In the centre of town, I look around at the creole eateries, the chinese grocery and the mayan vegetable stalls. Here in Punta Gorda there is a wonderful mix of peoples - garafuna, mayan, creole, east indian and spanish communites live side by side, each with their own traditions and languages or dialect. English is the common language of Belize, but you wouldn't necessarily know it by walking around town.
We pick up bits of local history from everyone we meet. Each community has an interesting story. The hardworking mayans with their citrus and chocolate farms have picturesque wooden homes with thatched roofs. Their story is better known to us from our time in the yucatan peninsula.
There are lots of creole people, deriving from a spanish and african background. Creole language is based on english, but as hard as we tried, we could never undertand a full sentence.
Garafuna, the majority of the PG population, have a history beginning as slaves on ships destined for labour in the Americas, but ending up on the Belizean mainland and integrating into local communities.
Chinese immigrants have more recently created a strong presence as small business owners. This is sometimes resented by the other local ethnic groups who do not compete well with shops that are open through the afternoon 'break' time.
And of course there are the incoming Europeans, Americans and Canadians who are setting up or visiting resorts, restaurants and dive shops. One of these is Rachel Graham who owns the gueshouse we're staying in, called Blue Belize.
Rachel, aka The Shark Lady, is an award winning shark scientist who lives in PG with her 2 young sons. A few years back, she designed her perfect home and guesthouse: light and spacious, with oversized decks and balconies, a variety of fruit and palm trees and well fortified against tropical storms. The boys fell in love with the place as soon as they spied the 3 dogs and a tree swing in the front garden. Finding out that there were 2 boys living there was the icing on the cake.
Like me, Rachel lived in America and then England. Following her studies, she moved to Belize and became heavily involved in shark perservation projects. Her work and her life are very impressive .. as I found, when she was able to take a day's break from research and campaigning projects such as 'Kids Meet Sharks 2011'. Seriously, how cool would it be to have a shark scientist for a mom?
In any event, Rachel's son Xavi, who is 8 years old like Ben, quickly became buddies with our boys and taugh them a bit about fishing on the local pier at Bamboo Chicken. Xavi caught a juvenile toad fish (the crazy looking fish in the pic below) and a couple of small grunts. He's already a great fisher at 8 years old. Unfortunately, as Ben was holding the fish, a group of local boys gathered roudn and declared it was a poison grouper, meaning it could kill or seriously hurt you if it scratched you. Ben screamed and dropped the poor fish and was insisting I take him to the hospital because he wasn't feeling well - it's spines had scratched his hand. Xavi, having been raised with a fisherman and a fish scientist, insisted that the boys were mistaken, it was similar but not the same. Fortunately Polly (and later Rachel) came along and told us it was actually a juvenile toadfish, which is quite rare to catch. Ben's symptoms did settle down eventually.
We all all enjoyed having Xavi and his dimple-cheeked little brother Gabriel around. We kept them for dinner at Bamboo Chicken, where there are rope swings on the deck and local boys played garafuna drums while we had dinner.
Xavi knows so much about local life and on the last day he delighted my boys by showing them how to open coconuts with a machete (while I watched their bare toes nervously in the background!!). He did know how to show them to stand back and slice just the top section . Boys and machetes, what a mix!
Finally, we did have to leave the home comforts of Blue Belize for our final week on ReefCI's island. Never mind, we are planning to follow Rachel's work from afar and email the boys a bit.
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