Stolen camera, and stolen youth

My camera was stolen last Friday morning, right before I left for two days of camping in the jungle. It was sort of my fault- I left my bag out unattended on Cornerstone's front porch for about five minutes. That's more than enough time for an opportunistic thief to run away with something as valuable as a gringo's camera.

The stomach punch of the whole situation is that we have a pretty good notion of who stole it. The guy has ties to Cornerstone- his wife receives free services from us. Apparently that's not enough to keep him from stealing from the people who are offering him charity.

Two months in Belize is not nearly enough time to understand the realities of the social problems here nor the complexity of their underlying causes. But the more we experience, the more we learn. Most people here are wonderful. They understand the value of such things as community, hard work, education, honesty, integrity, etc. We have been blessed to meet many of these people, especially through working with Cornerstone, and it is so inspiring to meet such enriching individuals in such an impoverished place.

On the other hand, there is a small but growing segment of the Belizean population that is deeply mired in a shady underworld of crime, sexual abuse, violence, and drugs. It is a small country consisting of small communities, so it is possible to view the struggle between positive and negative social forces pulling on the Belizean people on a daily basis.

I know a child here, a sweet young girl with one of the warmest smiles I have ever known, who was born into such a terrible household of poverty and addiction that her own mother tried to sell her for drug money. There are men here who are so twisted by crack and booze that they'll steal from their own brother, or rape a child, or beat a woman senseless for their own edification. A little girl told me yesterday, with the fiercest look in her big brown eyes, that she'll never let a man "knock" her. That wasn't a bland repetition of something she learned in school. That was a ten-year-old's conviction that the history she's grown up with in her own family will never be repeated in her own life.

You can almost begin to read a child's story from his face after a while. Any child anywhere in Belize will dazzle you with his sweetness, energy, cleverness, and creativity. But even to an eye as untrained to the signs of a child's welfare as mine, the differences between the children of "happy" homes versus "broken" homes are striking. Some kids are innocent, and boundlessly joyful. Others are guarded, distrustful, and fearful. The less fortunate kids are often rotten to each other, and to the adults who try to teach and discipline them. If you try to give them something they will snatch it away greedily as if they've never been given anything before and never will again. They possess a cynicism that no child that young should ever know. Today they are still young enough to lose their fears and worries in a round of play. But as they get older it will become more difficult to hide from the ugly cruelties of their lives, and less likely that they'll be able to prevent the cycle of abuse, neglect, and violence from spoiling the children of the next generation.

Lunch Time

Similarly to when I'm home in the U.S., lunch time is probably my favorite time of day here. Somewhere between 11:30 and noon, pretty much all of San Ignacio shuts down and everyone goes out or goes home for lunch. "Home" for us means the Cornerstone kitchen, where Miss Nellie toils each weekday to provide a delicious homestyle Belizean meal for the volunteers and about a dozen children who either live too far away to go home for lunch or won't get lunch even if they do go home.

The meal always includes white rice, and almost always red beans. Because the rice and beans come from relatively local farms and don't go through any preservative or mass distribution process, they taste a heck of a lot better than the rice and beans we used to buy at Shaw's back in Boston. On top of the staple rice and beans, Nellie cooks up a main course like vegetable stew, fried chicken, curried chicken, scrambled eggs, or chili ground beef. All the food is heavy on the flavor- they never skimp on the spices here. And if you have the stomach for it (as I do) you can top off anything with habanero hot sauce. Maria Sharp's and Hot Mama's are the two big brands here, and you can find the stuff anywhere. People like their food HOT here!

The other thing that's cool about lunch is hanging out with the schoolchildren in the Food Program. They're all in the range of about 8-13 years old, and somehow they are the only people in Belize who don't wilt from the midday heat. They finish up their lunches and then start bouncing off the walls! They're always looking for someone to play games with them. Lately we've been hooked on hangman, although I'm hoping Betsy and the other girls can come up with something new and creative to do because I'm getting sick of that game!

Computer Classes

The last couple days I shadowed Kyle at Saint Andrew's Primary School while he taught computer classes to Standard 4 & 5 students (Belize's equivalent of 5th and 6th grade). It was a pretty enlightening experience, and I had a little fun with some of the kids. For the most part, they have adapted well to the technology even though computers are nowhere near as available to Belizean children as they are to Americans. A few of the more savvy (and mischievous) students "secretly" goof off on hi5.com or youtube.com while they're supposed to do their work. Of course, they don't know that the tricks they think they're getting away with are the same that I tried when I was a kid.

So I'm sort of optimistic about the level of computer skills the children have here, but there still is a huge gap to overcome if they are to start using the machines in a really meaningful way. A large proportion of the Standard 4 students don't grasp the concepts of a "web site" or "web page" and they have great difficulty processing the vast amount of information presented on the internet. For example, I saw a number of students typing search terms into the first text field they saw, regardless of whether it was a search field or not. And it is impossible to explain why sometimes a website takes a long time to respond. It is just magic to them!

Regardless of the difficulties, it is great to see these kids get a chance to use computers and the internet. Used properly, a computer is a gateway to a vast wealth of information. It exposes people to knowledge and opportunities that we in the First World take for granted, but previously were not accessible to people here. And even the social networking sites have their value, even though snotty elitist American ivory tower dwellers like this dork can't see it. The Belizean boys and girls using Hi5 or Myspace are unwittingly plugging themselves into the global human social and economic network in a novel way. They are truly digital pioneers.