Every kid should have some monkey bars

Team Thailand is amazing. They have worked so hard all summer and this week we got to see some of the pay off. Today we had the big unveiling of our community playground!  In first coming to Thailand this summer the team went to many villages and tried to find the greatest need that they could help with. They came up with some great projects including education and health outreaches and working with small business ideas for local families. But one project that everyone because passionate about quickly was the idea of a community playground. The team stopped by a community center/school where the children had drawn pictures of a playground. This is one of the pictures they had drawn and had up on the school wall:

Development is hard. It's hard to work with culture and figure out what is right and what is opinion and what needs to happen and what could happen and what must change and what could change and all the in between. What the first world thinks the third world needs and what the third world thinks they need is often at odds. Evaluation is so important in trying to figure it out and I for one do not have all the answers as to how to do perfect development. But today I did get to see what it looks like to make a child's dream come true, and that was pretty impactful. Children were coming from all over the surrounding villages so see the grand opening of their playground that they had hoped for long before we showed up this summer. Their parents gathered around and watched as their kids played on the swings, chased each other on the boardwalk and mastered the monkey bars. It was happy. It was joyous. And in my opinion, it was good development. It brought the community together as we built it with them over the last couple of months and all rejoiced together today at the finished project. I'm so grateful I got to be apart of HELPthailand today. I love the Thai people already who are so quick to smile and ready to give love to me even though I don't speak their language.  The land of smiles is better than I ever imagined. 

Belize is a literal dream

Dont judge me. I would have posted more to prove my immediate love for Belize, but the day after I posted last, our documentary team showed up with a bajillion and ten devices and sucked up all the wifi in the worst way ever. I could get on instagram and kind of facebook but only if I stood in a particular spot and it was late or early. Why do I not have immediate perfect internet pouring into my Iphone at all times?!?! Hashtag firstworldproblems.

Anyways. The HELP International Belize team is just incredible. I loved all of the projects they were working on and meeting and interviewing all of the partners with the documentary team.

One of the projects we did this week was an empowerment camp with local children in the community of San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize. We partnered with the local police and other NGOs to put it on, and so many people came together to make it such a fun time! The kids learned lessons on health and self esteem and other topics. It was wonderful.

                                         

The kids have the most hopeful faces here.

There are too many things to write about, and I am about to get on a plane so I need to go for now, but one last partner highlight. I loved visiting Octavia Waight. It is a physical therapy nursing home center. Caitlin is certified in Musical Therapy and we had quite the jam sesh this day. I loved it. Music can bring so much joy and ease so much pain. This man loves his guitar and loves to sing, and I loved him.

Chatting with the patients and seeing life so different from your own but with so many similarities at the same time can be so humbling.  I'm grateful already for the people I have met and been influenced by here in Belize.  One of my very favorite quotes is by Mother Teresa,

                           "The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved."

I 100% agree and I hope that no one I know or meet can say that they are not loved or cared about. No one deserves to feel like that, and I hope the people I meet know how much I genuinely care about them and love them. Even if I am only able to be in their life for a short time.

You better Belize it Im here.

Okay. Belize is unbelizeable. (You knew that pun was coming....)

But seriously. I think I expected just a simple Latin culture, but that is nothing like what Belize really is. This is the most random mixture of peoples, cultures, and everything I have ever experienced! It feels like Africa and Jamaica and Mexico all rolled into one.  It's amazing and SO unique.

I flew to Texas and couldn't wait to board my flight to Belize. Does anyone else immediately start figuring out who would make it in a crash when they get on a plane and picking out who they would make an alliance with? Hashtag survivors. Anyways, as I was boarding, this very wealthy looking couple approached me and started talking to me about why I was going to Belize. She was loaded in jewels and he was sporting some expensive European shoes, but their smiles were real and their excitement as they started talking to me about Belize was contagious. I explained HELP International and what I was doing and as we started to board the plane, the woman reached out and grabbed me in a huge hug and said, "You must love what you do, because you are so so happy." It kind of caught me off guard. I've been told I seem happy before and many a person has hushed my overly loud laugh, but I have never thought about all the people around me that meet me trying to dissect why it is that I am so happy. I thought the whole plane ride about how lucky I am and counted all of my blessings and thought long and hard about why I really am happy. That's a different post altogether, but it made me wish I had had some pass a long cards instead of just my business cards with me to explain why I really am this happy.  I'm so grateful for my life and my opportunities and how I was raised and what I know.

Annnnywaaaays. Back to Belize. I flew into Belize city, figured out a taxi to take me to Belmopan and on to Dangriga and then found a taxi guy to take me and our country director Kristina and randomly the local LDS mission president's daughter south to Hopkin's beach! Here's a little map for frame of reference.

It was nice to start everything off with a fun weekend and the beach with amazing HELP leaders and volunteers. Our Belize team is incredible and I loved having them tell me all they have learned about Belize and the awesome projects they are working on. Hopkins has a lot of the Garifuna people who are Caribbean/West African decent. Seriously I felt like I was in so many places all at once. And the kids are so cute. Point in case:

 This bike babe killed me. She kept making the best faces of fear. But she WAS just riding on the handle bars of a bike holding on...
And the girl on the right and I bonded as I walked to the resort. Such a sweetie.

And we played on the beach with these kids too! The song I Love My Life keeps playing here and it's real. I love my Belizen life already. I  find out the name of all the taxi guys and whoever is closest to me and I just want to talk to everyone here and have them tell me everything about their country and where we could do the most good and what they love about Belize. 

 Such major culture and location crash in my head of what I thought Belize would be and what it is like. We stayed at the cutest cheapest hostel (run by a LATVIAN!!!!) and partied at a sweet resort just a mile down the beach.

We made our journey back to the location of the HELP team today - San Ignacio. It was a fun adventure of bargaining for taxis and bumpy bus rides and buying sliced mangos off the kids walking in and out of all of the people waiting in the bus depot. Maybe one of the buses was full and we convinced the conductor Edgar to squish us on anyways so we could make it home at a decent hour. Make friends with the conductor. Always. Even if it causes a slight scene. Edgar loved us :) 

We stopped by one of our partners when we changed buses in Belmopan. A place called King's Orphanage. It was fun to see the kids and their situation there and talk to the people and volunteers about that project. It was a ton of kids from all backgrounds and races, but they all pretty much get along I was told. I liked that. 

At one point a guy got on selling hot doughnuts.  Warm homemade doughnuts on a ghetto bus in Belize? So confusing, yet awesome. The guy came back to us and I watched the bus as the volunteers all bought them. One dollar Belize (50 cents converted to USD). "A steal!" say the Americans. And it's true when looking to our country and what we spend on food and things we really don't need everyday. There were tons of kids on the bus, but none of them fussed or reached out or begged for the doughnuts. It seemed like such a different scene than what would have happened in America if a doughnut man had walked onto an American bus full of kids. I wonder if many of them are aware of the family situation or if they are just very obedient and if they are trained not to ask for things. Granted, a couple more people bought a few I think, but it was humbling to think about everyone on that bus and wonder where they were coming from and where they were going and what their future held for them. It's days when I feel lucky like this that I really want to do the most good in the world. 

Changes

Exactly two years ago yesterday (as proven by the last post on this blog) I was standing in the backyard of my Ugandan home with my guard David burning trash and trying to figure out development, my life, and where I wanted to be in the world.  

Maybe some things never change. 

Two years later, I'm not sure how far I've come on figuring out conclusions to any of those ideas, but I sure have learned a lot. I guess sometimes learning only leads to more questions though, cuz boy do I sure have a bunch of those right now. One of the minor ones being: do I really want to blog? I started this blog to keep people updated on what I was doing abroad, but it ended quickly for a bunch of reasons. In the past Ive blogged about specific internships and experiences in a very private, few person audience, but after countless people telling me they cant keep track of me and no one ever able to figure out where I am or what I am doing, I've consented.  
I didn't want to start a new blog. Two years ago I liked the idea of trying to show people what the third world was really like, hence the title 'The Real Third World'. And of course 20 people living in the same house in Africa seemed like the next sequence in the TV show The Real World. So I've decided I'm keeping this one since 1) I'm actually leaving the country tomorrow to visit two development teams with HELP International. (They are who I was with in Uganda two years ago, and now I do a lot of their marketing) and 2) I really appreciate things that are real and will probably continue to do my best to blog about them after I return. Or at least present my life and thoughts as real as I can.  

You know what's real about thinking back to exactly two years ago?

I really miss Uganda. I miss the people that I love there and the huge bags of mangos you can buy and the way everything shuts down when it rains and the waterfall hikes and the Mbale LDS branch and boda rides and the African sun and children yelling mzungu and the shades of green so vibrant you cant capture them in crayons. But mostly the people. I've never met people so full of joy and love and laughter as a general whole. But the individual friends I made that impacted me and made me question how I viewed life and who taught me so much - that's who I'm grateful for and what I miss the most about Uganda. 

 I'm excited to go see a new place tomorrow full of new people to meet and learn from.  I know that if I pay attention and listen I will learn more than I ever imagined, but of course I guess that means I'll probably come back with even more questions. At least I know they will be questions that are worth asking and worth spending time figuring out. And I guess I'm okay with the more I learn the more questions I have. Who wants a boring life where they know everything anyways? Not me. People say adventure is dangerous, but routine is lethal. (thanks for that deep quote pinterest - that's real). But seriously. I hope my life is always full of adventure and questions and people who love me that will spend time with me both adventuring and questioning.    

Mbale, Uganda 2011- The road I came home on every single day.