Another Miss for Belize

Belize was lucky again, although Nicaragua and Honduras took the hit and it looks like Felix will continue to cause plenty of damage from flooding even as a tropical storm. Here, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any effect at all on our weather from Felix. So, thanks again to everybody for your thoughts and prayers for us, and continue them for those who weren’t so lucky with this storm.

Yesterday was a day of frantic preparation for everybody around here. We were still in pretty good shape from cleaning up before Dean, so all we had to do was get the 200 gallons of water off the stand over the roof, and pump water up to our gravity feed tanks on the hill so that we would be assured a good supply of fresh water if the water line was damaged. Our neighbors, however, planned to go to a hurricane shelter in San Antonio, so they were running back and forth all day. I think I spent most of yesterday charging cell phones, 12v batteries, and iPods, handing out our cell phone so people could contact family, checking for the latest Felix report on the computer with the neighbors, and dispensing band aids, garbage bags, and ibuprofen as the neighbors packed to leave, made bread (what Belizeans do in a crisis), and tried to get their houses in order so what was there wouldn’t be too damaged. I manned the fort here and didn’t go over to see what was going on next door, but apparently they were pretty busy because little Zulmi showed up at one point just for a drink of juice – and there are usually at least a half a dozen of her family members just waiting to give her what she wants, so the fact that she came here shows how distracted they were.

Today things are getting back to normal. Nobody is talking about how scared we all were any more, which was a big topic of discussion yesterday, and the kids are looking forward to another week off school, since for some reason the government has suspended classes until September 11th. The country-wide state of emergency was lifted at noon, and offices and business may reopen at any time.


Tom and Selwyn are continuing to work on the second cabin. They finished putting down the floors for the bathrooms this morning, and have been putting up the walls this afternoon. For once, they’ll probably get more done than Tom expected this week, since he figured we’d lose the end of the week to the hurricane, and now it will be just a normal week, for whatever that’s worth around here.