Day 6: Dwayne's a cool dude (Kurtis)

A good bit of this post won't be about anything from the itinerary, which I think is a beautiful aspect of travelling. You see, this morning before breakfast, Lex and I were waiting for the girls to come down so we could all walk to breakfast together. The owner of the hotel we were staying at, Dwayne, invited us into his office for some coffee. I started a conversation with him about something intriguing about his office - how he has a picture of the Obama family and a picture of Trump hanging in his office. I asked him about it and we started a conversation about politics (the day before was Belize's election day). He shared that he thinks Trump was a good idea for America; he thinks we needed a change because we continue having "establishment politicians" as he shared. I found this intriguing and controversial as, in my opinion, Trump is very American-focused and could threaten developing countries by not providing as much support.

Another very interesting piece of information Dwayne shared was about agricultural development in Belize. Dwayne used to be a rice farmer, farming approximately 200 acres. He shared with us that, while the US does not provide subsidies or support to Belize for its agriculture, European countries directly subsidize farmers in Belize. He did tell me a concern, however, which was that those subsidies will be ending soon. Belize has tried to support its farmers for when this day comes by improving infrastructure in Belize's "Banana Belt", by building more and better roads, and increasing access to electricity in the area.

After breakfast, we drove to our accommodations in Toledo district - a cabin maintained by a Mayan village. It was a challenging experience for me and most of the other students because we had had wifi at all of the other lodging places, and now we would be without any technology for 2-3 days. As soon as we had unloaded our bags, we went straight to our farm tour for the day with Manuel. Manuel is a Mayan farmer who has learned all of his practices through experience and knowledge passed down by his family. He produces cacao, nutmeg, corn, beans, squash, sugar cane, pineapples, and many edible palms. Something I found intriguing is how little the corn and beans he grows have changed in the past 100 years or so. This is a stark contrast to American varieties of these crops, which have changed so much in just the past 20 years. Manuel held differing opinions about education and agriculture than me, which challenged me. He strongly supports education, but still wants Mayan children to come back to the farm after they have finished their higher education. This seems counter intuitive, as education is frequently used as a tool to lift people out of subsistence farming.

The last thing I'd like to share about is our tour of the Marie Sharp's hot sauce factory. By this time on the trip, I had already fallen in love with their hot sauce and was putting it on every meal available. It was a fairly typical facilities tour, but two important take-aways I had were how Marie Sharp refuses to overly-automate her factory because it would put people out of their jobs, and she wants to provide jobs for as many people as possible. The second nugget of information is a comparison. During my internship last summer, the company required employees doing strenuous jobs with their hands to perform light physical therapy at least once a shift. Marie Sharp's requires the same of their employees when they are doing repetitive and stressful hand motions. I saw this as a great comparison between working environments in America and Belize, and as a way to break stereotypes. Before this trip, knowing Belize was considered a developing country, I had an expectation that working environments would be different than in the US. I'm very glad I had my ignorance of Belize challenged, and had this opportunity to learn from its people.

Kurt is a senior in Animal Science major at Penn State.