THE HOUSE ON FREEDOM ROAD

You betta Belize it: Global ESCAPE Team IV and I had a wonderful time in Belize, C.A. From the time we all met up last Sunday afternoon in Miami International Airport to yesterday afternoon’s parting over a last cup of (remarkably good) café con leche from the airport edition of the Miami institution Café Versailles, the 11 of us navigated customs, learned to live on Belizean time, saw Mayan ruins, ate mountains of fryjacks, demolished pounds of rice-n-beans, tortured our taste buds with Marie Sharp’s famous Belizean habañero sauce, roasted in the sun, sweated through outfit after outfit, got drenched by the beginnings of the rainy season, shook it with Garifuna dancers, “went slow” on Caye Caulker, sampled a few bottles of Belikin (the Beer of Belize), saw crushing poverty butted right up against relative opulence, and in so many other ways crammed a remarkably large slice of Belizean life into a weeklong trip—oh, and let’s not forget: we left a bright yellow, 16-by-16 foot home behind as a lasting legacy of our time there.
After snatching about four hours of fitful sleep, my trip started with the beep-beeping of my alarm clock at 3:55 AM on the 23rd. I shoveled a bowl of cereal, threw a last few items in my bag, and jumped in the car with Dad for the ride to Logan to catch the 7:05 American flight to Miami. There, I met up with the rest of the group, which was making its way in from New York, New Jersey, and Washington, for the flight to Belize City and the more official start of the trip.

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Aggravating/Enjoyable Travel Note of the Week I: Sitting at the gate in Boston, sipping a Starbucks and perusing the Sunday Globe, I’ve been watching Nervous Nellie a few seats away fidgeting and glancing worriedly out the window for some time. Turns out she’s concerned about the fog that’s blanketing the airport; unable to contain herself any longer, Nellie turns to the gate attendant and asks, “What do you think are the chances of these clouds lifting in the next hour and a half [before takeoff]? I mean, how do we know if there are other planes flying around out there so we won’t hit them?” Mystified gate worker: “Ummm, it’s all electronic, ma’am.” Welcome to the 21st century, Nellie: the fog didn’t lift, but we took off on time and without incident.

Aggravating/Enjoyable Travel Note of the Week II: Thanks to a booking snafu, I was not ticketed with the rest of the group, and ended up being booked in business class, front row, port side, aisle seat. I’d never flown anything but steerage before in my life, and, especially given that American’s nickel-and-diming is especially noxious (you have to pay for snacks, blankets, pillows, and earphones, for crying out loud), found that the front row suited me just fine. I spent the first half-hour of the flight luxuriating in my leather seat, stretching out for every inch of that legroom, figuring out where all of the tray tables and stuff are stowed (in the armrest, apparently), turning down glass after tiny plastic glass of champagne, and scoffing at Celebrated Living, American’s special in-flight magazine for the upper classes. The extra-attentive service, warm dish of mixed nuts at takeoff, and curried rice and shrimp entrée with salad, bread, and dessert served on real china and silver were also much appreciated.

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Unsurprisingly enough, my 96 minutes of celebrated living ended rather abruptly upon deplaning. That will conclude the climate-controlled portion of today’s service, ladies and gentlemen: a giant staircase improbably perched in the bed of a 90’s-vintage Ford pickup made a few awkward passes at the side of the aircraft before coming to rest squarely against the door, which was duly opened into the 80-plus-degree heat with 80-plus-percent humidity that is Belize on the cusp of the rainy season. After letting the less-celebrated folk catch up inside the terminal, we all cleared customs and immigration together and got the Belizean portion of the trip officially underway.

Aside from the heat, the lifestyle contrast was the most striking thing: I’d gone from business class to the land of the bicycle right-of-way (“They have to ride, you don’t have to drive,” explained one of our hosts) in a matter of minutes. Hand In Hand Ministries, the Kentucky-based organization that was our in-country host group, sent us Roxanne and her giant maroon van to meet us outside the terminal. That van, and the Starfish House to which it would take us, would be our twin homes for the next week.

After getting settled in at the Starfish, we met in the kitchen over chips and salsa (to sate those who’d missed out on the curried rice shrimp-and-scallop bowl) to go over the schedule for the week and other orientation matters with Roxanne and Bridget, the ESCAPE director our group’s leader. Once we’d gotten the logistics ironed out, Roxanne introduced to the story of the starfish, for which the house we were staying in was named. As the story goes, a little boy is walking along the beach, throwing stranded starfish back into the water. Along comes a cynical old man, who watches for a while, then chides the boy for the futility of his action: he can’t possibly save every starfish washed up on the beach, so why bother? The boy simply tosses another one back, then turns to the old man and replies: “I made a difference for that one.” The metaphor was well-chosen. Starting Tuesday, we’d be headed into one of the poorest parts of a very poor town in an impoverished country—the entire population of which is about half that of Washington, D.C.—to build a house for one woman and her daughters. We’d see a lot of other struggling families in the area, some only feet away, that we couldn’t help, but we knew that we could make a real difference in the life of one of them.

That night, we attended Mass at the local Jesuit parish, St. Martin de Porres. The celebrant, Fr. Brian, began his homily with an anecdote from his days as a student at none other than Boston College. After a very upbeat worship service that induced a serious case of “ministry envy” in Keith, our Jesuit novice, we went back to the Starfish to rest after a very long day of travel, feeling immersed in the Belizean culture and reminded of the high calling of our mission that week. Exhausted, we fell asleep to the unique drumming sound of heavy tropical rain on a zink roof.
Having celebrated the birthday of the Church the previous night (Pentacost), Monday marked another birthday celebration: the Queen’s. A former British possession—hence its English-speaking presence in a decidedly Spanish-speaking neighborhood between Guatemala and Mexico and its membership in CARICOM despite its Central American location—Belize celebrates Commonwealth Day, the Queen’s birthday, as a bank holiday. That being the case, not much work, including of the Global ESCAPE variety, gets done on Commonwealth Day. Instead, we reverted to some good old-fashioned volantourism, taking a field trip to the Maya ruins at Altun Ha with Roxanne, her husband David, and their adorable youngest son, Asher. After climbing the pyramids, we piled back into the van for a trip to Old Belize, a very cheesy tourist location that attempts to market “old-time” Belizean heritage along with a Zipline Adventure and artificial lagoon (yours with Slippery Conch waterslide access for $10BZ). Resisting the temptations of the Slippery Conch, we took a van tour of the north (nicer) side of the city, giving us an image of Belize that would be challenged by the beginning of the build the next day.

Tuesday morning, we arrived onsite to find Miss Amybell, the woman whose home we would be building, standing in the door of her colorful but obviously precarious shack with a gaggle of children and grandchildren. In front of the house (such as it was) was the 25-by-25-foot square of more or less packed and leveled soil, required by Hand In Hand of all potential home recipients, on which the house would be built. Besides the dirt patch, all we had to work with was a load of lumber, some coarse aggregate and cement mix, cinder blocks, tools, and our site bosses, Beto and Alfonso. After a quick opening prayer, we unloaded the truck and set up the tent that would offer some shade to those working beside the foundation site throughout the week.

The work went blindingly fast. In the space of three and a half days, we went from dirt patch to fully-constructed (if sparsely-appointed) house. By 4 PM on Tuesday, we’d constructed the five cinder block columns that would form the house’s foundation, built and laid the two halves of the floor, and framed two of the exterior walls. As the day progressed, many of the neighbors (some of them daughters of Miss Amybell, some recipients of Hand In Hand houses themselves) pitched in to help with the construction. This had not been planned, but more hands made for lighter work and they were welcomed onto the jobsite.

Before we’d even reached the site that morning, however, we’d had an incredibly touching visit to a Hand In Hand homeowner named Lauren, whose house had been built by the first Global ESCAPE team three years ago. Roxanne had driven us on a somewhat meandering route through the south side of the city to get a glimpse of what the impoverished half lived like, Lauren’s house was our last stop before heading to work. After seeing what she’d done with the home in three years—a remarkable transformation from basic structure to small but very personalized and well-kept home—Lauren launched into a parting soliloquy on what a blessing the house had been in her life the past several years. She concluded that all good things came from God and that she was convinced that we doing His work—a powerful sentiment with which to begin the workweek—then told us to wait one moment before we left.
Ducking behind a doorframe into the master bedroom, she retrieved a card and held it out to us. There, in a poor but proud home in the poorest section of Belize City, we beheld a picture of Healy Hall, the main building on Georgetown’s campus. This card was one of the GU bookstore staples, one we’d passed by half a zillion times on our way through to pick up textbooks or trinkets. It was a note from the members of GET I, which she read and then passed around the group. On the back of the card were the signatures of all the team members, many of whom we knew personally. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to see something like that, lovingly preserved for three years, in such a foreign corner of the world. “Hoya Saxa” doesn’t quite cut it; I think our other, unofficial, slogan may do better: Georgetown Forever!

The next days passed in a sweaty haze of sun, occasional rain, and furious work. We made so much progress on Wednesday—walls framed, planked and painted; bathroom nook floored and framed; first cuts made on the next day’s lumber—that there was hope of finishing the entire build on Thursday. As it happened, that was getting a little ahead of ourselves, but by the end of Thursday the end was clearly in sight. Another few hours, we knew, should do the trick. Caught up to the schedule of the week, we knew we’d have time to make our planned visit to Hand In Hand’s older ministry, an outreach center for children infected and affected by HIV/AIDS on Friday morning before finishing construction and blessing the home that afternoon.

The trip to the outreach center was both touching and devastating. First, we talked with the Belizean director of the center and its two nurses, one a Belizean woman and the other a nun from Wisconsin who’d spent years as a nurse practitioner in Belize working with HIV/AIDS patients. After a question-and-answer session with them and a quick tour of the facility, we got to meet and play with about two dozen children of preschool age who were attending the center that day. Closer inspection of these apparently happy, normal, young children quickly revealed the lesions on their legs characteristic of their disease. Though they are all nominally on antiretroviral drugs, ensuring compliance of these children (whose parents often don’t tell them that they are sick or what ails them) with their drug regimens is always a challenge. It was absolutely heartbreaking to see these kids running, playing, eating watermelon, and doing all the other “kid things” that their peers in would be while knowing that they were all living under what could be viewed as either a life sentence (of ARV’s, doctors, and sickness) or a death sentence (of noncompliance, ignorance of their illness, infection, and eventual death, reviled by a society that deeply stigmatizes HIV and AIDS).

Still running on the deliciously fresh local pineapple and bananas Bridget and Keith had surprised us with at breakfast that morning, we headed for the worksite and the completion of the project. A few hours of especially energetic work saw the roof completed, the final paint jobs completed, the windows and doors installed, the interior partition nailed up, and me earning the title “Wet Boy” by remaining outside to finish nailing false rafters up under the eaves despite a sudden tropical downpour while everyone else worked inside the house. Toeing in the last nail atop a ladder, water pouring down off the roof into my face, and swinging the hammer with one hand while trying to hold electrical wires out of my face (smart move, Colin) with the other, Beto finally called me inside. Another nail here, a little redecoration with a Skil Saw there, and it was time to hand over the keys.

By that point, the directors of Hand In Hand had arrived to participate in the blessing ceremony, and they brought Miss Amybell and her daughters from their old house out to their new home. After singing a few songs, dripping onto her new floor, Keith led us in a blessing focused on sharing what we were each grateful for in life, in hopes that the new home and its owners would be filled with the spirit of gratitude long after we had left. After the sharing concluded, we extended our hands over the family in blessing and then “grabbed a wall” and blessed the home. That done, Bridget handed the keys, a card, and a housewarming gift to Miss Amybell, who held them up, smiling and wiping away a tear. After hugs all around, we sang Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” posed for a group photo in front of the house, and then waved goodbye to Miss Amybell, clambered into the van one more time, and left the bright yellow house—the newest address on Freedom Street—to its proud new owners. We couldn’t help every family there, but seeing Miss Amybell hold up her new keys made clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that we’d made a difference for that one.

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The rest of the trip put the tourism in “volantourism.” Friday night, a troupe of Garifuna dancers came to the Starfish to share their culture with us through dance. Though their people make up only seven percent of the population of Belize, as the dancers said, the Garifuna make a disproportionate amount of noise. Their singing and drumming is loud, to be sure, but his point was more broadly taken: they might be a minority but the Garifuna, children of the Arawak, Carib, and African peoples, exert a loud and proud influence on the culture of Belize as a whole.

Early Saturday morning, we were off to Caye Caulker (pronounced “key”) for a day of fun in the sun before leaving the country. Fun it was, but sun there wasn’t: yet another rainstorm rolled in and blanketed our one day on the island with clouds and showers. The official motto of the island, Go Slow, set a vastly different tone from the jam-packed days of construction that had preceded this one. We started out with a wonderful snorkeling trip out to the reef, then spent the rest of the day wandering the streets haggling at tourist traps, drinking coffee and playing UNO at a café, and generally going slow. Being ESCAPE leaders, we couldn’t really go a night without reflecting, so we all went up to the roof of our hotel after supper to stare out over the ocean, shoot the shit one more time, and simply enjoy each others’ company for one last night.

Sunday was a blur, from 5:30 AM (central time) wake-up to 7 AM water taxi back to Belize to 9:30 flight to Miami to 6:10 flight to Boston. After an excruciating odyssey through the T (thanks for the heads-up on the maintenance work, D line), I arrived at Woodland station pretty spent and hungry (nothing to eat that Cuban coffee and pastry in Miami just after 5). Sans car, though, I decided to walk home. Turns out the Newton to Wellesley schlep takes a bit longer by foot (with duffel bag) than by car; about 45 minutes after leaving Woodland, I finally unlocked the door to my empty house just after midnight. Fighting back the initial panic at seeing the note from my family (away camping on the Cape) that apologized for the lack of food in the house, I managed to put together enough leftovers, cereal, and granola bars to make a very late supper. Tired beyond sleep, I read a few pages, fell asleep on the couch (a time-honored tradition of mine), woke at 4 AM with all the lights on, and stumbled to bed. And slept till 9.

And so ended, for good this time, sophomore year and my time as an ESCAPE leader. I covered what those milestones meant to me last time; suffice it to say for now that those feelings have only been deepened by this past week’s experiences. It was a wonderful and challenging experience that was also deeply rewarding and memorable. I’m sure I’ll treasure it for a long time, especially as I head into the summer and then into my year abroad. I’m certainly glad to have had this taste of life in a foreign country before heading out into the world (God willing, I’ll be touching down at Ataturk International in Istanbul in less than three months).

More than anything, the feeling that abides with me from this trip is the one that I felt at the beginning when Lauren showed us her Healy Hall card and that I felt again when Miss Amybell held up her new keys. Quite simply, that feeling is this: Georgetown, no matter its faults, has a longer reach and a wider net than I ever could have appreciated before this, and it produces a lot of good people who do a lot of good in the world. We might not be able to save the entire world or even an entire neighborhood, but we can be angels to a woman and her family, and at the end of the day it’s a real blessing to be part of something like that and to have the wherewithal to have done what this group did. Few twenty-somethings in this world have the resources and opportunity to do something like that, and few of those that do choose to make use of them. Back in my multi-roomed, multi-storied, fully-wired and –plumbed yellow house on Clifton Road, I’m immensely grateful to have been one of nine students at a school that provides and encourages such opportunities to have said Yes to the chance we were offered.

Who can know what becomes of the starfish the boy in the story rescues, how many little starfish they have, what sorts of lives they live? The important thing is that live they do, and that’s difference enough for each that gets rescued to justify the apparently quixotic effort in the first place. Who can know what will become of Miss Amybell’s new home, how it may impact the lives of her and her family and any future inhabitants? Perhaps a solid structure will be satisfactory enough, perhaps she’ll take what she has been given and run with it as Lauren has. At least we helped give her a chance. And that’s something, isn’t it?