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Eating Ants

Disclaimer: Views presented in this blog are those of Roger German.  They do not represent the views or opinions of the U.S. Peace Corps or the Government of the United States.

                I can’t tell you what ants taste like but I know I ate some.

                Tracy and I were sitting on my front porch of a lovely afternoon, eating peanuts and sipping on a couple of cold beers.  The temperature was cooling down to the mid-80s as the sun dipped toward the hills a mile or so west in Guatemala.  The peanuts came from the generosity of family back in the States, sending Care packages that mean just that.

                Chatting and idly reaching for some more nuts I glanced down and realized the can was swarming with ants, and probably had been for a while.  Relaxing there I had forgotten briefly that in Belize we only temporarily borrow living space from the bush, and in particular, whatever is open and edible, belongs to the ants.  They never make a formal request, or send envoys or diplomats.  They just send in the army.

                Leaf-cutter ants are particularly industrious.  Walking through the bush you’ll come on a jungle super highway, 3 to 4 inches wide, completely free of sticks, grass, or debris of any kind.  And scurrying along in two columns passing in opposite directions are the workers, carrying enormous chunks of leaf and returning empty handed (?) to grab another.  A guide once told me they can strip a tree in a single day.  That is a lot of leaves…and where, I wonder, does all that mulch go, and if underground, that is one humongous ant housing complex. 

                And these are not benign creatures.  Even the little guys you can barely see can chomp down with enough authority to get your attention and move you quickly on your way.  And then there are the appropriately named “fire ants.”  Not to be confused metaphorically with “fire men” whose stated work is to cool and quench, these little guys will set the most rhythmically challenged introvert to jumping and dancing like an aerobics instructor on speed, ripping off clothing like a school boy on a hot day down by the swimming hole.

                Joining the party with the ants, are the uncles…the scorpions, tarantulas, Africanized bees (named by the press “killer bees,” personified by John Belushi & Co. on Saturday Night Live), various vipers and constrictor snakes and the occasional jaguar, wild boar or baboon.  We do have some wildlife in Belize that can be a bit, well, wild.

                Tracy has more experience with most of the more exotic critters than me, since I’m a city slicker as it were in Benque Viejo town, rather than living on the edge in a humble village.  She was stung by a scorpion on the thumb while helping a neighbor dig a latrine, and she said it aint like a wasp sting.  The pain shot up her arm to her elbow, and the toxin made her lips and tongue numb.  She kept on working of course, being Tracy and Peace Corps, and the guys she was working with said that’s normally about how it feels, as they get stung several times a year.  She’s also eaten gibnut (a large rodent), iguana, armadillo, and once, the family dog.  She didn’t know about the dog beforehand, or I think that one might have been a bit beyond the pale, as she really does like dogs, just not for dinner.  She also has had prior culinary experience with ants, back when an advance platoon camped out in her jar of peanut butter.  Throwing food away requires a bit of consideration here,  so she put the lid on and stuck it in the fridge, thinking that would cool the little fellows off and slow them down.  Well, it did.  But she didn't remember the skirmish until much later, when she made a PB&J, and noticed that it seemd crunchy.  She said it reminded her  a bit of a Nestle's Crunch Bar.  I don't think that's the comparison I would make.

                Tracy also trained in a village that annually lost one or two inhabitants to Fer de Lance vipers, and then served in San Miguel, where her host family dad, Sebastian, killed a jaguar just outside their home after it had dined on three chickens and two ducks.  He wasn’t particularly troubled by jaguars, just that they shopped without paying.

                But here in Benque, life is relatively quiet.   I’ve scooted a couple of random tarantulas out of my door…couldn’t quite bide squashing them, and they’re really not nasty, just unattractive.  And I had my bout with Dengue Fever, but that’s way boring since it’s carried around by mosquitoes, and about the only place without mosquitoes is Antarctica.  We do have a couple of squadrons of the Africanized bees here, and they killed a man about 6 months ago a couple of miles out of town in the bush.  I saw a swarm of them at Mystic Jungle Resort, where we were having a meeting with Guatemalans from Melchor, just across the border, discussing inter-town cooperation.

                T he bees were just hanging out on their hive, and one of the men working there suggested we take a different path to get over by the pool.  Seemed like a very good idea.   I thought they would be bigger, but they just look like an unattractive cross between a honey bee and a horsefly.  Maybe that’s why they’re so mean, with all the emphasis on physical beauty these days, they are distinctly drab.  Of course, I didn’t mention that out loud.  And I avoided politics entirely.

BP

Disclaimer: Views presented in this blog are those of Roger German.  They do not represent the views or opinions of the U.S. Peace Corps or the Government of the United States.

                I missed the bus heading over to Pine Lumber to pick up a couple of things for the playground in Tracy’s village, two baby swings that hadn’t been loaded and a replacement for one of the sling swings that was delivered with a short chain.

                So, I stuck my thumb out and was picked up by a retired couple from Louisiana in a rental SUV.  They were looking to by some property and we talked about Belize and the U.S., and a little about business, his background.

                He retired from an oil company where he had been responsible for more than 60 platform wells in the Gulf of Mexico, in 6 or 7 locations.  Kept him very busy he said.  I said I bet he was glad he wasn’t working for BP.  He was driving at the time, and he looked over at me and said, ”Those guys should all be in jail.”  I thought that was a bit harsh coming from someone on the inside.

                He said, “All that oil is on the bottom of the Gulf.  It’s going to kill the Gulf.  All the time they were telling everyone that they were containing the oil, they were just shooting detergent into it from below.  It makes the oil sink to the bottom.  Sixty-five thousand barrels a day.  Covering the bottom of the Gulf. “

                He said on his rigs if they spilled “a cup of oil,” they would spray a little Lux on it, and bingo! It would sink out of sight.  But they didn’t spill much oil, he said.  The inspectors were too tough.  They would check everything they did, and they had to keep maintenance logs…”we’d get a $15,000 a day fine until we got things right,” he said.  I said I had heard that what was going on with BP, as far as maintenance and procedures wasn’t all that good.  He just said that they should be in jail.

                And they’re not, and probably won’t be.  That seems to be the way it works now, or maybe it always has at the level of billions and billions of dollars.

                So I woke up Saturday morning thinking about my Grandpa “G” as we called him, Edward German.  He had a small grocery store in Pierce, Nebraska.  He supported his wife and raised my Dad on the income from that store, and Dad took it over and raised 6 kids.

                He lived and died in Pierce.  His customers were his friends and neighbors.  He “sold” people groceries even when they couldn’t pay their bills.  He and Dad were on the volunteer fire department, they served on city council, Dad and Mother on the rescue squad.   

                My frustration with BP comes from my Grandpa’s grave and the graves of all those good men and women who ran businesses with their hearts.  Grandpa did not own a grocery store to make money; he did it to provide for his family and to provide a service for his customers, all of whom he knew.  And the howls and shrieks from the demons of the bottom line can’t change that.  There is a dramatic difference between what Grandpa did and businesses that are run solely to make money.  Capitalism has been warped to fit the mold of the Robber Barons of the late 19^th Century rather than growing true to a free and open market.   The bonuses and fees of the predators on Wall Street, building personal wealth out of obfuscation and deception, surpass the greed of even that Gilded Age.  And it is seen as not only normal, the status quo, but as something to emulate, to strive for.

                It is now about things rather than people.  Bigger houses, more cars, exotic vacations, corporate jets.  When the Big Three auto barons were called testify in Washington, and they each flew in their own enormous corporate jet, they could not understand the public outrage.  The rank and file in the U.S. was losing jobs, losing their homes and Ford’s CEO took home some $20 million or so.  Bonuses on Wall Street, based on bailouts from the middle class, recovered faster than any sector of the U.S. economy, and now exceed the excesses from before “the crash.”  Lobbyists for the financial sector continue to lobby for fewer controls on their own greed, and have more cash with which to lobby.

                 When Grandpa gave food to a needy family, he did it quietly.  He didn’t deduct it from business expenses.  He didn’t run an ad campaign based on German’s Grocery’s corporate giving.  He just gave.

                We wonder why our politicians act the way they do.

                They are only reflecting what we Americans have come to accept as “Good Business.”  There is absolutely nothing wrong with owning a nice home, a good car, taking a vacation, having a job that pays well.  But it seems we have created a class self-absorbed rich, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  We fought a revolution to throw off one aristocracy, while lobbyists in Congress wielding smoke and mirrors, have created another, equally despotic, equally overcompensated for under achieving. 

                Like the executives of BP, they should be in jail, not penthouses.

Accountability

 

.  Disclaimer: Views presented in this blog are those of Roger German.  They do not represent the views or opinions of the U.S. Peace Corps or the Government of the United States.

            Finally got into the office of a Sunday morning…quiet, peaceful.  Cool morning for Belize, nice breeze coming in the slatted window.  No screens of course, so the random bug shows up, buzzes the room and flies off in search of whatever bugs are searching for.   Me, I’m still searching for the right words,  sanding a little off here, fitting another one there.

            Two threads twined in my head this past week…one a quote from John Kennedy my daughter emailed to me, another a random act of kindness that put some flesh on the words.

              “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” JFK.  I don’t know the particulars of where or why he said that, and perhaps he was quoting someone else, but it’s worth mulling over.

            Now, the random act of kindness.  Bear with me here, because I need to set the stage, get the lighting right…

            The Government of Belize is auditing Benque Viejo now, and for the next few weeks.  Two women and one man have set up camp in the room next to my office, digging though boxes of receipts, musty old journals, scraps of paper, piles and stacks laid out in orderly rows all over the floor and several tables.

            The ladies especially seem to be having a good time crunching numbers, as I regularly hear peals of laughter, which alters some my perception of auditors and accounting in general.  But make no mistake, these two ladies, one in particular, want to know where each and every shilling went, and they are not happy when they can’t be found. 

            Manys the time I felt defensive as Miss Ellis grilled me about why we didn’t have some simple controls on receipts or why don’t we do thus and so, it would be so easy, and without those simple steps it makes her job so much harder.  I’m not really privy to the town’s accounting, but I’m handy, so I get to hear more than I need to know.  I think maybe she just needs to periodically vent frustration.   So I try to defend that which I really don’t know but have faith in, a position in which I have on many occasions placed others. 

            So, though we have shared some laughter too, I know this woman is about business.  She and her co-worker have been staying at a hotel about a block from Town Hall, a hotel I would recommend to my American friends if I was sure I never wanted them to return to Benque.  Rough, to say the least.  Not the worst in town, but close.

            Last week she came in a bit late, and into my office first, instead of back to the piles of paper.  Her eyes were clearly misted, her spirit agitated.  Good Morning…good morning…there’s this little boy in the room next to ours….4 or 5, about the age of my grandson….he’s been there by himself for days…it’s so dirty…his mother is off “sleeping with a man to get the rent” he said…head lice, dirt, he’s scratching, scratching… he said he didn’t have any soap, I gave him mine…I don’t know what to do…

            By this time there were tears. 

            They don’t tell you this stuff in training.

            We talked a bit more, I had no idea what to do either, but I did know that AnaMelita Castellanos, one of the Town Council here, would know what to do.  I gave her Miss Ana’s number. 

            Within an hour I saw some commotion out the front door, Miss Ana, the police…Miss Ana came in and filled me in.  She said she didn’t want to go in by herself, she wanted the police with her, but go she did.  Sorted out the story she could piece together, found a grandma over in Cayo to give him temporary safety until foster care could be arranged.

            That got me thinking about the JFK quote, Jesus’ admonition that “whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren…” and all the way around to the Health Care warfare back in the U.S.  If people would get out of their trenches long enough to listen, to see, perhaps they would understand that it’s not about them at all; it’s really about the little boy.

Playground 2

 

.  Disclaimer: Views presented in this blog are those of Roger German.  They do not represent the views or opinions of the U.S. Peace Corps or the Government of the United States.

            My plan was to ride with the truck full of playground pieces and parts from the lumber yard near Georgeville, down to San Miguel, and since the yard foreman said the truck would leave at 6:00 a.m., I caught the 4:45 bus out of Benque to get there on time.

            Only problem was, I was a little bit tired, and fell asleep on the bus, not an easy thing to do if you remember bouncing along smooth roads in school buses.  And these roads are not smooth.  And the school buses are not new, nor is the spacing of the seats sized for someone 6-foot tall.  Nonetheless, I managed to nod off, and woke up as we were flying through Ontario Village, about 20 minutes past the lumber yard.  Grabbed my stuff, worked my way to the front of the bus and got let out on a stretch of nowhere road at about 5 minutes to 6.  Rats.

            Stuck my thumb out and caught a pickup heading back the other way, and luckily for me, at a high rate of speed.  He must’ve been late himself, and I arrived back at the lumber yard at 6:10, with a high dollar punk rock hairdo.  No one there.

            I climbed the fence, and then of course, the guard showed up.  No, no trucks had left…at least that’s what my hopeful imagination got out of his Spanish.  And, as a matter of fact, no trucks had left, and didn’t leave until 8:15.  So, even being late, I was plenty early.

            We made it down to San Miguel by about 12:30, where Tracy and three or four volunteers had spent most of the morning leveling the site with shovels and pickaxes, so we would have room to put everything together.  Lunch first, and Tracy’s host mom, Juvena Pop, made us all rice & beans, then to work.

            We unloaded the pieces for the 30’ unit and the 8’ baby swing down in the park area, and the carpenter from the lumber yard started puzzling out where it all went, while the rest of us toted and held, and tightened up lag screws.  Once we unloaded all the bigger pieces in the park, we headed up to the school where we would assemble the 14’ set. 

            I need to set the stage a little bit here, so that you understand something about Maya children.  They sit in their classrooms like students in the US probably did in the 30s.  They don’t speak out of turn, they have their assignments done, and if a teacher tells them to do something they do it the first time, and now.  If not, they are “lashed.”  That’s the term, and I believe it’s self-explanatory. 

            But as we wound up the steep hill past the school, with what was obviously playground equipment on it, every window in the school filled with shining eyes and smiles, heads popped out of doorways, and laughter filled the air over the sound of our laboring diesel truck.

            I don’t think any lashings resulted from the break in discipline, but I don’t think the teachers could have done anything about it anyhow; too much excitement to bottle up with mere corporal punishment.

            By the time we returned to the park, school was out and the place was crawling with kids, and we were still trying to finish up.  Tracy put on her sternest face and told the kid they had to stay off the swings and playhouses until we were done…superhuman effort on the part of the kids, but they did just that.  Initially she said they had to wait until tomorrow…but we finished before sundown, and she relented, and the place became a beehive in pollen season.  Thirty feet of wooden structure disappeared under frenetic activity.  Kids crawling, hanging, sliding, running, swinging…of course at least one got bloody, but then, all in all, it was about as good as it could get.

            We had planned to work on Saturday, but didn’t have much to do since everything went together so well on Friday.  So we did some cleanup, a bit more grading and landscaping, and readied ourselves for the “Ideal Opening.”  Kids here chow down on a popsicle-type of treat called an Ideal, and Tracy had initially promised a one-o’clock Saturday opening of the playground, with one free Ideal each.  Ideals cost a shilling (twelve and a half cents US), and Tracy figured it would be a fun way to initiate the park.  But she also knows how kids can fudge on how many Ideals they have consumed, so she made a deal with the lady selling them to write down names, so she would be paying for ONE each. 

            That’s how we know that 122 kids were playing in the park at 1:00 Saturday, in a village of a little more than 500 people.  Pretty good turnout.