Service Learning in Belize Part 1

Hello! Again I apologize for the lapse in blogging, life here has been rather busy as late. A good portion of that busyness has been as a result of the Service Learning Project I am working on down here. As a part of this program, and part of my Community and International Development major, I am in Belize to take a class with an application component for the sustainable development practices I am learning about. Basically I have been working with a group of students designing a sort of community service project in a nearby community.

Towards the beginning of my time here, while determining what type of project I wanted to work on and searching for possible community partners, I met a woman living here, Andrea, who runs an organization known as the STAND Center. Meaning; Sustainable, Tropical Agriculture and Natural Development, the STAND Center runs a number of projects in the area working towards empowering communities by promoting economic and environmental health.

In one of the potential projects STAND was designing and considering involved hopes of establishing a community orchard of various types of fruit trees using a planting method known as 'stacked polyculture' along with a soil preparation technique called 'biochar'. Stacked polyculture is a biomimicry technique that observes and mimics the natural order of a forest and uses that structure in the planting organization. By planting an orchard to be like a forest, the differing needs of diverse types of trees will put less stress on the soil by taking and replenishing
complimentary nutrients, unlike a monoculture orchard where all the plants take the same nutrients and therefore require fertilization.
By using the biochar; a process of smoldering waste plant material over the soil prior to planting, the soil is amended with nutrient rich charcoal that later acts as a nutrient sponge to condition the soil.

The intention was to present these methods to a local community and determine if they were interested in establishing an orchard that would be managed in common by the community members for the benefit of all families involved. The community in mind was known as Arizona, on account of there being low supplies of water, and was relatively recently populated by a neighborhood of El Salvadoran refugees who had been illegally relocated by the government off land to which they had the right to title. Farming corn for market, most families did not make enough in a year for a fully balanced diet, nor education for most of the children. And due to the particular practices used to farm, the fields are being pushed progressively further from the village each few years. Most community members speak only Spanish and a number are illiterate. Fortunately, this was the small town in which Andrea teaches preschool.

This project took my numerous lessons in town planning, community consensus building and meeting facilitation and combined them with the classes in biomimicry and sustainable development and topped it off with some Spanish to make an incredible collaboration
of my recent years of higher education. I was stoked! And a group of capable students also interested made it an even more appealing endeavor.

Once the students to be involved in the project were officially committed and we had a meeting with Andrea, a trip out to Arizona was in order. We took a packed, Saturday-morning bus to the town humorously named, Teakettle, to be picked up by Andrea in her pickup truck. After packing 18 people; 8 students, Andrea and her two children, and seven Arizona residents getting off the bus, into the vehicle (UVM Risk Management Department would not be pleased...) we drove the few miles into Arizona. It was a great chance to check out the community, talk with a few residents and get to know Andrea a little better.

Arizona is a small community with fewer than a hundred families. The houses are modest, often being little more than a tin roof and walls on a cinder block foundation, but the dwellings we saw were all well kept, as well as the yards around them, in stark contrast to the similar structures in San Ignacio that clearly portray poverty. The few people we met were very kind and rather reserved. We have come to expect shyness when we show up in town as a big group of white folks.

As Andrea showed us around the town, we learned a bit about her own ambitions here. She is an expatriate from the US and has been living a few miles away from Arizona, essentially in the jungle with her husband and two young children. She teaches preschool and was working at the time on getting the materials and community support to construct a schoolhouse. Her ambitions for various projects to improve the livelihoods within this community were admirable despite seeming a bit overly optimistic about time line and probability of success. To me she seemed a little overly confident that the residents of Arizona would easily establish a consensus on the location and management of such a community resource. She also hoped that the orchard could be located on a particular hillside near the site for the schoolhouse where there is seasonal access to water in the form of a tiny creek.
After our brief visit to the community of Arizona we were each starting to get a better idea of what we were getting ourselves into and how much there was to establish in the short time that we were down here. Then, we piled back into the pickup and it was off to Andrea's frontier, forest farm for a taste of stacked polyculture, biomimicry tropical forest farming...