had about 12 people in the car who all looked at me saying "swimming???!!") I had a feeling this after church swim was going to get bigger.

By the time we arrived at church I had invited all of the girls to come to my house for lunch and then a swim...we would take the boys June 11th.

The whole afternoon swim was full of smiles, no fighting, no drama, just laughter. It was a wonderful day. Ahhhh. How refreshing.

Sometimes They Surpise Me

This is Alejandro and his mom.

Alejandro started his internship at the landscaping business. He is in "propogating" (he weeds and waters). He likes gardening and maybe this will turn into a full time job for him after he graduates June 22. It depends on his work ethic and if he can figure out how to communicate with his hearing boss. One of his biggest hurdles is he does not like to eat meat. Who would have thought that figured into the equation???!!

He's not a vegetarian..but he has had some bad experiences with beef and pork that has not been refrigerated. He is scared of getting sick form eating "meat". The men he works with noticed he only eats beans and chicken. Tomorrow they are going to buy some cooked beef and make him eat it at lunch. I asked him what he was going to do. He said, "Tough it out."

I'm proud of him.

Last Friday at Bible study he said he needed a cap to wear to block the sun. After everyone left we headed to town and hit the "Guatemalan stores". They have a good supply of mens caps with all kinds of logos from US baseball teams, to marijuana leaves, to solid colors, and lots of "HIP HOP" money, gold, "I'm rich" messages. There was one that was black and had a cross on it. It had a heart and the word "Jesus". He picked it up and said, "Hey here's a Christian hat". "It says love and it's got a cross. I like that."

Hmmm... Most of his buddies go for the "hip hop" variety. I was surprised to see him pick the cap with "Jesus" on it. He loves it.

Hmmm.

Me? I would have picked something solid. Now how boring is that! Good for you Alejandro!

Drama at Church

This is the good kind. We have enough of the other stuff... but this is "good drama".

We often dramatize an application of the story... or parts of the Bible story. It gets everyone involved and helps me to see what they understand and what needs more clarification. Dramatizing also gets everyone working together. Each person selects a poker chip from a basket. They work together with the other people who picked the same color poker chip. The groups are small and random. It always ends up giving us a good feeling of comraderie...teamwork...and helping each other.

I tried to take pictures but it was too dark or I flubbed the camera setting...but you get the idea.

A New Friend

Kristel has her priorities straight. She loves to socialize... she loves to chat... and she really gives her friends 100%. Last week while Kristel and Sulmi were waiting for me to finish watering the garden, they sat at the picnic tables on the school grounds and talked. Then Kelsey walked by. Kelsey is a 16 year old Deaf girl who used to live in Belize City but recently moved up to OW. Nobody knew that. Evidently she had been riding the bus back and forth to attend school in Belize City and she passes our school on her walk home. Kristel and Sulmi were ecstatic. They knew her from the annual spelling bee and from Mennonite gatherings. Kelsey is a nice girl...not into "drama"...she smiles alot and was happy to have a local friend. Kristel immediately asked her to church.

Today after school they walked around the corner to her house to visit. We are so glad that Kelsey moved into our neighborhood.

Our Community Service Project

Carl and Laisha plant some flower seeds.

For our "service project" for Education Week, all of the special education students went to the Ministry of Education to plant a garden and paint a mural on the wall.

While I supervised the planting, Elodia, Helena, and Angelica helped the children to put their hands on the wall to make the mural and still other teachers watched and entertained the children who were not planting or painting. It also helped that the night watchman for the building, Domacio, has such a big heart that he borrowed a pick and completely dug up and watered the garden space a couple of days before we came. Now he waters it every night and I bet he will even weed it, eventually. Thank you God for the opportunity to "serve" and for all who made it a successful day.

Here's most of the gang in front of our rainbow of hands mural. On Monday, Commonwealth Day, I will have time to paint the words from the Education Week theme above the hands.

Education Empowers: creating change, nurturing minds, embracing the future

The Tree That Played Dead

Have you ever seen a dog do a trick called "playing dead"? It rolls over on it's back with four legs straight up in the air and its tongue drooping out of it's mouth. The dog tries not to move until the master claps his hands to signal the trick is over.

We have a tree that did that, sort of.

We had this pretty orchida tree that blooms with white flowers in June. Our dear friend Pandora Canton gave us this tree (and the one behind it) for the school garden last June. Although it flourished for several months, in December all of a sudden it dropped all of its leaves. I emailed Pandora asking her if it was deciduous. (Most trees in Belize keep their leaves all year long.) She said, "No, it should not be losing it's leaves." Within about a week the leaves were all brown and blowing to the ground. A barren gray stick-like object was where the tree used to be.

Hmmmm... Another teacher pointed out that a tree on the other side of the school grounds was also dead. He said maybe it was some kind of blight. Others told me to scrape a few branches and if it was green underneath it was still alive. Knife in hand I scratched a few branches to find brown dead, dried, twigs. They said cut it back until you hit green. I chopped and chopped...everthing seemed brown or grey. I started looking around for a new tree to plant in the space.

Meanwhile Kristel's dad came to cut down the other dead tree. By this time it was leaning on the school fence and becoming a problem. I asked him to haul away the ochida tree, too, so I could put something else in the hole. He didn't have time that day...so I put it off. And the dead orchida tree remained. Sometimes when we watered the other bushes and trees in the school yard, Sulmi or Alejandro asked me if they should water the dead orchida tree. In fact one time Sulmi was cracking up laughing as she held the hose on the barren gray stick in the ground.

Then one day about a month ago, I was watering the garden and mentally preparing a devotion that I was going to lead at our teachers' workshop on "Renewal". I was thinking about hope, about not giving up. I was singing in my head "Prescious Lord, Take my Hand" and then I noticed the tree, that orchida tree that I really needed to dig up and throw in the garbage...was blooming. (??!) At the very top, a new, soft, light green leaf was blowing in the breeze, like a little green flame on the end of a long grey stick. As I held the hose on the trunk I could see that there were a few other tiny 1/4 inch buds of green trying to come out of the ends of two other branches.

I was SURE it was dead! But it wasn't. I had given up on it. It was worthless, I thought. It was never going to grow. What a fabulous metaphor for our workshop....to never give up on that difficult child in your class, or yourself, or that co-worker, but to hope. When YOU can't.....doesn't mean God can't. So grab a hold of God's hand and cling to that Hope that God is in control and God can do ANYTHING. He is able.

Yesterday when we were watering the garden Sulmi said the tree looked like it came out of a Dr. Seuss book with its long branches and leaves popping out in bunches at the tips. Ok... honestly, it is not yet the most beautiful tree on the block, but every time I look at it, the tree speaks to me a message of Hope, which is pretty impressive for a "dead" tree.