Good maawnin!

That's how the locals say it. This was my first full weekend here in San Ignacio, and it was packed with a lot of fun.

(This post was for the weekend of July 7 and July 8).


After class on Friday, a group of friends and I decided to go canoeing. It took us a while to figure out where to go, and what tour to go on, but after we talked to a couple of locals about it we were finally able to get a good price. The place was called Barton Creek, and it was a cave. It was awesome - the cave used to be used by the Mayans as an entranceway to the "Underworld," which I mentioned in an earlier post. Inside we were able to find a couple of skulls (mostly babies :/) and a few pieces of Mayan pottery. In fact, the guide mentioned something about the cave being recently abandoned, maybe one hundred years ago though I don't remember the exact date. Either way it was really cool to paddle our way through the nooks and crannies, avoiding the stalagmites and stalactites that hung close by overhead. When all was said and done, we raced back to the entrance (Boys vs. Girls), and jumped off a rock hanging about 50 feet over the water. It was a great bonding experience, and we all just had a ton of fun laughing and taking videos of people yelling ridiculous things as they jumped into the water. (Though my video got lost in the process somehow....)

There are a bunch of Mennonites on the way to Barton Creek, but they don't like getting their face put on camera...so out of respect, this is the only picture I will post.

We had to drive across a river to get to the cave, lmao. 

THE CAVE!!!! 

This is the ladder we all had to climb to make it to the top of that rock.

Saturday was a bit different. We started the day with our classmates, actually, back at the Green Iguana Project. All of the adults needed a bath and to be checked for tics. It was amusing trying to catch all of them, let alone bathe them all in a pool of iodine. After a couple hours we finally managed to finish the job, and all 40 of them were happy to be rid of us. Volunteering at organizations like this feels great, and I know that this is just one of the many ways our class gets to help the conservation movement. I can't wait to continue doing these sort of activities as the month progresses!

Can you spot all of the lizards??

Happy Iguana :)

My roommate Christian, trying to restrain the most dominant male at the reserve.

 Unfortunately, this lizard looks like it has some type of trauma occurring at the front left corner of its mouth....

Once done with the iguanas, a small group of us decided to go zip lining. Unfortunately, there was a slight mixup on the place we were going, and we somehow ended up back at Barton Creek. A key lesson to anyone planning on studying abroad: ALWAYS keep an open communication with the people watching over you. Either way, they had zip lines open at the Creek and we ended up having a blast. Afterwards we all enjoyed a couple of drinks with the owners, and even tried a new Belizean dish (I need to look up the name again). The food was delicious, the zip lines were fast, and the people were really nice...they even invited us back, free of charge (as long as we bring others willing to pay). It's great making friends out here, and pretty easy too. Just be yourself.

Us looking out at the path leading to the top. 

For those of you who have never zip lined, we use that ladder to attach ourselves to the metal wire hanging overhead.... this was just the practice line, so no big deal.

And then came Sunday. What an amazing trip. A whole bunch of us travelled with one of the professor's friends to Guatemala to explore the Mayan Ruins. It was about a twenty-minute trip to the border (and then a two hour trip into the country), and after getting a sweet new stamp in our passports we were all itching to explore Tikal. Needless to say, the whole site was breathtaking: forest enveloped all of the buildings with howler monkeys and spider monkeys filling the trees. Ancient stone towers rose up high over everything, and a small village stood in the middle of all of this...we even got the chance to climb one of these towers, overlooking the entire canopy. I highly recommend this trip to anyone interested in ruins. I learned quite a bit too - each cardinal direction has a meaning, the North for instance representing Heaven. Our guide also tried to explain to us why people often times confuse 2012 with the end of the world, but this was all technical and really hard to understand...something about going through thirteen cycles, and then restarting things with a new placeholder (almost like going from 999 to 1000, except instead of being based on 10 digits like our number system they base everything on 13). If you didn't follow that, that's ok - just trust me. The world is not ending!

"Hey look what I found!"

This flame is used in a sacred Mayan ritual...notice the four outer flames extending towards the four cardinal directions. Each flame has a different color.

One of the two twin pyramids facing each other.

The other twin pyramid. There are four sets of these pyramids in total.

It's the Mask from "Legends of the Hidden Temple!" Hahaha

Group shot on the top of the pyramid.

This is a panoramic view at the top of the tallest pyramid in Tikal. Simply breathtaking.

This was the first time I actually started to feel homesick. I don't know why, but Sunday night I was really starting to miss home...but I got over that pretty quickly. After glancing over a couple of old photos on my computer, I was full of energy and ready to go back to class on Monday.

But, that's a post for another day. Talk to you all soon!

~Bill

PS: here's a video of a wild coatimundi I found at the ruins:

Week Numero Uno

Hello again!

Sorry this post is a little late. It's hard to get Internet here, but this is for the week from 7/2 to 7/6:

It's been a crazy first week of classes. After settling in, we met our professor Dr. Isabelle. Her job is pretty sweet - she runs a wildlife clinic (not open to the public yet) and has some of the most unique patients I've ever seen! Just on the first day, we had the chance to take care of a barn owl. Here's a picture of me palpating its chest for thick muscle, and another of me giving an injection of Vitamin B12:

Unfortunately the poor thing had a broken wing, and won't be recovering as quickly as we hoped....

The next day (Tuesday) we went to an iguana reserve in the San Ignacio Hotel. Named the Green Iguana Project, the main goal is to raise these iguanas in captivity and eventually release them to the wild. Green Iguanas are unfortunately threatened, especially because every Spring people love to eat the pregnant females and their eggs... It's a delicacy here. While the main idea is to focus on reintroduction, another important role the hotel plays is to educate people not to act so carelessly and help protect these animals from endangerment.

How many iguanas do you think I could fit on my hat??

On Wednesday, we had the amazing opportunity to visit a Howler Monkey preserve. I can't begin to tell you how cool it was to walk around knowing that these "baboons" (as the locals call them) were all around us.

The Community Baboon Sanctuary is actually a completely voluntary, joint project involving all of the residents living in the area. These people only needed to agree to a couple of vital components to keep the project alive: 

          o Keep a few fig trees around that the howler monkeys enjoy eating from.

          o Stay away from cultivating right next to the streams and rivers (to prevent erosion
             not only for the monkeys but for the people as well).
          o Leave a patch of trees along the property borders to maintain a "skeleton forest"
             for the monkeys to travel through.

In return, residents can benefit from the attracted tourism and are invited to participate directly in the conservation project themselves. Working together, people and animals have developed something amazing that can be used to help conservation projects worldwide!

Just a Howler Monkey chilling in a tree.

We spent the day back in Dr. Isabelle's clinic on Thursday. After having a quick demonstration on how to restrain and treat a patient, we had the opportunity to practice this ourselves. With blow dart in hand, we were able to go outside and try shooting it at a cardboard target. It was a lot of fun, but I think I need to work on my aim a little bit more before I attempt that on a real animal....

The other thing we did on Thursday was practice our suture technique. This was the first time I ever got the chance to work with any sort of medical needle, so I was really excited!! After "wounding" our raw chicken meat, we used the sutures to stich it right back up. I took a video of me working on my "patient," as well as a photo of the finished project. Enjoy:

(Sorry I can't seem to flip the video around...)

Finally Friday came, and that day went by pretty quickly. After collecting a few samples from the dog parks nearby, we ran some fecal analyses to see if the dogs had any sort of parasites. Not surprisingly, we came across quite a large number of hookworm eggs and a few others, of which I don't remember the names. As a parasitologist, Dr. Isabelle is hoping to compile all of this data to educate the public about the status of dogs roaming the streets. One day it would be ideal to provide dewormer to all of these pups, but that day might be in the distant future.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of Friday's project, but I do have a picture of a sleeping dog instead:

He's only asleep I promise!

Until next time!

~Bill

How yu di do, bwai?

A lot has happened since my last blog. Today is my third day here in the city of San Ignacio of the Cayo District, and what a city it is! There is so much culture here… I’ve already been invited to a Queen of Diamonds fashion show, eaten at a local fast-food restaurant, and I’ve even seen a man walking around with a baby pig!

Yeah, this country is pretty amazing. It was a two-hour trip from the airport to the hotel, so I had the chance to look over the countryside; the landscape is really diverse. One moment you could be looking at a forest filled with palm trees riddled with strangling vines, and all of a sudden you reach savannah-like grassland with giant rock formations (some of which we saw were beginning to be paved over for future development). There are supposed to be quite a few Mayan ruins nearby as well, with caves used to “reach the underworld,” or so they believed. If memory serves me correctly, the ancient Mayans used to perform their sacrifices in these caves. I am really excited to explore as much as possible before I leave, and definitely plan on visiting the Mayan caves sometime soon.

A picture of the Midas Resort at night (where I am staying). This was taken during the Queen of Diamonds competition.

Now, you’re probably wondering about the title of this blog. Here in Belize, although the national language is English, a lot of people speak a variation of it called Creol. Many of the words resemble basic American English, but instead of being written in an eloquent fashion each word is written exactly as it sounds. As such, many of the miscellaneous ‘g’s and ‘r’s found at the end of words are dropped completely since a lot of people do not pronounce them. This language came about from the many African slaves who settled here being forced to learn English (since they were strictly forbidden to speak in their native tongue). Without pencil or paper, they did the best they could and came up with this language system, which has since been formalized with its own set of grammar rules. I also believe that Scottish played a role in the development of this language, but I am not exactly sure how. In case you couldn’t figure it out, the title in fact translates to “How do you do, brother?” or more commonly, “How are you?”. Here in Belize, it is ok to call everyone a “bwai,” even someone you respect or that is older than you; it is in fact a term of endearment.

That’s it for now, but be sure to check back real soon as I have a lot more to post in the near future. Laata den.

~Bill

This is a picture of the entertainment waiting for us at the airport. I thought it was cool because, really, how many other airports have bongo players on top of their luggage carousels?