Jitterbugging for Jesus

Belizeans love them some marching bands–every little village has two things: a soccer field and a marching band–and love their parades too.

The Friday morn parade had the really terrific Eden High School Marching Band with the entire student body in tow. They marched all the way from Eden High on the outskirts of Santa Elena into the center of San Ignacio (Ignacio and Elena are twin towns separated by the lazy Macal River).

Eden High is affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventists, a denomination that has a very big presence in Belize and especially here–they have a nice and very nice private hospital in Santa Elena where the medical care is a thousand times better than anything the public hospitals of Belize offer. But most anything would be a thousand times better than Belize’s medical care.

Belize is coming along in health care but there’s still a reason the First Lady of Belize goes to Miami to live for whole months for treatments in her long and hard battle with cancer. And expats who need critical care will get to Meridan, Mexico, near Cancun or Guatemala City, if possible, for cheap but world-class, quality treatment, if not to the States.

Belize’s public care is dirt cheap as in Mexico and Guatemala–I ended up paying less than $100 for my hernia surgery in Belize last year, and that included two nights in the dreadful public hospital.

(Treatment for the nasty infection I picked up, which took weeks of various anti-bygods before one cleared it up, was on the surgeon at little cost tome. But hospital infections in the world’s best hospitals are almost guaranteed in post-surgery and other hospital stays now. That’s by no means a problem exclusive to Belize.)

I chose to go the public care route for surgery just to experience the care that Belizeans get. They do have some good specialists like surgeons in Belize, trained in places like Guatemala City, but still–not nearly enough really good doctors to go around, and some of the nurses are horrendously bad. (Sorry, Belize, they are compassionate but awfully incompetent.) So health care is definitely not a good draw for relocating to Belize, unless you have plenty of coins to get flown out.

But they are working at improving health care; they’ve made strides here and there even in the short time I’ve lived here, and have to credit them for that. The hospital in Belmopan where I had surgery has completed remodeling and waiting areas and some of the doctors’ office are way, way cleaner and bight and shiny with beautiful tile floors covering the dirty concrete I shuffled around on.

A trail in the bush that the Mayans took all the way from today’s Xunantunich ruins near Guatemala all the way to the Caribbean around where the airport is 25 miles from Belize City, alongside the Mopan River. I’m pretty sure the airport wasn’t built yet when the ancient Mayans tramped around down there. They were very constructive and inventive but not quite that savvy.

Belize City now has quality, fully equipped cardiology units and some well-trained cardiologists thanks to church-affiliated, volunteer doctors and staffers from North Carolina who set them up and improved care for heart patients enormously over the span of a couple years.

But enough of this downside stuff.

Belize rocks and is worth the downsides and challenges, of which they’re are plenty to navigate as in any third world country and even one as relatively well off as Belize compared to so many other place.

Everything about the coconut is satisfying and delicious, and also healthy. If you put de lime in it and steer it all up it has magical powers. (see video below.)

And even my part of Belize has made huge strides in development, upgrading roads and infrastructures and new businesses opening or expanding. It’s really a pretty exciting boom town area at this point. A Belizean couple who lived and struck it rich in Houston for 27 years have come back and opened one of my favorite restaurants–The Maya Prince–that will eventually be a food, drink and entertainment complex with six stories of floors with bars and fountains, game rooms and babysitting for kids in areas, a swimming pool and a view from the sixth floor up a spiral staircase that is breathtaking, day or night. You can see miles and miles and miles of Belize from that observation tower.

The former Houstonians, who struck it rich with businesses like limo services in Houston that expanded to Dubai, took me up recently to for a sneak preview and explained how they want to give back to Belize and put people desperately in need of real jobs to work.

So there’s hope for this beautiful but ever-struggling little paradise of 300,000 yet.

More postcards for you:

The road to some of the most beautiful and interesting places, literally, on earth. The 1,000 foot waterfall is actually much more than a thousand feet. The paved road doesn’t last long though—it’s a rugged road up to all that stuff.

Oh, my, I hate this kind of toxic theology–be good or else the God of love, grace and endless mercy will do a 180 and throw you in a pit of fire to burn forever and ever and ever and evermore. But there’s a lot of it spread here as in so many poor countries where the turn-and-burn preachers take in enough money to not want for what the poor can’t afford.And then there are the poor and really humble preachers with little more than the poor who’ve never had exposure to any healthier theology.

The band and the student body in the parade sang, “We are marching–we are marching in the light of God!” The kids at Eden High are many and really sharp kids to-boot. And of course they are Belizean warm and friendly as Belizeans famously are by temperament.