Krak Bak: Xik we’ se Maya Day

As school winds down life continues to be busy as ever, but I will update unu with some of the bigger activities that I have participated in over the last few months. Firstly, we had Maya Day again at the end of March. As you may recall from a previous entry, Maya Day takes place once a year at Tumil Kin Center for Learning in Blue Creek and celebrates the Mayan culture. Seeing as one of my friends lives in Blue Creek and works at Tumil Kin, I went a day early to help set up. This encompassed such tasks as putting up thatch, setting up booths, putting together a punch board, and of course carrying a large tree about 1/3 a mile. On Maya Day, we celebrated with such activities as conch blowing competitions, eating competitions, best dressed Mayan, and by climbing aforementioned tree after putting grease on it. Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

When I said tree, I literally meant a huge tree.

The next major event we had was a sports day for the Methodist Schools in the Toledo District. All three schools came to Forest Home in order to participate in such events as lime and spoon, high jump, long jump, sack races, and running races. We also opened the day by having the mile run which I participated in and finished 4^th… out of the girls. I like to think that towards the end I was just running with the girl that got 4^th place to encourage her, not because I was being smoked by small children.

Since the last time I have updated my blog we have also had Easter, and once again we had an Easter egg hunt.

One exciting thing that has happened over the last few months is that I have a new baby brother, Daniel, born March 25. I went and visited them to meet him and see everyone again and they are all doing very well.

I also let my host cousins cut my hair with one of those little kid's scissors that has a dull end. I was thus rocking the old bowl cut (they call it a calabash cut here) for a good month recently.

The fam.

The other weekend we had Nationals for Basketball at the primary level. Both the girls and boys from Punta Gorda Methodist qualified to go and represent Toledo in Belize City. Our girls lost their first two games and were therefore eliminated. Our boys, after leading by 4 with 31 seconds left in the first game, lost the game by 2 and then won the second game. However, due to what clearly was a political decision we did not move on (three teams were 1-1 in their first games and something about our point differential being 0 or something like that made it so we didn’t move on).

We are in the blue.

Next I will just so you some pictures of when I went fishing the other day. We saw a bunch of dolphins and a manatee (probably coulda made that sound more exciting somehow couldn’t I have… just a day in the life though).

It poured on us in the morning.

There were probably a total of about 7 dolphins.

Then it was beautiful in the afternoon.

Finally, I will leave you with a few photos of the zoo that is my house. I will begin with showing you Maya through the weeks and then some of the cat, Mittons, that apparently I have now too. The name comes from the movie Bolt because the cat in it looks just like the cat that lives in the same house as me and in the movie Mittens is deserted by her owners and left to fend for herself, which is exactly what is going to happen to my Mittons when I go home. And yes, Mittons is how I want it spelled, that is a reference to something else entirely though, see if you can guess it.