Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Day Three: It's a National holiday

Today was our first day of work. Prior to leaving Texas, we thought we were going to be doing masonry work to build classroom walls. When we got to Belize, however, we found that this had changed. We also learned that Monday was a national holiday, which meant the whole country pretty much shut down. Belizians take their holidays very seriously.

Once we arrived at the worksite, Mr. Cuthbert Burrell, the site manager we worked with last year, arrived and gave us our different assignments. Well, he gave our different assignments to Bob and Bob passed them on to us.


Cuthbert planned for us to help repair the church's storm sewer, paint the exterior of the church for their 41st anniversary celebration, move dirt at the high school site, and work on building the concrete forms for the support of the classroom walls. While this would have overwhelmed many groups, our group just mobilized into work groups and got started. By the end of the day, Cuthbert was amazed with how much work we had gotten done and even expanded a few assignments (like now we are painting the interior of the church, too).























It was a long, hard, hot day and the group worked very, very hard. It was our longest workday of the trip. By about 4 PM, we were ready to quit and head to the Blue Hole, a Belize national landmark, and go swimming. We changed at the church and took off. When we got to the place, however, it was closed. We think this was because of the national holiday.


Luckily, Ray, the owner of Camalote Camp, knew of a beautiful creek that we could go to and swim in for free. It was absolutely gorgeous. The water was pretty cold, which felt great after our long day of work.











When we got back to the camp, we ate dinner and had worship. Kip gave a great sermon about the importance of walls and Wesley led us in praise songs.





We were all pretty wiped out so it was an early night. We turned in early to be ready to work for the rest of the week. It might have been a national holiday in Belize, but our mission team didn't let it slow us down.


- Julie W.

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