On the ground in Belize

Well, this is my inaugural blog post! Hopefully I can be at least half as entertaining as Marissa.

We got into Belize about 5:00 local time (although it's central time--the Belizians, like the Arizonans, don't believe in daylight savings--so it's the same time zone as in Provo).

The airport is not very large..in fact we had to flip a u-turn at the end of the runway because there is only one taxiway in the center of the one runway. One way in. One way out.

Now for those of you that travel a lot this may not seem unusual, but we climbed out of the plane onto the tarmac. Not something I've ever done--deplane from a 737 onto the tarmac.

First impression. Humid. Very, very humid. And warm. Very, very warm.

We went through customs and met up with Raymon, our county director and about 10 other volunteers that arrived today. We piled our bags into a trailer, and then climbed into a 15 passenger van and headed west towards San Ignacio.

The roads here are bumpy, to say the least. Mostly two lane affairs winding through the country side. Our Belizian driver whistled and hummed most of the way the there, and he honked and gave shout outs to almost everyone we encountered at the side of the roads along the way. He would say...that's my cousin, or nephew, etc. Quite fun!

We had dinner at Sister Kay's. She a member in the English branch. She cooks for us every night. She's a Creole who speaks heavily accented English. She made us a traditional Creole chicken dish, that was delish! She kind of taken on the role of our Belezian mom while we're here.

We luckily get our own room in our rented house. However it's hot. We managed to make it through the night by stripping down 'til we're barely decent and have a fan blowing on us. Not to mention our guard dogs ( a beautiful german shepherd and a doberman) who keep up a constant cacophony of barking throughout the night. So we feel safe, but are going to have to adjust a little so we can get some good sleep!

No hot water this morning for the showers, but we were okay with that...it felt really good.

So we didn't see a lot of mosquito's--we have screened windows, but I saw a fist-size tarantula up in the corner of the hallway ceiling (which I didn't point out to Maris). And then this morning we had a fist sized cockroach in our kitchen which Calvin (another country director) took off after with a sandal.

So yeah, we're getting exposed to the wonders of Belize!

We'll post more soon with pictures, but for now we're headed off for a team meeting and to work this afternoon!