Lilac Colored Glasses

Have I ever mentioned the two weeks I spent in Belize right before I turned 20?

No?

There are so many interesting little anecdotes from that particular trip but talking about all of them at once would take a long time to read and an even longer time to write.  Best to begin at the beginning, right? We’ll go with our first night in Belize; that’s a good topic for this week’s flashback.

I believe it was my sophomore year in college when I decided to declare an anthropology minor.  I had had Intro to Anthropology my second semester freshman year and I fell in love with it.  It was everything I loved about psychology plus history, biology and multicultural studies; basically it was perfect for many of my interests, but I knew I’d have a hard time finding a job outside of university grant research, so I left it as a minor.  Anyway, I took several anthropology classes sophomore year, feeding my avid interest as much as possible (as well as some honors course requirements) and finally that summer an opportunity arose that was possibly one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the chance to participate in.  A 4 credit anthro class was offered on site at a Mayan excavation site in Belize!

Had I ever heard of Belize before? No!

Did it matter? No!

Did I go and write up a proposal as soon as possible to get R.E.C.H.C. grant money in order to go? Hell yeah I did!

My proposal was accepted and I registered for the three week course (one week crash course on Mayan culture and two weeks travelling to different temple locations in Belize).  This is another story altogether, but between the time I registered for the class and it actually began I had broken up with my first (first everything, if you get my meaning) boyfriend*.   Suffice it to say I was NOT Miss Sunshine during my trip to the jungle, but I still learned a lot and got to see and do some really cool things.

After that week long deluge of archaelogic and cultural/mythological information regarding Mayan civilization , 18 anthropology students and 2 proffessors (Dr. Sara and Dr. Bev) boarded a plane in the Greater Pittsburgh Airport (there’s no Lesser Pittsburgh Airport, so I’m not sure why this one is greater) and headed off to Belize.  We stopped in Austin and got on the smallest plane I’d ever been on to fly down to Belize.  The international airport in Belize consisted of two runways and a small concrete building with a tin roof where we went through “customs”.  A few people stopped in the bathroom before we all got our gear and headed off to find the aqua painted tour bus that was to be our means of transportation for most of our trip.  When they came out, they were all pale.  One girl squeaked, “Dude, there were cockroaches in there!”

See, thing was, we were all prepared for ancient Mayan civilization, but in no means were we truly ready for present day Belizian culture.

The first four days of the trip were spent at a satallite camp of the archaeological site called Dos Hombres.  Our camp, as I said, was not the main camp at the site.  It was located quite a ways into the Belizean jungle.  Far enough in that we often had to cut our way through to places with a machete. That meant that fresh palatable water had to be piped in and was limited in supply.  There were a block of outhouses, a block of shower stalls (if you took longer than a three minute shower, the guy in charge threw rocks in over the top of your stall to “remind” you to get out, a mess tent, the dormitory (for whatever group of students was passing through at the time) which was built on top of a small lab, a smoking/socializing area that had no walls, just mosquito netting, and the quarters of the permanent staff.  Of the 18 students, 17 were girls, plus the two profs.  The lucky odd man out got his very own tent while the rest of us chose little cubicles in the dorm to sleep in for the next 4 nights.   The dorm was large and rectangular with dark plywood sheets erected to form a honeycomb of tiny “rooms” with a winding central hallway that led from one end to the other.  Each cubicle contained two sets of bunkbeds and enough room to get into and out of them.  Lights out was at 10 pm sharp, even outside in the smoking area.  Because Belize is so close the equator, it gets about equal hours of sunshine, and night, regardless of the season.  In fact, they really only have two seasons: rainy and not rainy; it’s always hot.  So despite the fact that it was mid May (my birthday is May 30th and that was actually the day we left Belize), the sun still set around 5 pm.

That first night, with all of our things stowed in our chosen rooms, our bellies full of rice, refried beans, tortillas and papaya, and our ears full of the stories from the regular staff that hung out in the smoking area, we wandered back to the dorms, hung our nasty, sweat soaked clothes up on nails to air out (clothes can only air so much in the jungle, so everything was perpetually damp), shut the lights out, and went to sleep.

An hour or so later a horrified scream shook all of us awake.  I shot up in my bed as did the girl I was sharing a room with.  We were both afraid to throw shoes on because it was pitch black and we couldn’t check our shoes for scorpions with no light.  We fumbled around for flashlights while the scream rang out again in the darkness.  I could see flashlights snapping on and could hear Dr. Sara and Dr. Bev dashing from room to room, trying to figure out what was happening and who had screamed.  Finally word was mumbled back through the thin walls: one of the girls had woken up to feel something tickling her nose and when she went to brush it off, she realized that the tickle was from a moth the width of her handspan that had settled right on her face.  I don’t know about you, but I think if I were in that situation, I very well might have screamed too.  Needless to say, none of us got much sleep for the rest of our first night in Belize!

*We’d been together for two years and the break up was very hard on both of us, but more so on me I think, because I did the breaking up and by the time I realized I’d made a mistake, he had partially moved on.  I lost 30 pounds in one month that summer.  I was so depressed that I barely ate…just ran on the treadmill and chainsmoked.  Eventually I met the asshat and that pulled me out of my funk, but only long enough to be betrayed by said fuckwad…again, totally different story.