by Amy Yoder, 6-month Caribbean IMMERSION team leader
The 6-month team has been to New York City, Haiti, and Jamaica, and is now living with host families in Belize until they finish their journey in July.
It's another normal morning in the remote Belizean village of 7 Miles...
My family's roosters and chickens cluck and I am quickly reminded of last nights routine crowing from 3-4:30am coupled with my host sisters sleep talking and endless cuddles in our shared bed. I am now sleepily leaning over my journal next to my regular morning meal of beans, tortillas, potatoes and homemade hot sauce, doing my very best to simply stay awake.
The sun is out and my host family is finishing breakfast with me and beginning to busily pack bags of potatoes. I will join shortly to claim my routine task of cleaning the yellowed leaves from the cilantro, so my host Papi can prepare to head to the market to sell his crops latest produce.
As I sit here, the strangeness of how "normal", "regular" and "routine" this all is to my host family hits me.
In 7 Miles...
Most families have no electricity. While some homes have solar panels that are accompanied by small solar lights (similar to the size of old fashioned Christmas light bulbs) most families simply go without or use generators on special occasions. At my home this means each morning at 9am my host Mom turns on the generator and radio to hear her oldest daughter's voice as she DJs in the city, hours away from our home.
Clean water comes out of the faucet fresh from a local spring. The delicious water is pumped to each home, but some days the pipe gets disconnected leaving most of the village without running water for at least a few hours, if not the whole day.
Nearly every home seems to have a "storage room" (and no, I don't mean to store old clothes or Christmas ornaments). These rooms are overflowing with potatoes and other produce until the family can sell them for top dollar at a market in the nearest city.
Attending church isn't a once or twice a week thing out here... oh, no! Going to church is a way of life in Belize. I attend church services five nights a week as well as a morning service on Sunday. Each night of the week provides an opportunity for men, women and children to present songs, testimonies and Bible verses with the congregation, and although these services are spoken only in Spanish, I love being included in this community's time of worship.
Meals consist of primarily fresh veggies (depending on the house you live in and what they farm) accompanied with rice, beans and tortillas. At my home we eat potatoes at every meal, which is totally okay with me!
Wi-Fi and phone reception are nearly non-existent in 7 Miles. Everyone knows about "the rock," aka: the one place anyone with a phone has almost guaranteed phone reception.
In 7 Miles, it isn't out of the norm to come home from church to find a scorpion on my bedroom wall, or to have funny "boy talk" conversations with my 14-year-old host sister. It isn't against the norm to spend a day working out in my host Mom's tomato field, or to have Spanish class with my host Dad as we ride in the back of a pick-up truck into town.
The New Normal
I am loving my time in Belize, and while I recognize that this new normal is temporary I also see this experience as life-giving and life-changing. I know that my hours in the fields and fumbling over my Spanglish are things I won't be doing on a daily basis when I return home. In the U.S. I will never have to think about whether I have access to Wi-Fi, electricity and running water. But here in 7 miles, over the next few weeks I will conclude my IMMERSION journey by living life simply and by embracing this new sense of normal as I go to work alongside my family in their fields, as I take refreshing cold showers, as I eat organic produce at every meal, as I sit in church services that I don't fully understand, and as I listen to my host sister giggle as she tells stories late at night in a room with no light bulbs.
In some ways it has been a very long 4 months since I've felt any sense of "normal." After all, 4 months is a long time to not sleep in my own bed, make and eat food of my choice or to have a quality, uninterrupted or *gasp* hot shower. In other ways, the time has flown by, leaving me to wonder what my "new normal" will look like when I return home in less than 2 months.
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