Belize is more than just a dream!

We arrived in Belize City at the International airport. To say it is small is kind. Portland Jetport looks huge compared to this friendly little place. It was warmer and more humid than the sixty degrees of Maine weather that we left at 6:40am. We quickly made it through customs and were met by Edgar who would be driving us the 2.5 hours to DuPlooys (see their site on my list of sites). The amazing thing is that we were traveling about 80 miles during that time! 2.5 hours in Maine gets many folks from Belfast to Kittery but here the roads are not quite as large and they have speed bumps (to allow children to cross the streets in the smaller towns) all along the way. While the main roads are paved, most of the busy ones anyway, the side roads are not. And they can be very bumpy. The final 5 miles to our place at DuPlooys was unpaved and on the first day it seemed to take forever as we bounced around on all parts of the road, looking for the smoothest rough spots, but by the end of our time there, I considered this one of the nicest roads on which we traveled.

Speaking of living conditions, folks in Belize don’t live in the type of homes that we might find along our roads. Our home in Belfast would almost be considered a mansion down here. Even some of our more dilapidated homes would be far better than the small 10’ x 10’ wooden homes that are up on pilings in order to keep the flooding rains from flowing through their living rooms. Not everyone lives in those small homes as more and more people are using cement to build their houses but I believe many of the homes we saw would not meet the long-term standards that we Americans have set for living. I am not slamming America or putting down Belize but here the manual laborers are used to making $5 American/day (that is not a misprint) and the folks who work at the resorts cleaning rooms make about $100 American/week for 6 days of labor. I was reminded again, and I believe it impacted the boys as well, to see how blessed we are to have what we have. I wonder how long that will last?

On an interesting note, our driver actually worked for two years as an illegal immigrant in the US many years back. Recognizing how little they can be paid when they sneak into our country and how poor the conditions in which the live and work can be I asked if it was still worth it with that knowledge and he stated it was without a doubt. He went for two years with the understanding that he could bring back enough money to give his family a nice home and to find a better paying job. He said that he had worked two jobs during his stay in order to support his family. He paid someone $1700 to get him to the American border and then they dropped them off right where they would get caught. He was arrested, spent time in jail, was released in Mexico, and then returned to the states. He also told me that when he left his wife and two children to begin his journey he fully understood that he might not come back alive or might simply disappear. Imagine leaving your loved ones for a better job and wondering if while working or while trying to get to work you might be killed and just disappear. What would it be like to suddenly have a loved one disappear without even having the chance to say good-bye or to bury the body. I know, that sounds rough but as he spoke it gave me the understanding of just how much he was willing to risk to try making a better life for his family.
He did not boast of his two years but rather saw them as a necessary sacrifice to try and make a better life for his family. He chose to stay only two years because of his love for his wife and children and the belief that he wanted to return to Belize and work here. He now has a US visa and travels to the US to purchase vehicles to drive back to Belize for personal use but also to sell them to others. Even with the long journey it is still worth it.

As we talked about his work in the US he noted that when it is picking season for fruits in Belize, there are people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua who come to do the picking. I guess you’d call it a picking pecking order in that there are people even poorer than those in Belize who see Belize as a place to make good money.