Expat jerks: This is not a test

We decided that even if something falls through and we don’t end up owning this property, we need more room. We’ve been living in the trailer with it still packed, which means the entire nose and table area is floor to ceiling boxes, and we have about 2 ½ feet over our bed and then the shelf to the ceiling is filled with boxes of clothes. If it’s too cold or wet or buggy to eat outside, we put our little camp chairs in the aisle of the camper and eat off a little square end table with our knees around our chins and our drinks perched on the edge of the counter. We’ve stripped the paneling out of both cabins, so we have plenty of room for storage, so we’re just going to suck it up and unload and cross our fingers that we don’t have to repack and move. Today we started emptying the nose of the trailer. We got to the seven and a half foot high birdcage, which is full of small, last minute things that we stuffed through the doors as we were packing to leave Canadice. Then Ofelia showed up because she and Tom had planned to go to San Ignacio to see the circus, so she and Tom left for San Ignacio and I got a couple of laundry baskets out of the pile and emptied the birdcage. The promise of more room is way more exciting than it should be, even though we’ll have to finish tomorrow when we’re both here in the light!

Tom went to San Ignacio with Ofelia, only to find out that the circus animals had been moved out of town the day before. So, they went to the market and then went out to lunch. Tom came back spitting mad, because they went to a little hole in the wall diner called Pop’s (which has great breakfasts and lunches as a good diner should), and as they were eating three American expats started talking to him and asking what he was doing in Belize. When he told them we were buying property on the Pine Ridge, they immediately started trash talking Belize and the Belizeans. One old guy has been here 15 years and he kept saying he loves the weather here but hates the people. The other 2 women live in Blackman Eddie and have been robbed numerous times and have had dogs killed. They said they sleep with tazers and machetes at their bedsides, and that a serial killer who chopped 14 people was just picked up in their town. The two women are missionaries – I guess God doesn’t protect all people all the time, or maybe there are just stupid missionaries, just like there are stupid people in every other line of work.

This conversation made Tom mad for a couple of reasons. The big one was that he was eating lunch with Ofelia, who is obviously a Belizean. Perhaps they thought she didn’t speak English, or maybe that she was just too stupid to know what they were talking about, or, as a gringa neighbor here suggested later, that she was Tom’s little chicky (the neighbor’s words) who would do anything to be paired with a rich American, so it just didn’t matter that they were being so rude. Tom said that as the people said things about how the Belizeans couldn’t be trusted, and how they would stab you in the back and steal and lie and kill your dogs, he kept turning to Ofelia and asking if her family does any of those things. She played along, and Tom told the people that perhaps they should just make better choices about who their friends and neighbors are. They acted as if he were utterly naïve, and sooner or later he would discover the truth in their words.

The other reason this conversation bothered him is that there seems to be this pervasive idea here that most Americans aren’t equipped to live here, and it’s a test to see if they can come and stay for a year or longer. When people find out that we’ve just moved here, they assume that we never visited before, and that we heard about Belize being paradise and bought property over the internet, and that we’re now here planning to live on next to nothing amid some happy but stupid natives. Expats who have been here for a few years shake their heads when we tell them what we’re doing, emanating sympathy for the hard knocks they know we’re going to blithely walk into as we try to live here, and saying that they’d like to talk to us in a year to see how we feel then, if we’re still here. We may be totally off base, but we don’t think moving here is a decision we made lightly. We’ve visited four times in the past two years, in four different seasons, and Tom spent two months living here in the spring. We spent over a year planning for the move, and figuring out what we wanted to do when we got here. We made an offer on a property relatively quickly, but we looked at close to 20 properties, researched costs for improvements, and we feel that our accepted offer was a fair price for the property we’re buying.

And, we don’t consider moving here to be a test. If it turns out that we don’t like it here, we’ll pack up, head back to the states, and go back to professional jobs without feeling like we’ve failed. Failure, in our minds, would be not trying to do something different and exciting. We also recognize that Belize isn’t perfect. There are evil people here who do bad things, just like every other place in the world. We could have been robbed driving through Mexico, and we could be robbed here, and there are definite dangers for our dogs between venomous snakes and jerks who think it’s funny to chop a dog with a machete, but we do what we can to minimize those risks by not leaving our stuff out to be stolen, and by keeping the dogs contained or very close to us if they’re out for exercise. I’m sure we’ll end up spending most of our savings on improvements to the property, banking on making a go of the B&B and making money, but even if we spend every cent we have and never have a guest, we can return to the US, get jobs, and probably still be less in debt than most Americans – and we’ll have had a great experience in the meantime. We know we’re living in a different culture here, but that’s part of what’s exciting and rewarding about this move. It would be easy to live in the US and have our 9 to 5 jobs and know we can always go to The Olive Garden for a good meal, but it seems like more fun to us to work to understand how other people live, and to learn to adjust to fit into their culture and way of life – not to make them conform to ours, which seems to be what most of the unhappy expats want. We’re making mistakes every day, but we’re learning from them, and the problem solving part of our life here is a big part of the reason we’re having fun and looking forward to every day as an opportunity to learn.

The other thing Tom did while he was out was pick up windows he had ordered in Spanish Lookout. We decided to jump the gun just a little, and order windows so that as soon as we close we can spray the first cabin for termites and then close it up to store our stuff and to allow us to move out of the camper. Even if this falls through, we can either resell the windows which are made to stock sizes for the Mennonite houses, or save them and build a place for us around the windows. Once we close, the first thing we’re going to buy is a couple of water tanks. The property has water piped in from the road, but it’s not very dependable. Sometimes the pressure is good and the water is clean, and sometimes nothing more than a muddy drip comes out of the pipe when the valve is opened. With the camper, our daily strategy has been to check to make sure the water is clean and flowing, then to fill the camper tank, which gives us more than enough water for cooking, washing, and showering for the day (at this point we buy drinking water in 5 gallon jugs). When we move into one of the cabins, we’ll probably need more water for “normal” showers, so we’ll need more of a reserve, and this need will only grow as we finish guest cabins and have more people on the property. We’re learning how to tell when the water supply will be good, since it seems to depend on what chores the people are doing down line. On the weekend, especially if it’s a little overcast, the water supply is pretty good. Sunny days during the week are when we get the muddy drip, and my theory is that everybody down line is doing their laundry and cleaning. One of the things we’re learning is how to manage water needs when you live at the end of the water line.

We heard the howler monkeys this afternoon for the first time since we’ve been here. Neighbors say they move in and out of the neighborhood, and they’re happy that the monkeys are still pretty far from here, since when they’re around they’re noisy all day and night. Neighbors have also asked if we’ve seen the toucans; we haven’t, yet, but we’re keeping a close eye on the trees that bear fruits that we know attract toucans. There are plenty of loudmouthed parrots around, and bunches of birds we don’t recognize, so there’s always something new to see.