land of the free by the carib sea

we’ve been in belize nearly a week and it’s still hard to believe that we get to live here for the next two years. we’ve been living the good life here in belmopan, with hot showers and AC, as well as delicious chinese food and wireless internet. all 43 of us have been together this week, learning the basic ins and outs of peace corps and our new home, belize. tomorrow we all ship out to our training villages, where we’ll be staying with host families for the remainder of training. coy and i are headed to a village in the west of belize, near san ignacio. two other education volunteers will live in the same village, as well as our language and cultural facilitator. we will learn spanish (wahoo!), and our eventual site placement will be somewhere in the north of the country (in either orange walk or corozal district).
we’ve learned so much this week and would love to share every last nugget of information. for the sake of everyone’s sanity, we have instead elected to share a few beautiful images we’ve managed to capture over the course of this busy week.

the view from our hotel in belmopan. not bad, eh? the city wakes up slowly, and coy and i have been enjoying some early morning runs in the deserted and COOL streets.
our hotel room, luxurious as it can be. certainly a whole new standard of comfort from what we are used to, but we appreciate every bit we can get…plastic wrapped beds and all.

dangriga is the cultural hub of the garifuna community here in belize. it’s a beautiful and energetic town located on the coast.

cassava bread is made after a series of arduous tasks necessary to create flour. here is the basked used for drying the cassava.

young masked garifuna men perform a special dance typically seen at christmas time.

the beach behind the garifuna cultural center attracts many members of the community.



a wonderful demonstration of modernized garifuna drum making.

we have enjoyed every moment of our stay in belize thus far, and look forward to moving in with our family tomorrow, where the real adventure begins. the biggest shock has probably been the humidity, but we will soon adapt to that (we hope). here in the capital we can find most anything we would need, including many of the brands of food and toiletries we are used to. for being the smallest capital city in the world (literally), belmopan has many comforts of home.
we hope to be able to update again soon, but battling 41 other volunteers for the wireless connection at the office is not always at the top of our list. however, we will try our best to keep everyone posted on our exciting adventures and share more of the wonders of belize.