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BELIZEAN WAYS: PART 2
Sent:
Monday, October 04, 1999 1:46 PM
“He ain’t
wrong, he’s just different,
But his pride
won’t let him do things that make you think he’s right.”
n
-- Ed Bruce
When I talk about Belizean ways, I hope you don’t think I’m saying that
the Belizeans are wrong about anything (except possibly the vapors. )
Because we’re new here, we notice things that old hands take for
granted, and that seem interesting to us.
No criticisms intended – we’re just innocent bystanders, eh?
HOSPITALS / MEDICAL CARE
If somebody hacks you, or you
get sick, you can go to the hospital, which is subsidized by the government.
If you have more money, they will charge you more.
If you have much money, you are better off going into Mexico, where the
hospitals look pretty modern. The
hospital here looks like something out of a civil war movie.
There are several pharmacies in Corozal, and they sell everything
(antibiotics, antihistamines, steroids) without a prescription unless it’s a
controlled drug. So, if you know that you need sulfa or cortisone, you can ask
for it by name at the pharmacy and get it.
Not terribly cheap, but there’s no prescription involved.
You can get lots of medical care cheap in Merida (pop. 700,000, up in
Mexico at the Northern tip of the Yucatan) so we are “self-insured” rather
than enrolled in an HMO.
ELECTRIC
Power here is 110 Volt, 60
Hertz, and some towns even have three phase.
It is very expensive (over 15 cents for a kilowatt/hour
which cost 6 cents in Colorado) and not very reliable.
We have an outage every couple of days.
Sometimes it comes right back on, but sometimes it’s off for an hour
or two. The power comes from
Mexico, which does not reassure me, since I know that Y2K projects in Mexico
are all 9-24 months behind. We do
have our own generating plant here in Corozal, but they shut it down because
fuel oil was so expensive. Of
course, those oil prices are down now but getting them to reconsider will be
difficult. Even so, the average
household electric bill is pretty low. We
just got our bill, very high by Belizean standards, and it was 49 dollah.
Everyone uses fluorescent lights wherever they can.
Right before I left Houston for the last time, I bought a bunch of
these fluorescent bulbs at Home Depot, guaranteed for 10,000 hours.
Now they are starting to burn out.
(Time flies when you’re having a good time, especially in the
tropics. )
[Footnote: Electrical Rates]
GAS & COOKING
There is no natural gas in
Belize. They use butane rather
than propane (Colorado is too cold for butane, which boils at about 28 degrees
F) and it is cheaper here than it was in the US.
You call the company, and then the butane guys come around with a
truck, take your tank out front and fill it while you wait. They used to fill it right at the house, but then they burned
a couple of houses down in Bleece, so now they take it to the street to fill
it. [Footnote:
Butane] Everyone seems to have some
kind of a stove, but the less affluent do major cooking outside with wood, of
which we have plenty! Also, it
doesn’t heat up the house.
IMPROVISATION
I am so used to going to the
home supply to get tools and materials, I had forgotten about improvisation.
That means using what you have, especially what you have left over from
a previous job. Robyn, one of our
handy men, built us a concrete back stoop.
He didn’t have a trowel handy to trowel it out smooth, so he used a 1
x 2. And did a good job.
Later, he and his helper needed hods to carry mortar upstairs, so they
made them out of a square of plywood with a block underneath for a handle.
I started drilling a hole thru
the wall for the gas hose from the butane tank (outside) to the stove
(inside.) Originally, I looked
for a star drill to do this job (I have one in the states) but they don’t
have those down here, so I bought a ¾ “ masonry drill, and used it like a
star drill, rotating it and hitting it with a hammer.
[You do know about drilling with a star drill and a hammer, don’t
you. Like John Henry, and the
nine-pound hammer?] My hammer is
a 1 pound ball peen, and the drill, even coming in from both sides of the
wall, wasn’t long enough. I
gave up, mainly because my wrists were getting tired and sore.
Elvis took over, used a 2 foot length of steel rebar and finished the
job! He doesn’t know what a
star drill is but he knows how to improvise.
While I was backing around out
in the bush, I caught the Scout’s right tail pipe on a pole, bent it badly,
and actually ripped it loose from the manifold.
Where is Midas Muffler when you need it?. I took it to Enrique Chan, whom they call “Magu” which is
Creole for “Magician”. He is
truly a magician with a welding torch. He
refastened the muffler pipe to the manifold,
Then he cut off the tail pipe right below the muffler, where the pipe
was rusted out. He cut a little piece of pipe from an old hunk he had and
welded it on to my tailpipe. There were a couple of holes in my pipe so he cut
pieces of sheet metal and welded them over the holes.
He straightened it out so it had the right set of compound curves.
Then they made a new hanger with the old metal parts and a piece of
rubber from a tire sidewall, and remounted the tailpipe.
Midas would have sold me a new muffler and tailpipe for $100, Magu
charged me 35 dollah ($17.50.)
THE HAMACA
This is pronounced ha-MOCK-a.
It’s what we call a hammock. I
was pretty dubious about using one, but the Mexicans make a great big one that
you can buy for around 300 pesos ($30 US) and once you wrap it around you, a)
you can lay flat in it, and b) it’s impossible to fall out of it.
They hang the hamaca in a breezy spot like the porch, and take a siesta
in the early afternoon. I think
it could add years to my life, if only I can trick Charlotte into getting out,
and letting me in.
They told me that English is
the official language of Belize. Well,
legally, that’s probably true, and if I speak English, somebody ought to
understand me, but there’s a credibility gap somewhere.
Most of the Belizean natives speak Creole, which is “English based”,
but not really English at all. For
example “Di ada day, Ah mi gaan fi bai sohn naiylz, kaaz Ah mi-difix up sohn
lee brok up ting dehn eena mi hous.” Loose
translation – The other day, I was going to buy some nails to fix up some
things that were broke in my house.
If it were written, or spoken slowly, I might have a clue, but at full
speed, it’s just English shorthand, and we can only marvel at the sound of
it, and hope that they will translate for us if it’s important.
Everybody up here (in northern
Belize) seems to speak a little Creole, and a lot of Spanish.
The Spanish is not elegant, but they all speak the dialect and (of
course) we don’t. And some of
them don’t speak any English at all, so it’s not much better than Mexico.
The only saving grace is that they are _supposed_ to speak
English here in Belize, and they have no such injunctions in Chetumal.
We are taking a course at the Corozal Community College, along with the
first formers (9th graders.) Yet
another adventure, eh?
BICYCLES
I learned about bicycles as a
boy. _Boys Life_ magazine
told me about “ankling” – moving your seat up so that your leg is
extended when you reach the bottom of the stroke, so that you can use the calf
of your leg at the end of each leg’s stroke.
Of course, all of the racing cyclists use this technique, and we are
used to seeing it at the Olympic Training Center velodrome in Colorado
Springs.
Belize is a country full of
bicyclists, but they just don’t have a clue about how to ride a bike well.
They adjust their seat like it was the seat on a Harley – about as
low as it will go, and then they pedal totally with their thighs.
From front or behind, they all look like a dad trying to ride his
10-year-old’s bike, with knees sticking way out to the side.
And, of course, they’re usually out of balance too, so they zig-zag a
lot. It really makes me want to laugh, but I just try not to look.
They may not be good, but they are determined, and sometimes you see a
grown man with his wife on the bar and a kid up on the handlebars.
Or a carpenter, with his tools in a canvas bag, hung from the
handlebars, and a long piece of wood balanced over one shoulder!
A couple of weeks ago, they
televised a national bicycle race in Belize, and I thought “surely the
racers know how to ride.” Well,
no. 98 percent of the Belizean
contestants had their seat set right down on the frame and they were pumping
valiantly with their thighs. The
race was won by a couple of foreigners who had their seats hiked way up and
were racing with their butt up and their shoulders down the way we know it
should look. On the other hand,
the Belizean contestants had a lot of heart.
On the road, cyclists have the
right-of-way under any circumstance, and there are apparently no traffic laws
to regulate their behavior. I
think they are supposed to have a light and reflector at night, but virtually
none of them do, and they wear black clothing at night (I call them “ninja
cyclists”) so this adds particular spice to any driving I do at night.
One of the gringos here in Corozal killed a cyclist last month (a
12-year-old Chinese boy) and his plea was that he couldn’t see him in the
dark.
THE VAPORS
After the sun goes down, the
Belizeans button up – close their doors and louvers. They are sure that the vapors (night air) carry disease, and
they will all get sick and die if they leave the louvers open. Mary, Elvis’
wife, was explaining to Charlotte that Ebony and CiCi, her small children,
were sick because she took them out in the night air one night.
Since then, I have tried to
explain to a couple of neighbors (whom I thought were more sophisticated) that
this is a medieval idea which was abandoned as soon as Pasteur discovered the
source of disease, but they’re not having any of that.
Of course we leave louvers open all night to maximize the air flow, so
I’m sure they’re all waiting for us to die.
The music is so bad I think
seriously about leaving the country. It’s bad for two good reasons:
1) It’s really boring. They
take a four-bar phrase, with one or two chords and a very simple bass line,
and play it for 20 minutes. There
are some lyrics, but they generally repeat a line twenty or thirty times
before they change. One “tune”
(I use the word very loosely) has the lyric “Yes, Yes, Yes”.
They just sing that over and over.
“Yes, yes, yes” (rest)
“Yes, yes, yes” (rest)
See – you’re bored
already!!
If it’s a record, they play
the 10 minute record five or six times.
“What about the drums?”
Well, the Belizean idea of good drums is a single bass drum beat,
played 4/4 – boom boom boom boom. One
of the schools here has a drum and bugle corps – 20 drums, one bugle.
They have about five bass drums and 15 snare drums. None of the snare
drummers can play a roll (after all, they’re kids) so they all play in
unison: “Boom Boom Boom Boom“,
and in unison “Rat tat tat tat.” They
were in a parade last week, and everybody cheered wildly as they marched by.
Without a good drummer, the
dance bands usually use an electronic drummer (a part of every keyboard) and
they set a very complex Latin rhythm and then play it twice as fast as it
would normally be played by a real drummer.
It might be interesting if it wasn’t so repetitive.
2) It’s really LOUD.
They stack up twenty or more big speaker enclosures, each with one or
two 15” or 18” speakers and a big steel tweeter horn, and drive these with
two, four, six amplifiers, with a combined output of as much as 10,000 watts.
(Your home stereo center has less than 200.) This drives the sound well over
the threshold of pain (which is 140 db.)
As a result the dancers can’t get within a 100 feet of the band.
They’re all dancing outside!
The bands usually sound great if you’re about 6 blocks away, but of
course, if you wonder what you’re hearing musically, see (1) above.
We have two forms of time in
Belize.
1.
Belizean Normal Time.
This is the time used in business and social transactions.
Whenever someone says “it will be ready Friday” you learn to ask
“This Friday?” And then you
check back every day or so, to see if it really will be ready.
“It will be ready next week” means “sometime in the future.”
Once you understand this, it doesn’t seem like tardiness – they
just don’t plan things more than a day or two in advance.
Victor, my current lawn care engineer, says “I will cut your lawn
tomorrow.” And he really intends to do that.
If it rains, he can’t cut the lawn, and so he doesn’t show up.
If I ask him about it, he says “well, it rained.”
(He means “well, it rained, stupido, and I can’t cut it when its
soaking wet.”) So I don’t say anything anymore.
I just hope for sunshine, eh?
2. Belizean Auto Time.
As soon as a Belizean gets in a car, time speeds up by an order of
magnitude. One minute seems like
10. Most Belizeans drive across
our little town – which is about three miles wide at the widest point – as
though their house was on fire. By
Belizean custom, when you visit someone, you sit in the car and honk to see if
they’re home, and will receive you. One
honk should do it, but since they’re sitting in the car, it seems like an
endless wait, so they honk again. And
again. And again.
I walk out of my house, and over to the car parked in front of my
neighbor’s house. “Were you
testing your horn?” I ask. “It
works!” They drive off. (Charlotte expects that they come back in the
middle of the night and throw all of their contraband beer cans on my lawn.)
[Footnote: "Right Now"]
Sr.
Ric
Copyright, CASELab, 1999. All
rights reserved
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