I found plenty to entertain me for the day. I finished ripping down the paneling in the first cabin, and attacked the walls that had been erected for the bathroom. I was finishing that around lunchtime, and one of the girls from next door showed up. Our dogs had been in the camper with just the screen door shut, and one of the dogs from next door had wandered over with her. Just as she said hi and started to introduce herself, Mel, Nock, and Lou burst out of the camper and took off down the driveway chasing poor Rex. Mel and Lou stopped at the gate, but Nock went after him down the road. I had visions of Nock getting to their houses and fighting with all the other dogs, killing all of their chickens, and generally wreaking havoc, so I went after her at a run. Nock must be mellowing, because as I passed our property line and had her in sight, she gave up the chase and came back to me, despite the many temptations. I took her back, put the three of them in the camper and shut the door, and met Rosa.
Rosa is 16, and is only home Sunday and Monday because she works and stays at one of the resorts up the road. She finished public school and just graduated from a school where she took courses on skills needed to work at the resorts – guest relations, cooking, waitressing, housekeeping, administration, and whatever other skills are needed to work in the tourism industry here. She is Ofelia’s sister, and I at first mistook her as Ofelia since they look very much alike. We started talking, and she was a huge source of information for me. We walked around, and she explained all the different types of citrus to me. A few days before that I had tasted oranges from a few trees, and found one that was large, like a navel orange, but was very sour, and another, that looked like Clementines, that was also very sour. I mentioned this to Rosa, and she started to laugh. The oranges, she said, are sour oranges and are used only for juice and as a marinade. She was hysterical over the fact that I’d eaten one of the “Clementines,” since they’re not oranges, they’re limes – which would explain why it tasted more like a lime than an orange. Who knew ripe limes were orange? She showed me another lime tree with a different variety of limes, which also turn orange when ripe, although they’re not as orange as the first, and they are frequently picked green because they keep longer that way.
Besides the local flora, Rosa also told me about the local fauna. She explained about the scorpions being more dangerous when they’re laying their eggs, and told me which snakes to watch out for – the black and yellow snakes, and the red and black snakes. She said that she hasn’t seen one of the black and yellow ones, which are the tommygoffs/fer-de-lances/some Spanish name I can’t remember, but rumor has it that there is one that lives in the hills between here and San Antonio which is so big that it can’t be killed, and which kills farmers’ cows. When I asked how big, Rosa made a circle with her arms with just her fingers touching, and said it was also very long. I suddenly understood where the dragon myths began, and why giant serpents decorate the Mayan ruins we’ve visited. She said she has seen the red and black snakes, which are coral snakes, but that they usually bury themselves in the ground to avoid people. She also told a horrifying story of a boa in the hen house, swallowing live chickens. When they killed the boa, they took one of the chickens out of its throat, and the chicken was still alive although every bone in its body was broken. After giving the willies with all of these horror stories, Rosa went home and I continued to work on the cabin.
Later that afternoon, Rosa returned with her mother, Marta (not the first Marta, but Julio’s wife), her brother Hector, her little sister Sulmi, and her aunt, Ulni. Marta and Ulni hadn’t seen Mel, so I took them all into the now stripped cabin to meet the dogs. They were looking at what I had done, when Rosa spotted one of the lizards I’d uncovered on the wall. She looked at Marta and Ulni, and they all spoke very fast, and Rosa informed me that the lizards aren’t geckos, but lizards, and that they’re poisonous and should be killed. I had read that there weren’t any poisonous lizards in Belize, but decided that if the locals are cautious about something, I was going to be cautious too. I said that I was afraid to kill them because I didn’t want them falling on me, and that I would wait until Tom got home. Rosa informed me that if I had some big sticks, they would kill the lizards for me. So, I dug through the pile of paneling and lumber I’d thrown out the window and found a couple of 8 foot 1x2s, gave one each to Marta and Ulni, and learned what Belizean women do for entertainment in the afternoon.
The lizards were all 6 or 8 feet up on the walls, Ulni would give a lizard a good whack, and when it fell in the ground, Marta would beat it with the stick. Sometimes they weren’t immobilized after Ulni’s first whack, so then we would all shriek and skitter away from the lizard writhing on the floor. Most of them lost their tails when they were whacked, and the tails would twitch spasmodically for a good minute or two. Rosa told me that the tails are as dangerous as the mouths, even when they’re off the lizard, so we’d all watch the tails until they stopped twitching, jumping back and yelping if the tail twitched too close or started to twitch again after it had stopped. When they had killed all they could, I got a rake and a shovel, collected all the lizards and their tails, and buried them. Then they interviewed me to make sure I had the proper level of fear of snakes and lizards, and I assured them that while I probably wouldn’t run screaming if I saw a snake or lizard, I wouldn’t try to make friends with it either, and if it was somewhere dangerous, I’d find somebody to kill it for me.
One of the poisonous lizards
This was all done with lots of laughing. Rosa had also told them that I’d eaten a lime, so they teased me about that and we did another tour of the trees on the property and they were very clear to make sure I knew which ones were good to eat, and which were good only for juice or seasoning. I also had a lesson in picking citrus. Rosa showed me how to get a long stick with a fork at the end, and how to use the stick to wrap the branch of the fruit and pull it down gently so it doesn’t split, rather than just whacking at it. At one point I decided that I didn’t want to use the stick, so I got the camper steps and reached up to pick some grapefruit by hand, and found a big nest of ants in the clump of grapefruit. Of course the ants fell all over me as I pulled the grapefruit down, and I learned why hyper people are accused of having ants in their pants, since I jumped all around smacking and brushing, trying to get the ants off before they started to bite. Fortunately Tom brought home a real citrus picker on a long telescoping pole, so I probably won’t have to worry too much about pulling ants down on top of me or about perfecting the forked stick technique.
Somewhere along the line we started talking about food and cooking with what grows around here, and they discovered that I didn’t know how to make coconut rice, which is a staple. Ofelia is the coconut rice expert, and she was out for the day, so Rosa told me that as soon as Ofelia got home, they would come show me how to make the rice. Just as Tom pulled in, Rosa, Ofelia, and their younger sister Iris came up the driveway. They walked with me into the bushes to select an appropriate coconut, and told me what else I would need – a machete to split the coconut, a grater, a strainer, a bowl, and a pot. Julio, their father, and Damion, their uncle, had come with them to see Mel, so Julio split the coconut for us with one of the machetes Tom had purchased on his first shopping trip. The men stayed outside and discussed the generator and the weed whacker, and the girls and I went in “our home” to make the rice. The rice came out great, and we threw a few sausages in a frying pan, made a salad, and the five of us had dinner in the camper – our first dinner party!
It was actually sort of funny to us that the machete had been on the list of items needed to make coconut rice, since everyone we encountered had offered to loan us a machete until we got our own. They are apparently considered the tool of the bush, and you really shouldn’t be in the jungle unless you have a machete. It’s used for everything from clearing land to performing minor surgery on pets. Tom had picked up one for each of us the first day out, and Bol had also brought one for us to use, which was still under the camper because he had dropped it off on his way out somewhere, and hadn’t yet picked it up.
After the girls left, Tom told me the story of ordering the windows in Spanish Lookout. After putting the deposit on the property, we have run a little short of cash until we get bank accounts straight between the US and Belize. Tom had talked to the owner of the window store about putting it on a credit card, and while the store doesn’t officially take credit cards, he assured Tom that they could work something out – which they did. It turns out that the Farmers Trading Center (FTC) in Spanish Lookout, which sells everything from food to hardware, does take credit cards. The window store owner buys everything there on a charge account, so Tom’s method of payment for the windows was to take his credit card and the window receipt to the FTC, and pay off the window store owner’s account. The windows were slightly more than the account, but that was no problem – the store owner now has a credit at the FTC.
No comments:
Post a Comment