It’s Friday afternoon. I just made myself a cup of iced coffee, grabbed two cookies, and drug one of the semi soft chairs out onto the porch. It’s hot, but there’s a kicky breeze, so no complaints.

We kept our younger daughter home from school today—she threw up during the night—but then she seemed to perk up enough that we took her along to Bezaleel with us. Walking down the driveway, we first passed the neighbors’ maid and then a hired hand. Both greeted us with the usual Buenos dias, but they greeted our daughter by name. When we take her out in public, it always amazes us how everyone seems to know her. She’s forever wandering off and smiling at little kids, so she makes friends quickly. And with her blond hair, she turns heads. This morning I had the distinct feeling I was walking with a celebrity.

Once at Bezaleel, I dropped off my ingredient list for the next week’s baking project (sweet raisin biscuits), visited with the librarian, checked in with a teacher who is helping me set up a twice-a-week tutoring program, signed out some children’s books (in Spanish) to prepare for said tutoring program, and interviewed a student. I’ve made up a general student interview and am attempting to interview about 30 students in hopes of getting a better understanding of the student body, their perceptions of the school, and their struggles and dreams. Also, the interviews provide me an in to the (what often feels like) impenetrable school.

When I was ready to leave, my daughter opted to stay at Bezaleel with her papa, so late morning I headed back into town solo, made a couple purchases, and then walked home. Upon arriving, I was pleased to discover I still had nearly three whole hours before the kids barged through the door. I ate some cornflakes, typed the interviews into the computer, chopped up a giant mango, and then headed outside to the hammock for some reading.

My husband and I have been feeling a little at loose ends with our work here. The only specific tasks and jobs we have are the ones we create for ourselves. On one hand, this is great. We are in complete control over how we manage our time and where we put our energy. But on the other hand, it’s exhausting to constantly be fishing around for meaningful work, and I often end up feeling guilty.

Guilty that I’m not putting in more hours at school.
Guilty that I’m not hanging out with the Guatemalans more.
Guilty that I’m not making lots of creative meals with all the local produce.
Guilty that I’m not spending more time tutoring my own children.
Guilty that I’m not reading more books.
Guilty that I’m not doing more to improve my Spanish.
Guilty, even, that I’m opting to go to bed early instead of staying up late watching movies.

Work harder! Do more! Be productive! Relate! Push! Struggle! Stretch! Grow! Relax! Have fun! shriek the voices in my head.

So I try to pace myself. I try to make some food from scratch to counterbalance all the white bakery bread. I do a little recipe testing and then tell myself that’s enough for one day. I send some emails and try not to feel bad about the ones I haven’t sent. I focus hard for 15 minutes of Spanish study with one child before releasing him to go play. I lay down in the hammock and make myself read eight pages of an interesting, but definitely not light, book because it will make me a better person and I need to be disciplined, dagnabbit.

I think what’s bugging me most is my lack of friends. There are lots of friendly people, lots of good people, lots of people who, by all appearances, seem to respect and enjoy us. But we haven’t found people like us. I don’t have Guatemalan girlfriends. We don’t have other families with which to get together and feel at ease. We are by ourselves here.

Which makes sense, really. I mean we’ve only been here three months. But we only have six more months to go, yikes! I gotta get cracking!

And then, naturally, I beat myself up. I should reach out more. Invite people over. Work harder. Be more carefree. And for crying out loud, lighten up already.

And so it goes. 

The rational part of my mind tells me that while I certainly could improve in some areas and it’s always a good thing to try to better one’s self, it’s better to start slow (maybe stay slow, too) and keep things in balance then to throw all caution to the wind and burn out in no time flat. We can be helpful and do little bits of good here and there, but honestly? How much can we really do in nine months? We can give our time, share our skills, offer encouragement, and that’s about it. It’s not like we’re going to swoop in here and blast the place full of earth-shattering good deeds. I had no illusions that we would do that, but being here and experiencing The Not Doing It feels a bit awkward.

“What’s the point?” we frequently ask ourselves. “Why are we here? What purpose does our bulky, foreign presence serve?

These are hard questions, and I worry them over, some days more than others.

But the answer, perhaps, is no different whether I am in sitting in front of the wood stove on my down-filled, Ralph Lauren (secondhand) sofa or sitting on a rat-chewed, saggy chair in the tropics. The answer is to care for those I love, learn new things, treat people kindly and gently, listen and watch and ask questions and smile.

Is it enough? I really don’t know, but here’s to hoping!

After many discussions and much gentle prodding, the school has finally agreed to let me teach a baking class to the 10th grade girls! (!!!!)

Every Tuesday morning, the twelve girls and I meet for two hours in the panaderia (bakery), a little room at the top of the outdoor stairs above the kitchen.

The main idea is this: I teach them a recipe and then they sell the product to the other students and teachers. With the money that we earn, we buy the next week’s ingredients. This isn’t how it goes exactly—sometimes the cakes burn or come out undercooked—but so far we’ve managed to cover the ingredient costs. With a bit of practice, there is the potential for some substantial, or at least satisfactory, earnings.

Last week I taught them how to make banana cake. This week, it was nutmeg coffee cake. My husband came along and played the role of paparazzi. (He teaches carpentry to the 10th grade boys on Wednesdays—this way he’s freed up on Tuesdays to be my number one assistant.)

The morning proceeds like so:
1. We arrive early to open up the panaderia. We scrub the tables—the room is infested with mice and flies, so we disinfect everything at the last minute, work quickly, and then clean up ASAP. (Starting next week, I’ve asked the girls to come at 7:30 so they can do the prep work and we can get started sooner.)

2. We hunt down the ingredients. This can get sort of tricky because even though I submit my ingredient list ahead of time, I never know if I’ll get exactly what I asked for. There is always a moment of panic when I first arrive and no one seems to have any clue where the ingredients are stored and whether or not anyone actually purchased them. But then, somehow, miraculously, everything comes together.

3. I start the class by briefly explaining the recipe and then we jump right in. Once the cakes are in the oven, we clean up and then gather around the tables to talk. The girls copy down the recipe in their notebooks, we calculate the costs and how much we need to sell the cake for in order to make a small profit, and I drill them on measurements and fractions (something they are deplorably weak in.  If anyone has links to some good fractiony worksheety websites—basic addition, multiplication, division, etc—I’m all ears).

4. When the cake comes out of the oven, we cut them up and the girls take trays downstairs where they promptly get mobbed by all the students having their mid-morning break and looking for something to eat along with their corn drink (or whatever beverage the kitchen is serving that day).

Except this week, the girls never even made it downstairs to sell. As we were pulling the cakes out of the oven, the teachers flooded the room. They bought entire pans. Within minutes, all the cake was sold. My husband didn’t even get a taste.

I’m a little surprised by all the cake-loving enthusiasm. I figured people would be happy about it, but to snap it right up? That I did not expect.

This eagerness is good, wonderful even, but I have to figure out how to handle it.

*Maybe we should raise the price? (But I don’t want to exclude the poorer students…)

*Make more cake and make it more often? (I’d love to have another class with a different group of students, but that all depends on the director…)

*Limit purchasing power? (But I hate withholding cake from anyone!) (I think one student bought an entire pan with the intention of selling it at an increased rate to make a profit. That, while admirably entrepreneurial, will not be happening again.)

And now, for all you bakers, a request. I’m looking for simple recipes with the following limitations:

*Must not call for butter. Or if it does, it must taste good with a margarine, vegetable shortening, oil, or lard substitute.
*Does not call for cream or any fancy ingredients such as chocolate, cheese, or nuts.
*From start to finish, the recipe must take no more than two hours.
*The finished product must be easy to divide up and eat out of hand.

The ingredients that are abundant and which I’d like to incorporate include: cardamom, cinnamon, limes, mangoes, pineapple, bananas, corn, mayonnaise, powdered milk, etc.

Some ideas that I’m already mulling over:
*mango-cardamom coffee cake
*cardamom-lime scones (I’m a little nervous about working with cardamom as I’ve heard that no one likes it or eats it, despite the fact that it is everywhere here, raised for export)
*cornbread made with maseca flour (or better yet, their homemade corn masa)
*a cake made with mayonnaise in place of some of the shortening (because it worked so well with this recipe)
*cinnamon cookies (made these tonight with margarine instead of butter; they were a hit)
*peppernuts?
*a good icing using shortening and a somewhat grainy confectioner’s sugar

Nutmeg Coffee Cake
Adapted from the More-With-Less Cookbook (I think).

This nutmeg coffee cake (torta de nuez moscada) is something I taught to the Nicaraguan women that I worked with many years back. It’s super simple to make and pairs very well with a cup of coffee. To fancy it up, serve it with sweetened fresh fruit and a bit of whipped cream. (Here, we make it with vegetable shortening, not butter, sob.)

4 cups four
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups sugar
1 cup butter
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sour milk
2 eggs, beaten
nutmeg, freshly grated, if possible

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, salt, sugar, and butter until the mixture resembles pebbly sand. (I use my fingers, but you could use a food processor.) Remove 2/3 cup of the mixture and set aside.

Add the baking soda, milk, and eggs. Mix lightly to combine.

Pour the batter into a greased 9×12-inch pan. Sprinkle the reserved crumbs over the batter. Sprinkle the whole thing with lots of freshly ground nutmeg.

Bake the cake in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes, or until golden brown and puffy.

After spending the morning dehydrating ourselves at Tikal, we packed our bags and caught a very, very full and very, very hot microbus to the Belize border where the Guatemalan official tried to charge us money we didn’t owe (we had a heads-up on this and to their request of Q20 per person, my husband’s sharp, “Por qué?” did the trick and they messed with us no more) and the unfriendly Belizean official in an air conditioned booth didn’t let us through until the third try (is there a reason they can’t tell you up front everything you need to do to get through the border?), and then there was a hot taxi ride into San Ignacio, the youngest kid wigging out all the while because he didn’t get a window seat.

We were not prepared for Belize. We did not have a guidebook, so aside from what people told us, what we gleaned from travel blogs, and what I read on the internets, we went in cold. This was not smart. But hey, I figured we were in Central America, right? People speak Spanish and ride on buses and eat lots of tortillas. How hard could it be?

Well, for starters….

*People didn’t speak Spanish. I mean, some did, I suppose, but mostly people spoke a mix of English and Something Else with a bit of Spanish thrown in for zip. All signs were in English, but I only understood about 20 percent of overheard conversations. It threw me for a major loop.

*Also, people were bigger, both height and girth. They were expressive: singing out loud, yelling at each other, smiling so big their eyes crinkled up in the warmest fashion evah.

*Some places we could drink water from the tap. There were toasters! We could flush the soiled toilet paper! Stores sold soft furniture and chocolate!

*All grocers were Asian, do not ask me why. Also, they all seemed exceedingly grumpy and did not speak a lick of Spanish.

*The money felt like actual, real money, not like the play stuff we’re used to: two Belize dollars to one US dollar, and both currencies were acceptable. Also, everything was a lot more expensive.

*The buses were huge old school buses (they got full, yes, but there was no packing in people like sardines), and travel was seamless—get off one bus and hop on the next.

*The street food was awesome, the best I’ve ever had in Central America. We ate tacos, buns with cheese, casava pudding cake (not our favorite—like cake, but with gummy bear texture), hamburgers, hotdogs, and a huge plate of beans and rice topped with a scoop of potato salad, a scoop of onion-hot pepper salad, a piece of chicken, and lots of rich, tomato sauce spooned over it all.

*Littering was taboo, glory be!

To sum up:  I was so out of my element, I didn’t know which end was up.

At our hotel in San Ignacio, we took two non-AC rooms, as the AC rooms were ten bucks more. Our rooms were on the top floor, next to a balcony. There was a great breeze and each room had one fan, so we figured we could handle the heat.

Wrong. When it got dark, the wind died down and the street’s multiple dance halls cranked it up, waaaaay up, until well after midnight. The noise combined with the sweltering heat so that even the exhausted children had trouble sleeping.

The next morning, though, there was a complimentary breakfast on the balcony, and we feasted on eggs, toast (TOAST!), fresh pineapple, bananas, and coffee.

After breakfast, we packed up and set out for our little island vacation. For only $US400 we would take an hour-long boat ride out to Tobacco Caye, sleep in little, over-the-water cabins (I had reserved two of them), eat three square meals a day, and snorkel all day long in the surrounding coral reefs. I couldn’t wait for the kids to see the amazing ocean life. I couldn’t wait to relax in the hammock. I couldn’t wait to smell the salt water and read books and get my meals served to me.

So we eagerly, happily caught a bus to Belmopan and then another bus to Dangriga and right there is where things went utterly, completely, and devastatingly wrong.

Even though the travel guides said otherwise, our source (a frequent visitor to this island) had told us that from Dangriga we should take a bus to Placencia and from there catch a boat to our little island. I must have misunderstood because this was simply not true. What we should’ve done was simply—oh, so simply!—get off the bus in Dangriga, catch a boat, and shoot out to our little piece of island-coral reef heaven.

But instead—woe is us!—we jumped on another bus to Independence (because the bus for Placencia had already left), went two hours south (what the—?), got on an expensive water taxi (because the guy selling the tickets insisted we could easily get to our island from Placencia) and traveled back up to Placencia where we learned it most certainly was not easy to get to our island. And so there we were, stuck.

On a tourist-ridden peninsula.

In a smelly cove.

Without hotel reservations.

In 104 degree weather.

No coral reefs in sight.

And no extra time or money with which to right our wrong.

The frustration, rage, and sadness completely overwhelmed. While my husband went to find a room and the children splashed in the ocean, I sat on the beach and cried. Our one chance to see the coral reefs and we blew it! And now we were spending oodles of money in a place we didn’t want to be! I was so crushingly disappointed, so insanely angry at our ineptitude, and so hot that I felt like I’d explode. I hallucinated about angels in speed boats, money-laden strangers, and miraculous turns of events. None of which happened, of course.

Instead, my husband found us a nice little cabin with a good kitchen, great stove, toaster, and coffee pot. My younger daughter made everyone coffee for breakfast—it may have been her favorite part of the whole beach experience. We ate supper at an okay restaurant. The kids played in the sand. We rented snorkeling equipment and floated around admiring the grains of sand and the raw sewage settled on the bottom (so says my husband—we didn’t say a word about that to the kids).

Also, some of the kids came down with diarrhea. The fan over the bed rattled like a jackhammer, or a galloping horse, and kept waking us up. The ocean was full of jelly fish and the kids suffered multiple burns (those buggers hurt). It was so hot that getting undressed was like peeling plastic wrap from moist bread dough.

My husband, in an effort to add levity to brutal disappointment, started referring to our offspring as The Baudelaire Children of the famed Lemony Snicket books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, which, clearly, was what we were having.

It helped, some. We told the kids they were travel warriors, that they were learning the downside of backpacking in a foreign country, that things can’t always go as intended. We apologized and said that, lucky them, they had their whole lives ahead of them in which to explore the world and find the best coral reefs, since their parents obviously couldn’t. “When you find them,” I said, “send us photos, ‘kay?”

They were tough about it. The older kids even piped up with a Thanks for the trip, Mom and Dad, as we were trudging to the bus stop to head back up to Dangriga. Somehow their bravery and graciousness made me feel all the worse. They were so excited, so hopeful, so trusting—ARGH!

While we waited for the bus, we ate our lunch: cornflakes, bananas, and reconstituted powdered milk in old yogurt cups.

This, traveling with cups, spoons, and powdered milk, was perhaps the smartest travel move to date. That, plus always carrying doubled-up plastic bags (they got called into service once), packs of moist towelettes (which I shared with the mothers of two other puking babes), and packing a ball of laundry soap, a piece of twine for clothesline, and a pack of clothespins, (Maybe Lonely Planet does want to contract with us after all?)

So we left the peninsula at noon—by now it was Saturday—and spent the whole afternoon busing back to San Ignacio where we got two air conditioned rooms, thank you very much we are so done with the heat.

The next day we re-entered Guatemala—at least we got our visas renewed!—and suddenly I could understand people again.

We got a bus and headed back through the Petén.

I still marvel that people can exist, even thrive, in such an inhospitable climate.

We drove by miles of palm tree groves (for palm oil) and thatch roofed houses and flaming fields (‘tis the season to burn the fields, la la la la la la la la la), this time without any bathroom breaks.

It didn’t matter, though, we just sweated instead of peed.

Except for this kid.

He learned the art of taking advantage of brief stops (when, for example, the driver pulls over to buy a hundred pounds of corn) (though I don’t think he peed at that particular stop). (I snapped this photo and chuckled, because last year, when we stopped to let this same kid pee in an upstate NY ditch, a cop pulled over and gave us the fifth degree. Here, the men relieve themselves wherever they pretty well please and no one bats an eye.)

We shared our microbus with a group of (mostly) European backpackers and their dog. We can tell just at a glance if a tourist comes from North America or Europe. North Americans are heavy and wear clothes. Europeans are almost always radiantly fit … and half-naked. These observations are the sort of thing one ponders when stuck in the back of a microbus for hours on end.

Oh, we did have two new-to-us experiences!

1. At the beginning of the trip, in the broiling heat of the midday, the driver pulled the bus into a gas station, the attendants shut all the windows with us inside, and then a half-dozen gas station employees proceeded to wash the bus. I contemplated having a panic attack but decided it would take up too much air.

2. Also, they filled the bus with gas while it was still running, and then about four guys rocked the bus back and forth for two whole minutes while they tried to top off the tank. At moments like this, I practice an important travel skill called Not Thinking.

And then we were home. Sad, bummed out, relieved, grateful, and so, so happy to be home.

Our next trip is in July. We’ll be hitting up at least two more countries, and we will, I can assure you, be acquiring the appropriate guidebooks.

Ps. Today I’m home with a sick little boy. His stomach is all sorts of messed up. Probably thanks to all the hours spent frolicking in the sewer.

Pps. I will get over our Baudelaire adventure. It was simply a blip in the big scheme of things. Just a small, hot, 24-hour mess. Time heals all wounds. Etcetera and yadda yadda yadda…