Short Update

I know I haven't written in a long time. I feel like my life is pretty boring these days. I don't have much going on with work now and I've mostly just been hanging out.

I wrote a while back about the HFLE (Health & Family Life Education) training of trainers that I helped plan and facilitate. About a month ago we had the second part of this activity; the participants from the first training taught the material to other teachers in our district. It went pretty well and now another group of teachers is more prepared to teach this curriculum to their students. Schools started on Monday so hopefully they will begin using the materials and lesson plans we shared with them.

Belize faced its first storm of the year a couple weeks ago. Tropical Storm Harvey made landfall in Dangriga Town, Belize though I never would have known it. Peace Corps was overly prepared for the approaching storm. We received frequent updates that it was coming days before it hit and all the volunteers on the coast or in the southern part of the country were consolidated in Belmopan the day before. The day of the storm, it rained all morning but wasn't too crazy. We were expecting it to hit mid-afternoon so when winds and rains picked up we thought it was the outer bands of the storm. It started to clear up and nobody knew what happened. We thought we were possibly in the eye of the storm. Well it stopped raining and the skies cleared. Turns out that was the whole storm. There was a lot of flooding in Belmopan including in the Peace Corps office but not much damage. Two tornadoes were spotted throughout the country which was all over the news here. Nobody remembers every seeing a tornado before in Belize, let alone two. When I returned to Dangriga the next afternoon, I was surprised to really not see any damage. I guess there were a few trees that fell and a couple shacks that were knocked down but nothing serious. I guess it was a good practice storm because we're all still expecting more for the year as September is usually the busiest time of the year.

September is also holiday season here. This Saturday is National Day and Sept 21 is Independence Day so everyone is in a festive mood and ready to party. I hear the days involve parades and lots of drinking.

That is about all thats been going on here. I'm down to about four months of service left and am starting to think about whats next. Will keep you all updated!