Greetings from Belize
Hello Friends
As many of you may or may not have known Samantha, Aven and I are in Belize for the summer on internships as part of our Global Studies degrees at Malaspina University. Sam is doing a study on municipal governance and planning and I am doing videos to promote post secondary education to Belizean youth for the University of Belize and a study on community based conservation in Belize. We’ll fill you in more as those projects unfold.
We arrived June 15th after an overnight flight from Vancouver via Houston. We headed straight to Belmopan (the Capital) and settled into the house we are renting until September 14th (Aven and I will be heading back to BC on August 28th but Sam is staying until September 14th). The first thing we did was buy bicycles so we could get around town. Belmopan is pretty small (population 11,000) and flat so biking around town is a good option.
Dr. Roy Young the supervisor for our internships gave us a tour of the city on June 19th and got us set up at the University of Belize with an office and computers we could use. On the 20th I met with Dr. Martin Cuellar to discuss the video projects I would be doing for the University of Belize. On the 21st we met the mayor of Belmopan and Sam discussed her project with him and the city administrator. We then set up an appointment for a video interview with the communications director of PACT the Protected Areas Conservation Trust on June 29th.
“Samantha with the Mayor of Belmopan Simon Lopez”
Over the weekend, June 23rd to Monday June 26th we went to Placencia to experience a little Belizean culture and festivities at the Lobster Festival. Like typical white folk on their first sunny day on a Caribbean Beach (it rained solid Saturday) we ended up looking like Lobsters.