WE LANDED!! - 8/1/06

It is Tuesday and we have spent our first night in a two-bedroom apartment with a tile floor and no air conditioning! We have been assured that the a/c will be completed today, I hope they are able to keep their word!!

In the picture who see Abe Rempel, Nathan and I in Abe's Cessna 172 E; you can see I got to be the co-pilot!! Abe (who seems to be the man-of-all-trades to his town) picked us up from Belize International and we had a short 30 minute flight to Blue Creek where he showed us the village from about 200 feet in the air. The Mennonites moved to this area in the 1950s and have cleared out miles and miles of jungle to make their homes and farmland. From the air, we could see the rice paddys, soybean fields, and cattle farms surrounded by lush, green, thick jungle.

Our small two-bedroom apartment is very clean and they just installed a brand new gas stove and oven; although I can't imagine baking anything in this heat. The apartment is located in a building above the local hardware store, market and bank--so we are very close to all the necessities!! (You can just make out our apartment in the picture below, it is the building in the top right hand corner) The store graciously provided milk, bread, bagels, cream cheese, jam, sugar, cereal (Honey Bunches of Oats, our favorite!) and some instant coffee. It was waiting in our kitchen for us when we arrived.

Belize is well-known for their beautiful mahogany wood and our apartment is full of it! There are two large bookcases in the kitchen/dining room/ livingroom and each of the bedrooms have a large mahogany wardrobe and bookshelves. I already cheked the wardrobe in the spare room, there is no magical land where it is always winter (I had been hoping) and no Aslan.

Our apartment also came with a house gecko, which we named Dobby. The gecko is good beacuse he eats the bugs. He must be doing his job beacuse we have seen hardly any bugs in our place at all!! The bathroom is very small and the shower is a little scary, but I plan to get in there tonight (once the weather cools off) with some really intese cleaning supplies, it should be fine by tomorrow!

The people have been very welcoming and gracious. We ate dinner with a local family last night and another family has offered to cook for us tonight. The family we ate with last night has lime and orange orchards and the wife offered to bring us limes and oranges for fresh juice! They are so generous and giving here! The community is very small and word travels quickly, I have had several women approach me, call my by my name, and introduce themselves to me. Hopefully they will be so generous with a job for me to do!

This afternoon Abe and I went to a nearby farm to gather eggs. We can purchase eggs in the market, but this farm has 18,000 chickens and they give away the eggs that are too big or too small to sell at the market. They allowed me to collect a small bucket full of eggs, so we will have plenty of scrambled eggs, french toast, hard-boiled eggs, and I am sure I will invent a few new eggs recipies!

Thank you to everyone who has posted comments, it means so much to know that you are thinking of us. I am already a little homesick, and seeing our apartment for the first time was quite a culture shock for both Nathan and I. We have a slideshow set on our computer that plays pictures of some of our friends and family, to make us feel a little closer. So, if you have any pictures you would like us to have, e-mail them to us! We would love to update the slideshow as often as possible.