Santa in Belize

It’s difficult to get my head around the fact that we are actually spending Christmas away from family and friends, in Belize! Luckily, we have some new friends to lessen the loneliness. Coming from the mountains of central Oregon, where already this winter the temperature has dropped to -20, to Central America where today’s temp hit 90, is taking some adjustment. Of course, getting away from the snow was one of the incentives for making the move. Art is pleased that he’s traded a snow blower for a rototiller. That’s another wonderful difference. It’s Christmas and we’re actually planting a garden. There are two growing seasons here. In Bend, it seemed a joke when they told us that we had a one month growing season. We found it to actually be the truth. We could have a nightly freeze almost any time of the year, leaving only August. Here in Belize cold is 50 degrees. It actually feels very cold at that temp, but the plants seem to love it. The lack of cold weather will keep us from growing many of the veggies that we’re used to, but we’ll adapt. At this point tho’ we can’t see ourselves living on hard corn and beans, which are what most folks are planting. I’m hoping for lettuce, onions & sweet corn.
A week ago I planted a border of zineas and some sunflowers and they’re up already. Wow! How rewarding is that. We had a dumping rain and they actually loved it. The trick to most of this will be to keep the bugs and birds at bay. Hoping the mylar tape will scare the birds and send them to other farms. Projects, projects, projects!
We’ve been invited to have Christmas dinner with some wonderful new friends, the Robersons. Just a small group of 40 for a sit-down dinner and then more folks for dessert. How lovely to be included. I’ve just finished baking two apple pies as our contribution. Beth was excited when I suggested them. I had seen apples in the market and found that they appear to be Granny Smith’s, but when I asked the lady in the stall what they were, she said “Mexican”. So much decent produce seems to come from there. The local produce is pretty scrappy. I hope ours will be better. We’re going to attempt to be as “organic” as possible.

What does Santa do when he makes the decision to move to the tropics. He brings down his suit and visits the kids, of course. Art has had a wonderful time bringing Santa to so many of the children in the area. For those of you not familiar with my wonderful husband, he has been a professional mall Santa for 9 years. This year he decided to forego the grueling 6 weeks and just visit the local kids here in Cayo.
He started at a party for the Anglican School in San Ignacio, which has a large population of AIDS affected children. The party was held at a club called Hodies where he saw about 100 children. Two days later he visited the Catholic school in Bullet Tree with 350 students. What a surprise at the size. We almost didn’t agree to going to the RC school because the principal kept asking “what will Santa be bringing for all the kids?” Of course, we all know that ALL gringos are wealthy. Ha! I made the initial visit to the school so that Santa wouldn’t be seen wandering in regular clothes. We agreed that we just didn’t have the funds to bring bags of goodies for 350 kids. One of the teachers phoned and begged him to visit. We did agree to buy some little sweets. As it turned out, most of the teachers had candy for him to hand out. The other school in the village is Adventist.
Last Saturday, our friend, Bill, who owns a little restaurant called “Mom’s” held a free party for kids. He furnished hot dogs and juice, a bag of fruit and a present for each child. About 45 folks donated gifts to the cause, but sweet Bill footed the rest from his own pocket. He doesn’t have a family and was so pleased to be able to do this for the children. In four hours, Santa (Art) saw over 600 children. Most were the local kids who had never seen Santa. They were in awe and so excited. When we got there at 2pm they were already lining up. Some of them waited in line for4 hours, just for the chance to touch Santa. Art was frustrated that he didn’t have the time to actually visit with them, but the crush of little ones dictated that he move them thru rapidly. A wonderful photographer, also named Art, took photos. All-in-all it was a fantastic day. Everyone was exhausted, but exhilarated to have had the opportunity to make a special day for the kids.

solar

This is in answer to a question asked by several folks. We brought down 8 Concorde 6v AGM batteries (they're sealed, don't put out a gas so venting is not required and they can be shipped without a hazardous permit), 6 Solarworld 175 watt solar panels and all the stuff that goes with the system. This system cost us $13k US in March, 09. We also brought down a Sundanzer frig and Sundanzer freezer, Grundfos pump for the cistern and 7 DC ceiling fans. Of course, on top of that was shipping. We are extremely conservative with our consumption, but we couldn't be more thrilled with our system's performance. We're still going thru some adjustments, such as getting our marginally powered generator reconfigured to work as a backup. It's surprising tho' that we have been able to find folks who can help us get this all working.

This photo is showing our little setup, which is located in the bodega, just inside the door. We did have vent blocks installed at the top of the bodega walls to provide air flow.

My suggestion to anyone contemplating doing this is, buy as much wire, as many breakers (DC breakers are IMPOSSIBLE to find here) and any other bits and pieces you might need, in the US. Shopping here can be very frustrating and solar is still a new thing here. Lots of things not available and they can't answer many of your questions.

Interior in transition

Hope you'll all be impressed by our fancy house. Actually, for us, it's perfect. We made a choice to not finish the inside of the exterior walls. To us, that would just become a haven for bugs and little critters. We don't have glass windows like we would have in the States and we don't like the louvered glass windows so popular in Belize. We opted instead to have double screened openings with wood shutters which we only close when we'll be gone for a prolonged period of time. The screens the boys built are definitely not elegant and have proven to be quite bulky, but we like them anyway, at least for now. Even when the wind is blowing and the rain is pouring down, we remain dry inside and appreciate the free flow of air. The shutters give us a modicum of security when in use and were cheaper and better looking than the metal bars so much in use in town.

At this point, we don't have kitchen cupboards and we're still looking for wood to finish the wall between the livingroom and bedroom. We're getting there slowly.

A special thing for us was hanging the rug above the computer table. We purchased it on our way down at the Hubbell Trading Post in Arizona.

Photos

As you can see, we still have lots to do. We don't have places for everything yet, so stuff piled around. Oh well!

We're getting terrific results from our solar. It's now dropped down to about 17 degrees, which we've been told is the direction for Belize. Not sure if we'll have to change it in the summer months. The photo looking up at the house was taken from the cistern. We still haven't spent any time trying to get the little Kabota tractor running. That's for another day.

The guest house is a work in progress. The last two days we've spent putting boards up on the wall between the two rooms. We debated about leaving a door between the rooms, but decided that folks will just have to go out one door and in another. I'm sure whichever way we decided at some point we'll wish we'd done the other. Such is life!

When I find them, I'll post a photo of our solar setup.

November update

November update
Wow, I didn’t realize that I haven’t updated my blog since the first of October. We’ve been really busy trying to get out little place livable. We finally moved into our house the first part of November. It’s still not finished, but we’re picking away at projects. What else is new? The house is just 600 sq ft, with a living room/kitchen, bedroom & bath. It’s turning out to be very comfortable and perfect for the two of us. The wonderful thing here is that we have the guest house (which is the two bedrooms above the bodega) for company. That’s a hint to anyone contemplating a visit! We just roughed in a counter in the kitchen and will try to build some cabinets as we can. We’re not carpenters AT ALL, but we’re not trying to impress anyone, just want places for things. The little Mennonite house is still full of dishes, books and beds for the guest house. Progress is slow, but we’ll get there.

We brought down a submersible well pump for the cistern and it’s functioning perfectly. We put in a large pressure tank to get water to all the faucets. We bought a 10 liter, on demand butane water heater which has been a learning process. Our plumbing has it’s foibles, but is working. We won’t talk a lot about our Biolet composting toilet. It’s working ok, but can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone, especially for the money. I’ll post photos of our toilet progression. (now that’s something to look forward to).

The solar is a fantastic success (so far). We still don’t understand how to read all the meters, but we have our lights, DC frig, DC freezer, 2 DC ceiling fans & well pump all working most of the time. We also watch videos at night and use power tools during the day. All indications are that we’re not even putting a dent in our capacity. Yippee!

We drove down from the States in our lovely little 2000 Toyota Tundra. Well, the poor little thing isn’t quite so lovely now. It’s truly a “Belize” vehicle. The main street in San Ignacio is Burns Avenue. It’s a single lane, one-way, street. The weird thing is that the first half of the month you park on the left-hand side of the street. From the 16th on, you park on the right hand side. Anyway, I was driving on Burns with the cars parked on the right. There was a taxi stopped illegally on the left and just as I started to drive past it the passenger in the back opened the door INTO THE SIDE OF THE TOYOTA! ! ! By the time I realized what had happened & got stopped, the door had dented and scratched every panel on the driver’s side. I won’t go into the whole hassle of the thing, but we had to spend the whole afternoon in the police station and various insurance offices. He admitted the fault, but not sure about his insurance. It’s another “Oh Well” at this point. We did find a body shop (generous term) and got an appraisal (which you have to pay for) for the insurance company. $2,000 Bz. At least it’s drivable and with the help of the body shop, the door now opens.

The first part of the month Art traveled back to Oregon to visit the VA. His diabetes is always a concern, so will maintain that connection. He’s lost 30 lbs and is doing wonderfully. We’re pretty pleased and proud of ourselves as I’ve actually lost the same amount. The heat, work and lack of refrigeration, limiting our food choices all contributed to our success. Hope it keeps going.

Well dear friends & family, that’s it for today. I promise to do better with updates and will add photos.

Our solar is working ! ! !

After lots of dollars spent running our generator, we finally are getting our power from the sun! Fantastic. It's all thanks to our wonderful friend, Robin, who spent lots of hours here putting it together for us. He generously said that we could have done it ourselves, but we both have serious doubts that we could have. Anyway, the batteries are running my internet receiver right now. We still have a long ways to go. Our large appliances are DC and they still have to be wired in. It's frustrating here, because so many things aren't available. Instead of pluggin our frig and freezer in, we'll have to wire them in because you can't buy the plugins here. Little things like that can be irritating, but we're managing ok.

I'm posting a couple of photos, but you'll note that the solar panels are at an extreme angle for here. They look positioned more for Oregon or Colorado. We're going to cut the legs off about half way for "winter" here and then when the sun moves more to the north again in the "summer" we'll probably lay the panels down flat on the porch roof. We'll learn as we go, but so excited to finally have some of our plan working.

Belize carwash

Our poor Toyota was still sporting the mud from Mexico, so during our most recent DOWNPOUR, I headed out, bucket and cloth in hand, and washed it. The heavens provided and I used it. Of course, it got dirty again right away, but I felt quite resourceful.

Now, all of you who don't know me, can see that I'm a not thin, not young, Grandmother, who's having the adventure of a lifetime.

Second thoughts!

RETHINKING
We’ve now been in Belize for 5 weeks and have faced our “cold feet” dilemma. My gosh, what have we done? We’re still camping in our guest rooms. Hauling water from the Rotoplast, no electricity, except the 2 hrs a nite we allow ourselves with the generator and IT’S HOT! We’ve been here before when it’s hot,, but we’ve been where we had ceiling fans to make it bearable. That’s another thing we don’t have – ceiling fans! I can’t believe that we’re actually hoping it will rain. It’s difficult to phone home to Oregon and hear that it’s 80 during the day and 40 at night. Here we’re lucky if it’s below 80 at night. Our poor non-complaining Bailey, just looks at us with a soulful look to say, WHAT IN THE HECK WERE YOU THINKING, BRINGING ME HERE! He ‘s actually wooled up again for winter just a couple of weeks ago, but now his system has realize that it’s not going to snow here and he’s dropping hair like crazy. Of course the biggest complaint is that we seem to be blowing thru money like drunken sailors (sorry if that offends anyone).
Art and I have had a couple of worry sessions together, asking ourselves if this was really such a good idea. We’re realizing that we’re not Wonder Man/Woman and that there are a lot of things that we don’t know how to do. Did we bite off more than we can chew? We really don’t know diddly squat about how to install our solar. We relied on Backwoods Solar to advise us on what to buy and now we’re staring at all this good stuff and don’t have clue what to do with it. Why can’t I be “Bewitched” , twitch my nose and have everything just pop into shape?
We now have a cistern that was filling when it rained and a pump, but how to install it? We are really dumb when it comes to all this off-grid stuff, but we want to learn. It’s just hard to slowly learn while you’re doing without.
A nasty dilemma has been the road up to our place. It’s a 60 foot wide “government” road, which we’ve been told we can’t touch, but it’s nothing more than a dirt track which gets very slippery when wet, not allowing anyone up who doesn’t have a 4-wheel drive vehicle. This has been a huge matter of frustration for us.
A really tough one is when we phone home. I know, we wanted to spend some time just worrying about our own problems, but can’t turn off our love and concern for our kids and grandchildren. We hear the “we miss you’s” and the ups and downs of their lives and feel that we should be there for them. What really tugged at me was talking to our grandsons and then to our daughter, Kris. We chatted for a bit and then she wanted to go check on our grandsons because Tyler was crying. He’s a big boy and doesn’t cry anymore, but we’ve always been around for them and now we’re not. I hate that part of this. On the other hand, we are relaxing and enjoying being “retired.”
We really miss our wonderful friends and family. Our neighborhood potlucks are fantastic- great food and delightful people.
Ok, we’ve hashed over the negatives and realize that they are real, but we looked at all this before we made this move. Granted, reality is a lot more difficult than theory, but most of the building/adjusting stuff will get resolved and a real life will set in.
We’ve found a terrific friend who has a large solar system and has agreed to help us install ours. We also have great young men who have worked on building our place ,who can do the hard stuff like putting the solar panels up on the guest house roof. We know that our system is fairly small, but we’ll use it first and improve it later.
Our wonderful builder, Amelio, has been studying about our cistern pump and can install that, help with our minimal plumbing and do much of the wiring. See, some of this stuff will fall into place. We took the plunge and had an internet dish installed on our bare shell of a house. That has been one of the greatest bits of comfort to me. We can keep in contact with the other world called the US.
We found a fellow to put in a driveway, of sorts, and a parking area so we won’t get stuck in our own yard, and when he gets time (so Belizean)he’ll bring up a grader to fine-tune our area and bring up a load of gravel for the government road (to heck with “don’t touch it”) so that we may find the way up to our place less unfriendly and intimidating.
We’ve made friends here in Belize over the last few years as we made trips down to explore and make improvements to our place. We were just invited to a brunch with a lovely group, some we knew already and many we had never met. It dampens somewhat, the pain of missing our old friends.
When we step back and look at what we’re creating here and how we want to spend the next few years, we realize that we made a good decision. I’m sitting at our makeshift table, it’s hot here, and I can hear the thunder from the clouds working their way around us, but I feel that rain will come soon. Rather than worry about putting in wood for the winter, or getting the snow blower serviced, here we’ll worry about wet and dry.
OK, we’re putting our second thoughts away for another time and plunging forward, like we had good sense. We know that some will try to scam us, because we must be “rich Americans” LOL, if they only knew, and we’ll have a few “downs”, but over all, it feels exciting and right for now.
Love to you all, Gale

Our stuff arrives

OUR STUFF ARRIVES

I have to preface this by saying that I was afraid of going into Belize City, so kept putting off going into the BTB to finalize our QRP. Not sure if I mentioned that I got an email when we were on the road saying that we had been approved, but it wouldn’t be final until we went into the office and paid the fee. (Of course)
I got a phone call from Roy (our mover) that the container with our things and others, would be traveling thru Customs in 15 minutes. Wow! Did we have our QRP papers? Of course not. All we could do is tell him to do his best at getting us thru at a minimal cost. We brought down our solar system, including batteries, DC appliances, some furniture, tools and LOTS OF BOOKS! These books included several boxes that we want to donate to a school here in Bullet Tree. I won’t go into the details, but I will say that Roy got us thru very gently. Thank you Roy.
Roy Pascascio (Roy & Son Trucking) and Nena, are wonderful. He actually handled this door-to-door. What a relief. He took a chance coming up here in his very large Isuzu box truck. It’s only rear wheel drive with duals in the back. Of course, it rained the night before, so as you can imagine, he couldn’t make it up the hill. We were all going nuts trying to figure out what to do. A neighbor who has a lumber mill with a couple of huge loaders had helped us before, but this time, neither piece of equipment was functioning. We couldn’t stand to see our sorely missed items stranded on that slippery slope, so, TADA! the Toyota Tundra to the rescue. We hooked a chain on our truck and helped the big truck enough to get up. Boy did we feel powerful.
Roy had a couple of fellows with him and we called to Rene for help so altogether we had about 6 guys offloading our things into the Mennonite house. I knew it had to have a function sooner or later.
I have to admit that we’re still not into our house yet, so haven’t unwrapped most of our things, but so far, except for one chair, everything made it in great shape.
We did have one little hitch which may be of help to someone else. We were bringing down a very small, very old, Kubota tractor. It’s not much larger than a lawn mower. Well, it got held up by US Customs as we had to have a NOTARIZED BILL OF SALE. We had a receipt that had everything spelled out on it, but that wouldn’t suffice. We had to contact the seller (who happened to be our next door neighbor in Bend, and have him write one up, get it notarized and get it to us or to Roy. It went slightly astray, so the tractor and rototiller are coming on the next load. Not sure how we’ll fare with customs, but will have to wait and see. It’s actually a 1980, so definitely for home use, not commercial.

work continues

I'm not a very good blog updater. Sorry about that. We've been awfully busy, just trying to keep up with running errands and buying (spending) for our project. I can't believe the stuff we're continuing to learn. Wire sizes, direct current is a whole different animal, conduit, wiring & pipe for the cistern and the list goes on. Seems that we fairly live in Spanish Lookout. For all our friends and family who haven't been here, SL is about 10 miles from Bullet Tree if you go either by the crank ferry or take the back road which will shake your teeth out, or 15+ miles if you want to take a better road but travel further. With gas running at about $8.65/gallon bz, the shorter routes usually win.

We're still in the guest house, but are making headway. The boys should be finished with the basic construction this weekend. Then it's our turn to get a few tasks done, ie finishing the floors and the ceiling.

This Monday is a holiday and there's all sorts of excitement. They're celebrating Belize's independence, I think 28 years ago.

Right now I just want to update with a couple of photos of our progress. Hope you enjoy our little adventure.

My office!

Just so you realize just how sophisticated we are down here, I want to share an overview of what I have to do to publish these posts. First, before we had much more that a skeleton of a house, I was tired of wandering around, trying to find a WIFI site (there are maybe three in San Ignacio) or finding an internet cafe that had a connection that didn't take hours to make, so we jump in and had Computer Ranch fellows come out and install a dish. I still find it hysterical to look outside and see the dish on a zinc roof, surrounded by jungle trees. 21st Century here we come!

Now for the fun part. This connection is in our little house, but we're still in the "guest house", so I pack up the laptop, turn on the generator which we only run for two hours each night and I trudge over with my laptop and flashlight to my Office. I have to find where the fellows left the extension cord to plug in my receiver (which I keep in a cardboard box to keep it dry and clean) and away I go. Right now I can hear the crickets, cicadas and the generator and can see the lightning moving off to the SW. Cool, but weird.

Noise - part 2

The “chicken frog” was funny. There are now 2 of them, occasionally chatting with each other during the day. Not a problem. We’ve been taking it all in stride and enjoying the humor and strangeness of the sounds. What an adventure.
It’s now 2am and the humor is gone! We must have a goose in the trees. What is it? Now it’s a boy on a bicycle, honking his infernal horn. Blat, blat, blat –blat—blat, blat, blat. Oh my gosh. It’s another frog, only this guy only comes out to serenade his hoped for love during the night. Ugh! It’s the most incredible, LOUD, sound. It envelopes the night. Now it changes to sound as tho’ he has his head in a metal drum. Honk, honk. Sometimes I can hear an answering honk, off in the jungle. Sure wish he’d take the hint and go to her. Maybe this one is the female and she’s waiting for him. Can’t imagine what that serenade would sound like. Occasionally the chicken frog on the roof decides to compete, but his little clucking sounds can’t begin to cut it.
At 4am I’m now fully awake, trying anything to block out the cacophony of frog sounds. Wrapping the pillow around my head has no affect. I can hear Bailey scooching under the bed, pushing his head against the stored suitcases. I hear his disgusted signs as he’s also trying to sleep. Visions of our lovely house in the cool mtns of Oregon dance thru my head. What have we gotten ourselves into?
Magically, at about 6am, the honking diminishes, now to be blocked out by the hoards (I know they’re flocks, but they sound louder than a mere flock) of parrots come alive. They seem to love to spend the night in some of the trees to the south of our house. The crescendo of sound is impossible to ignore. All right! I’m up. Good gravy. When we lived in the “real world” I loved to stay up until midnight, watching TV or reading, then to get up about 7:30 or 8am. Here, if you want to get any sleep at all, it’s lights out at 9 – 10pm and up at 6am.
Through the day we’re so busy trying to make this our home that we rarely pay attention to the competing sounds of the Brown Jays, parrots, and once in a while a Toucan. Our generator & the boys pounding in nails add to the cacophony of our jungle home. Anyone who thinks the jungle is quiet has never been here.