Please enjoy the latest newsletter from Adrian Bishop and Rosalie Dance, Living Letters volunteers in Belize:
Greetings from Belize City. Thank you for keeping us and our school and the Southside of Belize City in your hearts and minds. We do feel supported by you!
Sandi gave us 8 Izzy dolls to travel with us to Belize. If you are not acquainted with these sweet things, you can learn their history and see pictures here. We have just begun to distribute them, a delicate task because we have more than 8 children! The first recipient was my young friend Elroy. For him, it was a birthday gift on his 14th birthday. I showed it to him and asked him if he would like to have it. His eyes lit up! He said, “Yes, Ma’am!” I told him to talk to it at night. “If you have any problems, any at all, tell him,” I said. With a big smile, he put the doll in his bag and ran toward home.
Then I gave the other 7 to our pastor, Oscar Mmbali, and asked him to distribute them as he saw fit, but to start with a girl, one of 12 children who suffers from severe verbal abuse in her family and was especially sad and hurt a few days ago.
And then to give one to a young boy whose birthday is coming up soon. He will be 12, a very small but very bright child who came to the school after almost being sent to prison for working in a bar at the age of 11. He had been forced to work there. He was successful in making the judge understand that and also that he wanted to be back in Belize City with his mother. He and his sisters had been sent away to an aunt (who owns the bar in her village) because their mother, an alcoholic, was not caring for them. They are back with their mother now, and so far, he is thriving. He is a strong classroom leader. I think he is going to appreciate having someone to talk things over with at night, too.
There are so many things that could be better at our school, and some of them are beginning to happen. We have just completed an 18-hour basic Alternative to Violence Project (AVP) workshop with the children over 5 days between Oct 2 and Oct 11. Bette Hoover from Sandi Spring Meeting (Baltimore Yearly Meeting) came to facilitate along with Carmen Hamilton from St Thomas, VI.
We are going to want to continue AVP work, and we’ll need funding for it. This session used up the funds we got from NY Yearly Meeting and Wilmington Meeting. Bette and Carmen worked not only with Belize City Friends School but also another Belize City school (Gateway) that serves children like ours, a Mayan village on the Belize-Guatemala border, and a prison just outside Belize City. The funding we had was for Belize Friends Center outreach beyond just our school, enabling support for their whole endeavor. AVP is a powerful tool. We are glad to see it being supported and strengthened here. We’ll need to establish a version of it closer to HIPP (Help Increase the Peace Project) AFSC’s version for elementary and middle schools) at our school as we continue.
We hope to support the children in a tree-planting partnership with Belize City Council and the Forest Department to help conserve the environment and mitigate environment-related concerns of health and well-being. They can learn much about the environment that way, along with soil science and plant biology. We can’t do what we plan until we get some seeds, soil, and seedling containers as prescribed by the Forestry Department, but we have started anyway with planting avocado pits and squash seeds in the ground beside the school.
The growing problem of human trafficking has not spared Belize. Oscar Mmbali, pastor of Belize City Friends Meeting, worked for Transparency International on ending human trafficking in Thailand, so we have an experienced and knowledgeable expert here. I know there is human trafficking going on in Baltimore, too, modern day slavery as people say here. I do not know how widespread the effects of this terrible practice are in North America, but we are told that traffickers here take their victims there. We hope to help the children understand the dangers and learn to recognize signs of human trafficking, and then to start a campaign to alert other children.
Our Belize Wish List includes both of these initiatives. Please ask us for a copy. One item is computers for the students to use. Our special reading teacher prefers to use a web-based program, but it is not available to us without computers. We brought back 2 in September from a Friend at Stony Run Meeting and 6 more will come with Eden Grace on her next visit (November) from another Baltimore Yearly Meeting Friend. We have recently been contacted by our friend Markéta Otipkova from the Czech Republic, whose business is managing computer networks. She arrives in December! It’s remarkable what comes when one asks! Thank You Friends!
The children at our school are 12 to 16 years old, although their academic achievement is not what we would all hope for those ages. We work to help the teachers support their students’ learning, and we are working to improve the physical environment for learning. The need for the latter was emphasized for us by our AVP facilitators who spoke of how much more effective the AVP workshops seemed to be at the other Belize City school where they worked (not very far from our own) because the room they used there was air-conditioned and did not have the continual truck noise that besets us here at Belize City Friends School. These are big concerns for us, and while much has been done with this site, whether there are ways to make it a truly productive site for children’s learning is not so clear.
For those of you who think we are not having enough fun (we are!), we should tell you that we are on Ambergris Caye this week Monday-Thursday. Monday is Pan American Day (a holiday) and Thursday is Rosalie’s birthday. You can go to our Blog at www.fuminbelize.org and ask for regular posts. We aim to post every two weeks, but do not always manage it.
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