FSBO in Belize…or anywhere

A big part of this adventure has been selling, or at least attempting to sell, the B&B.  This is a frequent topic of discussion between me and Tom, and real estate sales is a big topic of discussion in Belize in general, both on the street and on the chat boards.  This has been especially interesting to us because we are in a somewhat unusual situation where we don’t have to sell on a timeline, and honestly aren’t even sure if we want to sell.  We don’t need the money to purchase the next property, we are not leaving Belize and don’t need the money to escape, and the way things are running now, the property is continuing to make us money even though we’re not living on it.  We have it on the market because we don’t need it, and with a full time job up here, we would rather not have to take the time to do the administrative work that we are still doing…and since it’s our money that is running it, we feel that we do need to remain involved with the administrative side of the business.  Plus, it would be much less stressful to have money in the bank rather than to worry about if the business is making enough money to buy a new battery for the truck, buy a new stove when that one breaks, pay for all the truck repairs and miscellaneous maintenance expenses, and pay for all the annual licenses as those come due.  However, Julio and Janeth are doing a great job running the place, and it doesn’t take an excessive amount of time, and in the short time we’ve been running like this it does seem to be running in the black, so we are by no means ready or willing to fire sale the property just to get it off of our plate.

One of the big Belize real estate issues is property valuation.  When we first decided to put the property on the market in October 2012, we spent a lot of time doing research to figure out how to price it.  We figured it bottom up, top down, and collected comps both on other properties for sale and for properties that had sold in the not-too-distant past.  We talked to people in the real estate business here in Belize and got their gut feel, as well as the average person on the street who had put some thought into property values in Belize either as buyers or sellers, or potential buyers or sellers.  All of these thoughts and methodologies kept coming up with a number within a surprisingly small range.  This worked for us, because the calculation we were the most comfortable with was the one where we figured out what we had put into the property, assets (which are part of the sale), and the business for the past six years as the base property value, plus the value of the business based on its profitability, and this calculation put us well within that range.  This pricing meant that we would not be making any real profit on the property, but it also meant that we wouldn’t be walking away with this adventure having cost us a boatload of money.

Because we had put so much effort into honestly trying to come up with a fair price, we were a little surprised by some of the negative, and sometimes openly hostile, responses we had.  The general theme of the negativity was that the potential buyer could buy an equivalent 50 acres, put up some buildings, and start a business for a fraction of that price.  At first, we spent a lot of time explaining how we had priced the property and why we believe our price is fair.  But, it pretty quickly became obvious that we were arguing with ignorance, which is time consuming, frustrating, and ultimately pointless, especially since most of the people arguing had no intention of buying at our price.  Apparently, if you read the online propaganda about what it’s like for expats in Belize, the popular theme is that you can get great land for just a few hundred dollars an acre, build on it for next to nothing, and somehow live on manna from heaven.  The reality is that any land going for under one or two thousand US dollars an acre is either in a very large tract of land so you have to spend half a million or more for the whole package, in a swamp somewhere or otherwise completely inaccessible, or not yet titled.  Even if people manage to find an affordable, decent, legally saleable plot of land, ask anybody who has built here about the costs of construction; it may be less expensive than in the US, but it is certainly not cheap for any sort of quality construction.  Then, once you have your land and your building, you need to buy everything else, and many things taken for granted in the US – appliances and furniture, for starters – are way more expensive here than they are in the US. 

We also wondered if any of these people had ever started or run a business.  They seem to think that they can get some land, slap up a couple of cabanas, and the tourists will start pouring in and giving them lots of money to stay there.  Again, ask anybody in the business here in Belize and they will tell you that it takes quite a while to even make people aware that you exist, and longer to build up any sort of a reputation so your inn is a desirable destination.  The big guide books like Moon, Fodor’s, and Lonely Planet won’t even talk to you until you’ve been in business for a year, and then they schedule a visit which could be up to another year in the future, and then they write you up for publication in their next issue, which is usually another year after the visit.  We were lucky and seemed to hit the publication cycles right so we were in the guide books just a couple of years after opening our doors, but all we can do is shake our heads when somebody tells us that there’s no value in buying our business.

Of course, the ultimate reality in Belize and elsewhere is that every property is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.  This is something of a double edged sword when pricing a property, because the obvious temptation which seems to lure many sellers is to put a gigantic, pie-in-the-sky price tag on any piece of property, and hope somebody with more money than sense will come along and see some sort of value in what’s offered.  We have heard of some places that have sold for what seems an exorbitant price, but usually after many years of being on the market and a lot of dumb luck.  And, many places are on the market for years and years, and never sell.  The other side of the sword is that almost anything will sell quickly if the price is low enough, and if people need the cash badly enough they’re usually willing to part with their land.  We are smack in the middle on this, where we would like to sell the property so we’re not going to put an outrageous price on it, but, while we’re willing to forego a huge profit, we are not willing to lose money on something that we’ve not only invested a lot of cash in, but also a lot of time and effort.  We’ve had people ask us why, since we own everything outright, we’re not willing to just take one third or half of what we’re asking and be happy with a fairly large chunk of cash, and we can’t even begin to figure out how to explain to these people that we haven’t accomplished all that we’ve accomplished in life by basically just throwing money away and giving things to people who don’t want to either work or pay for them. 

Being human, we tend to get offended when people try to explain to us why we are being unreasonable in what we are asking.  Of course they don’t know that we are both honest and intelligent, and that we have spent a lot of time and thought and research and discussion and effort in coming up with a fair price.  People tell us that we will have a hard time finding someone just like us who will see the value in what we are offering, but their mistake is in the assumption that we want to find someone just like us.  We don’t.  Someone just like us would take their money and do what we did and start from scratch and take the time.  We need to find a buyer who wants to take their money and not take six years of effort and expense to get to where the property and the business are right now.  However, we also need to find somebody who doesn’t want to consider their money an investment and get a guaranteed return from it.  This sale will provide somebody with a beautiful piece of property and the income for a comfortable lifestyle, but they won’t be able to plunk down a chunk of money and expect a return on it without any effort.  As with property values anywhere, you don’t have a guaranteed return on your investment when you sell, BUT you get a beautiful place to live in the meantime.  We know some of those people are out there, and we are just waiting for them to find us.

Something that makes us feel bad

I’d always read how doctors warn women that their bones weaken as they age.  I didn’t really pay attention, or really care, beyond thinking briefly that this wouldn’t apply to me since I’ve always had really strong bones and normal aging factors don’t apply to Superwoman.  I’ve taken a few really hard knocks over the years, mostly horse related, and while I broke my tailbone, fractured a few ribs, cracked my cheekbone, and have had my fair share of jammed fingers, I never had an injury that required a cast.  Until now.  And all I did was stub my toe.

We had been here about three weeks, and the house was still a construction zone.  Part of the roof of the porch was ripped off to build the fireplace chimney, boards were all over the floor, tools were scattered everywhere, clothes were piled on boxes, and everything was in a jumble.  One of those big driving thunderstorms blew in, and I realized that rain was pouring in from a few different spots, so I was running around closing windows and moving things away from spots where there weren’t any windows to close.  As I was running from one end of the wet veranda to the other with an armful of stuff, my foot slipped on the wet tile and slammed my little toe into a pile of boards.

It didn’t hurt right away.  I knew immediately that no pain for how hard I’d hit was bad.  I put my armload of stuff down, went to the bed, and curled up on the edge so I could take a good look at my foot.  My little toe was sticking out at a funny angle and my whole foot was starting to tingle, so I grabbed the little toe and put it back where it belongs, feeling very proud of myself for being so easily fixed.  I got up and started walking, and realized that I could feel a nasty grinding from the bone on the side of my foot and casually wondered why a dislocated little toe would be popping and grinding there.  This state of shock lasted another few minutes, and then it started to HURT.  I started to get that semi-nauseating adrenaline rush whenever my foot passed within a few inches of a corner or piece of furniture or anything that could bump it. Then I started to feel semi-nauseous in general, and sat down to feel sorry for myself.  Tom came in a little while later, and I got up to get the door for him, and as the dogs also ran to greet him, one of them stepped on my foot.  I said a bunch of bad words, burst into tears, and curled up on the floor holding my foot.

Tom, immediately recognizing that this was not normal behavior for me, sat down, put me in his lap, and asked what was wrong.  I proceeded to sob out all that I thought was wrong with the world, and finally got around to telling him that I’d stubbed my toe and hurt my foot.  It didn’t help that I was overtired, having been on an airport run to Belize City with M three days before, out shopping all day two days before, and surfing in the back of the Land Rover for nine hours as we did the mapping the day before.  It also didn’t help that by this time my foot was swelling to the point where I couldn’t get it in a boot, and we hadn’t gone for our walk with the dogs yet that day, and I was starting to figure out that I might have a sore foot for a few days.  Of course none of this prevented me from unlacing my sneaker so I could get my foot in it so I could Nordic Track for 40 minutes.  Denial is a very powerful analgesic.

By the next day, my foot was really swollen and really bruised, and wouldn’t even go in an unlaced sneaker.  Normal walking wasn’t working because of the grinding, and I knew I’d broken a bone.  But, I reasoned, toes can’t be casted anyway, so it wasn’t worth the hour-plus drive to town to see a doctor, so I just started walking on the inside of my foot so it didn’t hurt too much.  M had seen my Facebook post, so she showed up with a couple of comfy chairs and a footstool, knowing I would be up and around but thinking that if I had a nice place to sit and read, maybe I would stay down with my foot up.  I did spend more time than usual sitting with my foot up, but in a couple of days the swelling had gone down enough that I could get a sneaker on, so I started going with Tom to walk the dogs, and generally just doing everything I would do anyway…walking the dogs, mapping, going out in the tow vehicle, marching around the property.  Superwoman does not let an itty-bitty broken bone slow her down.

But, after 17 days, it wasn’t any better.  The bruising was gone, but it was still swollen and the pain was starting to wear on me.  We had to go to town for some other errands, so I succumbed to peer pressure and allowed, Tom, G, & M to persuade me to stop for an xray.  I consented, mostly because I figured they would tell me that it was just a broken toe and it would get better in a few weeks, and then I could say “told you so” to everybody who had told me they thought I’d be coming home in a cast. 

But they got to say “told you so” to me.  I went to the hospital and saw a doctor, who poked and yanked my toe in and out of joint (after me being so proud about straightening it!), and who then sent me for an xray because he said he thought my foot was broken. So, I walked on my broken foot to the xray department.  The xray tech wrote up a slip and told me to go pay my $15BZ at the cashier, so I walked there.  She didn’t have change for a $50 and I didn’t have any smaller bills, so she suggested I walk out to the parking lot and see if any of the food vendors had change.  They didn’t, and they sent me over to the taxi stand to talk to the taxi drivers.  None of them had change, so they sent me to the other side of the parking lot to the Bowen & Bowen truck, saying that they might have change.  They didn’t, and at this point my foot was getting more than a little sore, so I went back to the cashier and told her that she could hold my $50 until I got change, but could I please just go get the xray.  She didn’t want to hold onto my money, but told me to go get the xray and I could pay later.  I went back to the xray department and explained my dilemma, and the tech took the xrays and sent me back to the doctor. 

My foot was, very clearly, broken, about an inch into my foot from the toe joint, and the doctor told me that it hadn’t even started to heal on its own, and the break didn’t seem to have anything to do with the out-of-joint toe.  He sent me to the emergency room and they put me in a back slab cast, with plaster on the back and an ace bandage around the top, and told me to come back in a week for another xray and a real cast if the swelling had gone down enough.

Tom had dropped me at the hospital at about 2:45 while he went to do errands and I took a radio so I could call him when I was done.   This had been fine with me, because I figured I had a better chance of talking my way out of a cast if Tom wasn’t there trying to make me do what was good for myself.  I did try to talk my way out of the cast, but it didn’t work and I couldn’t really argue with the xray showing the unhealed bone.  When I was done getting the cast in the emergency room, they wheeled me out to the open air waiting area where I could see the parking lot.  They told me I wasn't to put any weight on my foot, and should use crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair…and the hospital pharmacy was all out of crutches.  So, I was essentially trapped until Tom showed up to get me. 

The cast was on around 4PM, and I tried to radio Tom to tell him to pick up some crutches before he came to get me so he could make sure to get to the pharmacy before 5PM.  I turned on the radio, hit the Talk button, and got the dreaded dead battery tone.   I tried again, with the same results.  Remaining calm, I figured that since he had dropped me off at around 2:45, he would have to be there before too long.  Wrong.  A few hospital employees were sitting on a bench near me and had been watching me fuss and fidget, partly because I was impatient with waiting, and partly because I was really uncomfortable and couldn’t move.  They remarked that they had seen me marching around trying to get change, and couldn’t believe I was walking on a fracture.  They asked me if I needed a ride, and I told them that my husband was coming to get me.  I remained calm, sort of, although had I been able to get up and storm around, I no doubt would have.   Tom finally pulled in at about 5:15.   I leaned out and motioned him to drive into the pickup area by the benches, and as he got out and came around the truck to help me, one of the employees warned him that he’d better be careful.  It was exactly the right thing to say, and we all laughed.

We got me loaded, I explained the crutch dilemma, and we decided to radio the farm to see if anybody had any crutches here.  There weren’t any crutches here, but M called a friend on the Western Highway, and he had a couple of pairs of crutches.  Tom had arrived too late to pay the cashier the $15, so we finished a few last errands in town, and headed down the Western Highway to fetch the crutches.  After visiting for Julian and Olda for a few minutes, and getting a really handy bag for my leg for in the shower from Olda, we drove home, arriving at the farm around 8:30PM.

By this time, my foot was really swollen.  I went to bed and propped it up, but the swelling didn’t go down for hours.  Finally, in the middle of the night, I unwrapped the ace bandage and removed the cast, and had a few good hours of sleep.  The swelling was down in the morning, so Tom replaced the cast.  I had problems with the swelling all week, whenever I spent more than a few minutes on my feet (well, foot and crutches), and I finally took the cast off for good on Friday – but I didn’t walk on the foot, and sat with my foot up as much as possible.

On Monday, I went back to the hospital hoping that I wouldn’t get yelled at for removing the cast, which I had very specifically been told not to remove, but also hoping that maybe it would have healed enough that the doctor would decide I didn’t need the cast.  I was partly in luck, and the doctor understood why I had removed the cast.  However, he sent me for another xray, and when I took the films back to him, he told me that I still needed a cast, although the bone had started to knit.  Hanna and Lori had driven me to the hospital because they had some other errands, so they went in with me to open doors and carry my bag.  This was great because I really appreciated the help and they made it a lot easier, and Hanna stood in the cashier’s line to pay my $15 bill from the previous week, not to mention the fact that I probably couldn’t have driven myself anyway, but they also provided witnesses and a reality check.  The doctor told me that I should come back in two weeks for an xray, which I tried to interpret as telling me that the cast would come off in two weeks.  When we got home and I told Tom, in front of Hanna, that I was to go back in two weeks to have the cast removed, Hanna laughed and told Tom that the doctor hadn’t said the cast would be removed, he said he wanted to xray it again in two weeks.  Nonetheless, I am hopeful.

The shorter, lighter cast is much more comfortable than the plaster and ace bandage, but it’s still a major pain in the butt to have to use crutches.  Not only is it tiring, but I can’t carry anything unless I can put it in a bag.  And, if I’m up and about too much, my foot still swells and the cast gets very uncomfortable.  I’m trying to be good about keeping off my feet and keeping my foot up as much as possible, but it’s difficult because I think it should be all better after almost four weeks.  But, maybe the doctors do have some idea what they’re talking about, and I will just have to hope that my deteriorating, post-menopausal bones will have healed enough in a couple of weeks that the cast can be removed.

The Post-Menopausal Stubbed Toe

I’d always read how doctors warn women that their bones weaken as they age.  I didn’t really pay attention, or really care, beyond thinking briefly that this wouldn’t apply to me since I’ve always had really strong bones and normal aging factors don’t apply to Superwoman.  I’ve taken a few really hard knocks over the years, mostly horse related, and while I broke my tailbone, fractured a few ribs, cracked my cheekbone, and have had my fair share of jammed fingers, I never had an injury that required a cast.  Until now.  And all I did was stub my toe.

We had been here about three weeks, and the house was still a construction zone.  Part of the roof of the porch was ripped off to build the fireplace chimney, boards were all over the floor, tools were scattered everywhere, clothes were piled on boxes, and everything was in a jumble.  One of those big driving thunderstorms blew in, and I realized that rain was pouring in from a few different spots, so I was running around closing windows and moving things away from spots where there weren’t any windows to close.  As I was running from one end of the wet veranda to the other with an armful of stuff, my foot slipped on the wet tile and slammed my little toe into a pile of boards.

It didn’t hurt right away.  I knew immediately that no pain for how hard I’d hit was bad.  I put my armload of stuff down, went to the bed, and curled up on the edge so I could take a good look at my foot.  My little toe was sticking out at a funny angle and my whole foot was starting to tingle, so I grabbed the little toe and put it back where it belongs, feeling very proud of myself for being so easily fixed.  I got up and started walking, and realized that I could feel a nasty grinding from the bone on the side of my foot and casually wondered why a dislocated little toe would be popping and grinding there.  This state of shock lasted another few minutes, and then it started to HURT.  I started to get that semi-nauseating adrenaline rush whenever my foot passed within a few inches of a corner or piece of furniture or anything that could bump it. Then I started to feel semi-nauseous in general, and sat down to feel sorry for myself.  Tom came in a little while later, and I got up to get the door for him, and as the dogs also ran to greet him, one of them stepped on my foot.  I said a bunch of bad words, burst into tears, and curled up on the floor holding my foot.

Tom, immediately recognizing that this was not normal behavior for me, sat down, put me in his lap, and asked what was wrong.  I proceeded to sob out all that I thought was wrong with the world, and finally got around to telling him that I’d stubbed my toe and hurt my foot.  It didn’t help that I was overtired, having been on an airport run to Belize City with M three days before, out shopping all day two days before, and surfing in the back of the Land Rover for nine hours as we did the mapping the day before.  It also didn’t help that by this time my foot was swelling to the point where I couldn’t get it in a boot, and we hadn’t gone for our walk with the dogs yet that day, and I was starting to figure out that I might have a sore foot for a few days.  Of course none of this prevented me from unlacing my sneaker so I could get my foot in it so I could Nordic Track for 40 minutes.  Denial is a very powerful analgesic.

By the next day, my foot was really swollen and really bruised, and wouldn’t even go in an unlaced sneaker.  Normal walking wasn’t working because of the grinding, and I knew I’d broken a bone.  But, I reasoned, toes can’t be casted anyway, so it wasn’t worth the hour-plus drive to town to see a doctor, so I just started walking on the inside of my foot so it didn’t hurt too much.  M had seen my Facebook post, so she showed up with a couple of comfy chairs and a footstool, knowing I would be up and around but thinking that if I had a nice place to sit and read, maybe I would stay down with my foot up.  I did spend more time than usual sitting with my foot up, but in a couple of days the swelling had gone down enough that I could get a sneaker on, so I started going with Tom to walk the dogs, and generally just doing everything I would do anyway…walking the dogs, mapping, going out in the tow vehicle, marching around the property.  Superwoman does not let an itty-bitty broken bone slow her down.

But, after 17 days, it wasn’t any better.  The bruising was gone, but it was still swollen and the pain was starting to wear on me.  We had to go to town for some other errands, so I succumbed to peer pressure and allowed, Tom, G, & M to persuade me to stop for an xray.  I consented, mostly because I figured they would tell me that it was just a broken toe and it would get better in a few weeks, and then I could say “told you so” to everybody who had told me they thought I’d be coming home in a cast. 

But they got to say “told you so” to me.  I went to the hospital and saw a doctor, who poked and yanked my toe in and out of joint (after me being so proud about straightening it!), and who then sent me for an xray because he said he thought my foot was broken. So, I walked on my broken foot to the xray department.  The xray tech wrote up a slip and told me to go pay my $15BZ at the cashier, so I walked there.  She didn’t have change for a $50 and I didn’t have any smaller bills, so she suggested I walk out to the parking lot and see if any of the food vendors had change.  They didn’t, and they sent me over to the taxi stand to talk to the taxi drivers.  None of them had change, so they sent me to the other side of the parking lot to the Bowen & Bowen truck, saying that they might have change.  They didn’t, and at this point my foot was getting more than a little sore, so I went back to the cashier and told her that she could hold my $50 until I got change, but could I please just go get the xray.  She didn’t want to hold onto my money, but told me to go get the xray and I could pay later.  I went back to the xray department and explained my dilemma, and the tech took the xrays and sent me back to the doctor. 

My foot was, very clearly, broken, about an inch into my foot from the toe joint, and the doctor told me that it hadn’t even started to heal on its own, and the break didn’t seem to have anything to do with the out-of-joint toe.  He sent me to the emergency room and they put me in a back slab cast, with plaster on the back and an ace bandage around the top, and told me to come back in a week for another xray and a real cast if the swelling had gone down enough.

Tom had dropped me at the hospital at about 2:45 while he went to do errands and I took a radio so I could call him when I was done.   This had been fine with me, because I figured I had a better chance of talking my way out of a cast if Tom wasn’t there trying to make me do what was good for myself.  I did try to talk my way out of the cast, but it didn’t work and I couldn’t really argue with the xray showing the unhealed bone.  When I was done getting the cast in the emergency room, they wheeled me out to the open air waiting area where I could see the parking lot.  They told me I wasn't to put any weight on my foot, and should use crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair…and the hospital pharmacy was all out of crutches.  So, I was essentially trapped until Tom showed up to get me. 

The cast was on around 4PM, and I tried to radio Tom to tell him to pick up some crutches before he came to get me so he could make sure to get to the pharmacy before 5PM.  I turned on the radio, hit the Talk button, and got the dreaded dead battery tone.   I tried again, with the same results.  Remaining calm, I figured that since he had dropped me off at around 2:45, he would have to be there before too long.  Wrong.  A few hospital employees were sitting on a bench near me and had been watching me fuss and fidget, partly because I was impatient with waiting, and partly because I was really uncomfortable and couldn’t move.  They remarked that they had seen me marching around trying to get change, and couldn’t believe I was walking on a fracture.  They asked me if I needed a ride, and I told them that my husband was coming to get me.  I remained calm, sort of, although had I been able to get up and storm around, I no doubt would have.   Tom finally pulled in at about 5:15.   I leaned out and motioned him to drive into the pickup area by the benches, and as he got out and came around the truck to help me, one of the employees warned him that he’d better be careful.  It was exactly the right thing to say, and we all laughed.

We got me loaded, I explained the crutch dilemma, and we decided to radio the farm to see if anybody had any crutches here.  There weren’t any crutches here, but M called a friend on the Western Highway, and he had a couple of pairs of crutches.  Tom had arrived too late to pay the cashier the $15, so we finished a few last errands in town, and headed down the Western Highway to fetch the crutches.  After visiting for Julian and Olda for a few minutes, and getting a really handy bag for my leg for in the shower from Olda, we drove home, arriving at the farm around 8:30PM.

By this time, my foot was really swollen.  I went to bed and propped it up, but the swelling didn’t go down for hours.  Finally, in the middle of the night, I unwrapped the ace bandage and removed the cast, and had a few good hours of sleep.  The swelling was down in the morning, so Tom replaced the cast.  I had problems with the swelling all week, whenever I spent more than a few minutes on my feet (well, foot and crutches), and I finally took the cast off for good on Friday – but I didn’t walk on the foot, and sat with my foot up as much as possible.

On Monday, I went back to the hospital hoping that I wouldn’t get yelled at for removing the cast, which I had very specifically been told not to remove, but also hoping that maybe it would have healed enough that the doctor would decide I didn’t need the cast.  I was partly in luck, and the doctor understood why I had removed the cast.  However, he sent me for another xray, and when I took the films back to him, he told me that I still needed a cast, although the bone had started to knit.  Hanna and Lori had driven me to the hospital because they had some other errands, so they went in with me to open doors and carry my bag.  This was great because I really appreciated the help and they made it a lot easier, and Hanna stood in the cashier’s line to pay my $15 bill from the previous week, not to mention the fact that I probably couldn’t have driven myself anyway, but they also provided witnesses and a reality check.  The doctor told me that I should come back in two weeks for an xray, which I tried to interpret as telling me that the cast would come off in two weeks.  When we got home and I told Tom, in front of Hanna, that I was to go back in two weeks to have the cast removed, Hanna laughed and told Tom that the doctor hadn’t said the cast would be removed, he said he wanted to xray it again in two weeks.  Nonetheless, I am hopeful.

The shorter, lighter cast is much more comfortable than the plaster and ace bandage, but it’s still a major pain in the butt to have to use crutches.  Not only is it tiring, but I can’t carry anything unless I can put it in a bag.  And, if I’m up and about too much, my foot still swells and the cast gets very uncomfortable.  I’m trying to be good about keeping off my feet and keeping my foot up as much as possible, but it’s difficult because I think it should be all better after almost four weeks.  But, maybe the doctors do have some idea what they’re talking about, and I will just have to hope that my deteriorating, post-menopausal bones will have healed enough in a couple of weeks that the cast can be removed.

Conservation Projects

While the focus of this business is the pines and the carbon credits in the broadleaf parts of the property, G&M have also become involved in a number of conservation projects.  “Become involved” is intentionally vague, because what they, and the business, do for the various projects ranges from providing a helping hand when necessary, to becoming an important and vital part of some of the larger projects.  Because they own such a large tract of undeveloped land, the land itself is a valuable resource for some of these projects, and sometimes all that is needed is permission to track an animal, or release a bird, or follow some sort of wildlife across the property.  But, sometimes the farm provides more support.  As General Managers here, Tom and I are also able to get involved and help however it is needed – and we are excited to do it!

One of the projects we’ve been learning about is the orange breasted falcon tracking and captive release program.  The “hack site,” where the fledglings are released and where the researchers are based to watch the birds, is on farm property.  In addition, the farm provides a portable screen room so the researchers don’t have to sit outside in the sun with the bugs.  The farm freezer also hosts a big box of frozen quail, used to provide food for the fledglings until they can hunt on their own.  Some of this “work” for us involves socializing with the researchers and the sponsor of the project, and asking questions to find out what else we can do to support the effort.  So far we have found that the enthusiasm of the researchers is contagious, and we celebrate with them when the fledglings fly, and mourn when one of the birds disappears.

The jaguar research project here is slightly more labor intensive.  While the OBF project has the quail in the freezer and a few boxes in the storeroom, the jaguar project’s many trunks are a few floor to ceiling piles in the storeroom.  The farm also provides housing in one of the staff cabins for the researchers, and keeps the project’s truck when the researchers are not in-country.  The project has camera traps on the farm property, as well as other remote locations throughout the Mountain Pine Ridge.  Part of Hanna’s decision to ride around in the HVI off-road rally support vehicle a few weeks ago was to check out road conditions where she would be setting and checking the camera traps.  Between truck difficulties and very bad driving conditions due to excessive rain over the past few weeks, part of our job in supporting the jaguar project has been to help Hanna and Lori, the volunteer assistant, get out to set and check the 40 camera traps.

While in most cases this has meant nothing more than making sure their truck was running and they had everything they might need for an emergency situation, one day Tom and I were just getting back from getting unstuck while out doing our mapping project when Hanna’s distress call came over the radio.  She and Lori had driven out to check a couple of camera traps deep in the Mountain Pine Ridge, very near the big washout where we had decided to turn around during the HVI off-road rally, and had become hopelessly stuck.  They had spent two hours trying everything they could do to get the truck out, and had muscled it out of a couple of deep spots, but every time they thought they were out and going, they’d get stuck again.  They had finally ended up in a hole that wasn’t letting them go, so they radioed for help. 

Instead of heading back out for more mapping, Tom, G, and I headed into the Pine Ridge to find and rescue Hanna.  We successfully traversed the big washout that had turned us around during the off-road rally, using the loading ramps for the trailer, which Tom had the foresight to put in the back of the truck, along with shovels, a pickax, and the metal digging bar.  With all of these tools plus some muscle pushing the truck, we made it over that rough spot.  After a near miss with slick mud and a tree, we plowed through a few more deep spots, and were on the final downhill, approaching where Lori and Hanna had become stuck as they were trying to come up the hill.  We thought we’d have few problems going downhill and using gravity, but all the rain had gouged some very deep channels in the road.  Most of the time, we were able to get to either one side or the other or straddle the channel, but at one point the only way to get both sides of the vehicle on firm ground involved bumping through the channel…and we didn’t make it.  As we tried to drive out, the tire dug the hole deeper, and the soft mud from the side broke away and gave no traction.  We tried the ramps, we dug, we pickaxed, we pushed, we rocked the truck, but we were stuck.

G thought that Hanna and Lori weren’t too far down the hill, so we left the truck and started walking.  They were farther than we thought, probably a half mile away, and they were very stuck.  However, with three more brains and sets of muscles, and two more very good drivers, and the winch, we managed to get the truck out of that hole.  And out of the next one, which it fell in as Tom drove it up the hill.  And out of one more, before we came face to face with the other stuck truck.  We ended up not having to use the winch on that one, and a simple pull down the hill with the other truck did the trick, but G then had to reverse through the ruts and back up a good 200 yards up the hill to get to a place where he could get turned around without either getting stuck in deep mud off the side of the trail or going over the edge of the cliff.  After a couple of more deep spots, we made it out to a road that was in relatively good condition, and started the trek back to the farm.  By this time it was after 6PM, and the sun was setting.  We saw some beautiful sunset views from the ridgelines we traveled, and marveled at the mist wending its way between the hills as the temperature dropped, but had a fairly tense last ten miles back to the farm driving in the complete darkness.  Even though the roads were good by Mountain Pine Ridge Road standards, driving on muddy ridgeline roads that occasionally dropped off on either side in the pitch black wasn’t, shall we say, relaxing.  But it was another work adventure!

Less adventurous but also fun is the time we get to spend just getting to know the researchers.  We eat together, we have dessert together, we talk about what the researchers are going to do when they’re done with these projects, and we try to soak up as much knowledge as we can about what nature offers around here.  It’s as though we’ve suddenly been invited into a society where we were always on the outside looking in, and now we can actually help.  It may just be logistical support, but it’s help.  And we are looking forward to continuing to help these and future projects.

The Paradox of the Move

Our B&B is nine miles south of the Western Highway on a bad dirt road.  We’ve had guests show up in tears because they felt that they were going so far out in the bush that they might never get back.  While the property has water piped to it from the Village of 7 Miles, it is otherwise completely off the grid:  no electricity, no phone lines, certainly no cable, and no municipal services like road maintenance or garbage pickup.  However, we had a generator, some batteries, a small solar setup, satellite internet and a cell phone that worked off the electrical system, and a water setup so we always had running water with good pressure.  We used battery powered lights and kerosene lamps at night, and if we had to do something that required a lot of light, we just made sure to get it done during the day.  We had butane water heaters in our house, the guest cabin, and the kitchen, and a butane refrigerator and freezer, and a washer and dryer that we could use for laundry when we ran the generator.  We just managed our resources and lived quite comfortably.

When we started telling friends and family that we were moving eight miles further south, further into the wilderness, lots of people thought we were crazy.  Hadn’t we proved our point that we could live off the grid using our own resources?  Didn’t we think we deserved a little more comfort?  That’s the paradox.  Moving here, we are now living like civilized people, and even though we’re not on the government grid, the farm has its own infrastructure and we have electricity, water, phones, and internet, and we don’t even have to work too hard to manage all of it.  Our house has a big battery bank, so we have 24-hour electricity, and enough of it that we can run a 25cf refrigerator/freezer, keep our computers plugged in all the time, have lights on whenever we want them, and even run the washing machine when the generator isn’t running.  The wifi is on all the time, and we have a real phone line that runs into the house.  Cool, huh?

As we were gearing up for the move, we motivated ourselves by talking about the luxury we were going to be living in up here.  And we are enjoying it, although we have to admit that we may have gone a little feral with six and a half years of living in the jungle, and there are a few things that we really miss.  They’re little things, but we still miss them.  Lots of them revolve around my beautiful, practical, B&B kitchen, which was a huge palapa with a thatch roof, and half walls.  I never felt like I was inside when I was cooking, so I was able to combine two things I love to do at every meal, cooking and being outside, and the whole time I cooked in that kitchen I would get a big kick over having wild birds fly through, and sometimes stop to chatter at me or clean up crumbs.  Here, I have a nice kitchen with my huge refrigerator and freezer with a water and ice dispenser and an automatic ice maker, but I’m not outside when I’m cooking, and the hummingbirds can’t buzz me because they smell the sugar as I’m stirring some pudding on the stove.  And Tom misses griddle toast, since I dug out my regular old toaster when we moved here.  I can just plug it in, push the bread down, and have toast pop out a few minutes later and I don’t even have to watch it.  It’s getting better now, but when we first moved here the noise of the refrigerator running at night was enough to keep both of us awake, especially when we opened our eyes and saw the little water dispenser light on the front reflecting brightly enough in the kitchen that we could see it from the bedroom.  In fact, all of the little lights of all the little things we now leave plugged in seemed very bright after six and a half years of complete darkness at night.

We’re not knocking lights; it’s really nice to come home after dark and be able to flip a light switch and have all the light we want.  But, more light also means that sometimes the day never ends, and where without electricity we would give up trying to do anything productive and just sit around and play cards by kerosene lamp, now we keep working on whatever project didn’t get done in the house during the day.  And with 24 hour wifi, we can be on the computer any time with no worries of running down the batteries, which is also good and bad since as we all know the computer can be a huge distraction.  It seems that in some ways we were forced into a nicer quality of life by lack of the modern technologies that are taken for granted.

The other paradox is that we’re now part of a larger community than we were at the B&B.  We had neighbors there, but we didn’t see much of them, and of course we had our guests, but they would come and go.  Here, G&M and Dave are our fulltime neighbors, and since we work together, we see quite a bit of them.  The staff stays here four nights a week, and our house is very close to their cottages, so we have close neighbors at least part time.  We hear their doors slam, we hear them if they’re talking loudly, we hear each other’s radios, and if we’re out in our yard or they’re out in theirs, one of us will wander over just to chat.  Right now, two jaguar researchers are staying in the cabin closest to us, so we have full time neighbors right next door for the next couple of months.  This isn’t a bad thing, and in fact we’re enjoying it, but it’s different, and not what we expected of moving further into the bush when it seems like we should have been moving away from other people.  I can’t stand naked on my porch to comb my hair any more…but so it goes.  I’m also much more frequently a dinner guest rather than the cook and hostess, and that is quite nice, and well worth the tradeoff of having to comb my hair in the bedroom.

Mapping

As long as we’ve known G, we’ve known that he’s a bit of a map geek.  He makes his own maps of the property and the area, which, if you’re a map geek and you want maps of the places you go around here, you have to do since good, detailed maps for specific areas of Belize are difficult if not impossible to find.  When we first started getting to know the property, G gave us .pdf maps of the property for our iPads that work with a GPS program, so we can always see where we are.  I immediately geeked out and started carrying my iPad around with me when we went for walks or horseback rides or drives on the property.  One of the first days we were officially working here, we had to pick up some guests at Manakin Falls.  We weren’t quite sure where it was, and it wasn’t marked on any of the maps, so we had to find our way there with verbal directions from G over the radio.  His directions were good, and we found it without a problem, but I decided I was going to remedy the problem and start pinning locations on our .pdf iPad map.  I carted my iPad to the base of the falls, dropped a pin, and took a picture.  I looked at the Avenza map app when we got home, and realized that I could attach the picture to the pin, name the pin, and have a pretty snazzy little map.  When Tom saw what I was doing, he took a closer look at the app, and realized that you can do all sorts of cool geeky things with the pins, like classify different marked spots by color, add descriptions, turn different classifications on and off, and send the pins to other maps.  A project was born, and Tom was suddenly on board with carrying the iPad everywhere so we could map everything on the property:  buildings, gates, vistas, waterfalls, beetle outbreaks, and bridges.  Our map quickly became prickly with pins.

Around the same time we had started working on this project, G realized that there were many new roads and trails on the property that weren’t on his current maps.  He and M were planning a trip to the US where they could more easily get big printed versions of the maps if he could update the maps before they left, so the re-mapping project suddenly had a deadline.  Driving every possible road with a GPS was also a good way for Tom and me to get to know the property, and we could work on our pinning project.

G&M had good friends coming to visit right about when we decided to do this, and Aaron, the husband, also loves these kinds of projects.  So, M packed lunch for the four of us, G and Aaron put the good GPS in the open backed Land Rover, Tom drove, George navigated and ran the GPS, and Aaron and I stood in the back.  We spent a delightful day driving around the eastern portion of the property learning the roads, property lines, and compartment lines, and absorbing bits of farm history from G.  Whenever we got to something pin-able, we would stop so I could drop the pin on my map and take some pictures, usually interrupting my ongoing conversation with Aaron with, “Excuse me, I have to go to work now!”  The map feature also allows notes to be entered and tied to a pin, so I further expanded the use of the tool by taking notes on what G was telling us, such as what water crossings were next up for bridges, and what kind of bridge he envisioned at each site.  We visited the hack site where the endangered orange breasted falcons are being released, and stopped for a few good views of 1000 Foot Falls that aren’t open to the general public.  We also had a primer on beetle damage identification, since the beetle has done quite a bit of recent damage to the east of the property and there are too many examples of beetle infestation in different stages.


We drove on all sorts of roads, trails, and lines that may or may not have been considered map-able in a lesser vehicle with a less brave driver, and only had trouble in one spot where Tom decided to make a stop for me to drop a pin…on a bridge crossing that was crumbling away under us.  Aaron and G yelled at Tom to “GO!” as I was bailing out of the back of the truck, and Tom, to his credit, reacted quickly enough to move the truck before the hind end was so far in the hole it couldn’t get out.  We made it back to the farm around 6PM for a delicious dinner prepared by M and Sarah while we were out, with about half of the property mapped.

G was comfortable enough with Tom’s driving, and he knew we had hiked many of the roads and trails around the farm, so that he asked us to finish the GPSing project on our own while he did desk work.  We spent another day driving around, and then another couple of half days filling in gaps and looking for trails that we didn’t see on our first pass but that G knew we had missed, and finished the project just before M&G left.  We sunk the truck once, when we went down a compartment boundary to an uncross-able water crossing in a thunderstorm, and backed into a mud-filled ditch that we couldn’t see because of the water flowing over it when we tried to turn around.  We were only a mile or two from the farm, so Jose came down on the tractor and yanked us out.  We saw a herd of peccaries on one of the boundary lines, and a bunch of grey foxes, a number of tapir tracks, and a few interesting birds while we were out and about, and we finished much more familiar with the property.  We finished the project comfortable with the general layout of the roads and compartments, and knowing what we need to know if we need to get somewhere quickly during fire season.  Now we just have to hope we don’t have to use that information – but if we get lucky and it’s a couple of years before a bad fire, at least we will have up to date maps.

HVI Off-Road Rally

A couple of weeks ago, Hidden Valley Inn sponsored an off-road rally where drivers could test their skills driving their four-wheel drive vehicles over a 110 kilometer course through the Mountain Pine Ridge.  Part of the course is on Hidden Valley property, part on farm land, and part on the back roads of the Mountain Pine Ridge.  Because G helped map the course, and because we have a Land Rover with a winch, we were the tow/support vehicle and were assigned to follow the drivers to help if anybody got stuck.

Originally, 12 vehicles had entered the rally.  However, it poured rain for the entire day and night before the rally, so only four intrepid souls showed for the rally:  two compensation trucks (both large Dodges) from Belize City, an old Land Rover from Sittee River, and a new Mahindra from Belmopan.  Trevor, the owner of Hidden Valley, followed in his white Toyota Prado with a winch, and we joined the end of the line around kilometer 30 after cutting off the first part of the course.

This was a REAL off-road rally.  The vehicles had to traverse steep hills, running water, major mud holes, canyon-like washouts, crumbling cliff-edge tracks, and generally rough conditions made rougher by the recent heavy rains.  And, although it didn’t rain too heavily during the race, conditions deteriorated with each passing vehicle.  Even before the first vehicle, Hidden Valley vehicles had run the course to make sure it was passable, and as it turned out it was a really good thing that only a third of the entrants had shown up for race day because as the last vehicle in line, even the rescue vehicle had its share of difficulties negotiating the course.

At one point, we had to winch ourselves up a hill out of a creek bottom.  We tried getting a running start on the concrete slab bridge over the hill two or three times, but couldn’t get over a very muddy spot with very deep ruts near the top of the hill.  So, G gave Tom, me, and Hanna, one of the jaguar researchers, a winching lesson, which was new for Tom and me, and a good refresher for Hanna, who takes the Land Rovers out to remote spots in the Mountain Pine Ridge as she sets her camera traps and occasionally needs to winch herself out of a deep spot.  We made it through that spot and continued the course somewhat behind the competitors and Trevor.

Not too long after needing to winch ourselves up the hill, we came to a big washout.  It looked like if we hugged the bank on the left, we could just fit our right side wheels past the big hole.  I elected to get out of the truck and document the effort with pictures and video, mostly because I didn’t want to be in the truck when it fell in the hole.  G and Hanna got out so they could wave at Tom to stay further to the left, and to stop if it looked like he wasn’t going to make it…which is what happened.  Fortunately Tom was able to stop before sliding into the hole, which was about four feet deep, and at that point we decided that discretion is indeed the better part of valor.  We backed up to where we could turn around and took a different route to intercept the drivers, cutting off one loop of the course.

We waited by one of the gates onto the property and found out that we were behind all but one of the competitors, along with a couple of the Hidden Valley chase vehicles and Trevor.  At that point, we found out that when we turned around we were very close to the last competitor and Trevor, who had been held up because one of the big Dodge trucks fell in the hole and enlarged it as he got out, and then Trevor fell in the hole with his Prado and had to winch himself out of it, breaking his winch in the process, so he ended the race with the winch cable spooled around his entire brush guard. 

As we were making our way back to the farm, M radioed G for our ETA, and he told her we’d be home in about 30 minutes, right after we went to check at the Inn that everybody was back and safe.  Hah!  Everybody was back, but one of the compensation trucks – the one that hadn’t fallen into the hole – had decided to do the obstacle course set up behind the Inn, and when we got there they were in the process of towing him out with a tractor.  The tractor got him out of the mire, but as he went to exit the course he had to cross a stream, and his truck stalled out in the stream.  Both sides of the stream were extremely muddy, and the truck was extremely big and completely dead, so when the tractor that had towed him out before tried again, this time it couldn’t get enough traction on the muddy stream bank to even move the truck.

So, the rescue team sprang into action, and G went to fetch the Land Rover rescue vehicle.  Even with all the toys, er, tools, it took about an hour and a half to get the truck out.  We tried winching the big truck out of the creek, but it just skidded the Land Rover through the mud and dragged it down the hill, digging deep trenches as it went.  We then tied the Land Rover to a tree with a tow rope, and managed to get the Dodge out of the water and onto the bank so the passengers could get out. 

The next step was for the tractor to try towing the truck the rest of the way up the bank, now that it was out of the water.  No go.  The decision was made to get the Land Rover out of the mud and into the brush so the Land Rover could tow the tractor towing the Dodge.  To get the Land Rover out of the mud and into the brush we had to learn to use the snatch block, which isn’t, as you might imagine, a weight lifting move or form of birth control, but is a simple little gadget that allows you to winch at an angle by running the winch cable through the snatch block, tying the snatch block off to a tree so the cable can run over the pulley at an angle, and connecting the winch to something solid off to the side.

We first used this rig to get the Land Rover out of the mud and off to the side, then used it to go the other way down the hill and connect the tractor and truck.  It took a few tries, but we finally got both the tractor and the Dodge off the muddy track and into the grass.  We then disconnected the winch, put the Land Rover at the head of the train, and the Land Rover and tractor hauled the Dodge up the hill to flat, relatively dry ground.

We had left the farm about 7:30AM, and returned at about 5:30PM, tired, dirty, and extremely pleased with our day.  We had to take the “how to clean and maintain a winch” lesson the next day, but that was fun too!

Typical day to day life on the farm

The month and a half or so since we have moved here has flown by, and while in some ways it seems like we were just frantically getting ready for this move, in other ways it feels like we’ve been here forever.  When we moved here, we weren’t sure what we would be doing with ourselves every day, and both of us were a little worried that we wouldn’t feel productive.  I felt this way more than Tom because Tom has most of the responsibility for managing the work crews, and if worse comes to worst he can always go out and work with the guys, but I wasn’t sure what I would do.  We were both worried for nothing.  In fact, I thought I’d get this blog up and running within the first couple of weeks of being here, and here it is a month and a half later, and I’m just getting to it, and that’s only because I have a broken foot and have been forced to look for sit-down desk jobs.

So what have we been doing?  We’ve had a couple of big jobs that deserve their own posts, like being the rescue crew for an off-road road rally, GPSing all the roads and tracks on the property so the maps can be accurately updated, getting familiar with the environmental projects the farm helps, and getting ready for M&G to be away for a few weeks, but for the most part we’ve just been figuring out the business.  We’ve had to learn, as G says, the rhythm of the weeks, and have been figuring out how to manage the work flow between the forestry projects and the farm maintenance and infrastructure.  Tom develops a weekly work goal list, and then goes to the morning gaggle every day where he and the foreman and the crew leaders decide who should do what each day to try to accomplish the weekly goals.  Tom goes out with the forestry crews once in a while to see how they do what they do, and to learn how to fight the beetle, applying what he reads about at night to the field.  The time needed to fight the beetle has been more than we anticipated, both for the time spent for us doing some immediate learning, and for the amount of time it takes the crews to be out chopping and clearing and planning burns, which haven’t been able to happen yet due to pretty consistent rain.

While doing this, we’ve both been able to do another ongoing introductory part of the job, which is getting to know the staff, both personally and as part of getting to know what they do here.  This has involved some going through personnel records, but a lot of it has been just talking to them, asking about their jobs, and working with them.  This has been a relatively easy task, since they all want to get to know us too, but it takes time.

We also spend a lot of time working on the house.  As I’ve mentioned in other blog posts, work on the house has been delayed because most of the work crew has been out fighting the beetle.  However, one of the main jobs for Tom and me has been to keep making progress, however slow, on the house.  For the first couple of weeks we were here, the two of us worked almost exclusively on the house, painting and putting up trim, Tom doing the electrical system, getting the phone and internet hooked up, getting the kitchen in some sort of working order, finishing the bathroom, and generally trying not to let the project stall even though the two of us on our own couldn’t get it done as quickly as the whole crew could.  For the past couple of weeks, we haven’t had as much time to spend on the house either, but we’re still trying to keep it moving. We still have a lot of work to do, and it will probably take another couple of months to get done, but we’re comfortable and making progress.

Another part of our job is shopping for the farm.  As a rule, the “quincena” shop is every other week, just to reduce wear and tear on the vehicles running up and down the road.  This means that the actual shop is just a small part of the project, and the larger effort is spent managing needs and requests to try to limit the shop to every other week.  We have been marginally successful at this, and have found that we seem to be doing more of a plan where we skip a week, but then have to go down two weeks in a row because with the number of items that build up over two weeks, it takes more than a day to get to all the places to get them.  Part of this is just doing business in Belize; there are no supermarkets or Walmarts or malls where you can go to one place and tick off half your list.  Instead, we may make 20 stops in three different towns in order to get everything, especially when we have very specific items like vehicle parts.  And, being Belize, part of doing business is chatting with the business owners, or with the other customers, and generally catching up with everybody from the outside world while we’re out, and it just takes time.  Between the list management and the actual shop, we probably spend two days a week on this ongoing project.

Although not technically part of the "work,” we’ve also spent a lot of time just getting to know the area.  Until I broke my foot, we made a point to take Kismet and Jalis for a walk every day, and we tried to pick a different route.  We take the walks for our enjoyment and the enjoyment of the dogs, but at this point we know all the roads and trails on the property within two or three miles of the house pretty well.  We expanded that knowledge a bit with the horses, although the broken foot has infringed on that pastime as well since I haven’t been able to get my foot in a boot since the third week in August.  Just in a relatively small circle around the farm compound, we’ve been able to learn not only about the roads and trails, but also about the different types of vegetation that grow around here, about some of the different waterways and waterfalls, about the local animals, and about how the property is divided into compartments in order to manage fires.  It’s been a very worthwhile way to spend our free time.

Getting Settled.... sort of

On July 28, we, the horses, and the dogs spent the night at the farm, so the move was official.  Our official day to start work was July 30 rather than August 1 because the farm runs on a Tuesday to Saturday work week rather than Monday to Friday.  Because the farm is about an hour of bad roads from San Ignacio, it’s too far for the staff to commute, so they stay here four nights a week.  That means that if they worked the traditional Monday to Friday work week, they would never be in town during traditional business and school hours.  With the Tuesday to Saturday schedule, Monday is a day off when they can be in town to take care of business, and they don’t have to worry about missing work.  We decided to move in the Sunday before starting the job so we’d have a few days to get settled, and be here and ready to go on Tuesday morning when the staff returned from their weekend. 

“Move in” turned out to be a bit of an overstatement.  Despite everybody’s best efforts, the house was nowhere close to done.  Part of our mission with this job is to help the pine forest regenerate from the pine bark beetle outbreak in 2000/2001, and in the early summer fresh beetle outbreaks appeared on the property.  Obviously, the first priority for the staff was to head out to fight the beetle, especially because the quicker it is contained, the less likely it is to spread uncontrollably.  So, the house crew was reduced to a minimum, and we had to decide what really needed to be done.  Having lived a no-frills lifestyle for the past six and a half years, Tom and I agreed that we needed a suitable place to keep the dogs, a place to sleep, a working stove and kitchen sink, and a toilet.  And that’s what we got, basically.  The guys worked to get a fence put off the back of the house for the dogs, and cut a dog door so the dogs could go in and out.  We put a closeable door on “the dog room” so we could go out for the day and lock them in a safe space where they could go in and out at will.  The bedroom hadn’t needed a whole lot of work to begin with, but since the whole house had been rewired, we had to have the lights, outlets, and switches put in the bedroom before moving in so nobody had to climb all over the bed to get them installed, and that got done.  The guys moved my new stove from the coffee barn to the kitchen, and Tom connected it to the butane and made sure it worked.  The sink was already in, and Tom stuck a couple of long planks under the ends so I had a little bit of counter space.  We had purchased a small chest freezer from the previous general manager, and had put some food in it a week or so before we moved in, so even though we didn’t have a refrigerator, we had cold food and enough stuff that didn’t need to be refrigerated, and a way to cook it, so we weren’t going to starve.

The toilet turned out to be the only hitch.  We decided that we didn’t need to worry about the shower because we could use the staff shower, complete with hot water, right next door.  So, Tom and Dave had spent most of the week before we moved tiling and grouting, and they made sure the corner by the toilet was done.  Tom put the toilet in the Friday before we moved, and made sure that everything was connected and it wasn’t leaking.  He says he flushed it about 50 times to make sure it was working and not leaking, and I believe him.  It took us about two and a half hours to ride the horses from the B&B to the farm, and although we had packed lunch, we found it easier to just keep going and not take a break.  We got to the farm, untacked the horses and introduced them to their new home, G came out to welcome us, and I professed the desire to pee in my own toilet.  So I did.  And then I flushed, and it overflowed.  Welcome home, to a pee flooded bathroom!

I called Tom and said I thought he had said that the toilet worked.  He swore it worked two days before, and we stood and looked at it.  When it gradually drained, we flushed it again, just to see what would happen.  It flooded again, although at least this time the water was clean.  We decided we had more to do than worry about the toilet, especially since the staff bathroom is close to the house, and went about unpacking, although Tom was fretting about the toilet and kept darting off to try different remedies such as making sure the vent was clear, digging up the drain pipe out of the house to make sure it hadn’t broken, and looking for a snake in the shop which, as it turned out, he fortunately didn’t find.  We had a lot to do on Monday, so we didn’t do much more about the toilet, although after not solving the problem on Monday, Tom didn’t sleep for thinking about it Monday night, and was up well before 6AM on Tuesday with the mission of pulling the toilet up and reinstalling it from scratch.  I was still in bed, and heard him working in the bathroom, but didn’t really think much of it when I heard him come out of the bathroom, shut the door, and start rustling around in the kitchen.

I finally got up a little after six, got dressed and went out to the staff bathroom, and came back in the house to make our breakfast.  Tom told me he had something he wanted me to look at before I started breakfast, and led me into the bathroom, where the toilet was pulled away from the wall.  It’s a rear-drain rather than a bottom-drain toilet, so the drain hole is out the back, and it was completely clogged by the front end of a very large and very bloated marine toad, with just its back half and legs sticking out.  And, it stunk.  We both laughed, and I escaped to the kitchen to make breakfast while Tom used a pair of pliers to pry and yank the very dead toad out of the back of the toilet before reinstalling it.  We spent a few tense days waiting for the toilet to clog again, knowing that the drain hole had been open for months, since the old bathroom was gutted and the old toilet removed, and not knowing what besides the giant marine toad had crawled into the hole.  It has now been another month since the toilet has been installed, and we’re thinking at this point that anything that was down there has died and won’t be attempting to reappear in our toilet.

In the past month, we have been slowly working on learning the job and finishing the house.  Overall, things have been going smoothly, although the resurgence of the beetle has made the reality a bit different from our expectations; we feel like we set out on a peace keeping mission, and instead of talking, we landed in the middle of a skirmish and had to start fighting, although fortunately it’s not all out war at this point.  This has meant that we’ve done less work on the house than we expected, but we can hardly whine and let the beetle get out of control, especially since at this point we have a fully functional bathroom and kitchen, and the bathroom is even pretty.  We’ve also learned more about the beetle than we thought we’d know by now, and knowledge is always a good thing.

Besides getting a good start on the new job, we have been quite pleased, although not at all surprised, by how well Julio and Janeth are doing with the B&B.  We picked the August 1 transition date in part because we thought that would give them an easy month with light bookings before their kids went back to school.  Then we got a lot of bookings for August in July, so we ended up giving them something of a trial by fire, where they had almost two weeks of solid bookings, and almost every booking had some sort of quirk – dietary restrictions, special transfer needs, or last minute changes.  They managed all of it extremely gracefully, and although Tom and I made a point of meeting all the guests and spending time with them at meals, they all told us that while we’re nice enough, they really enjoyed the authentic Belizean experience provided by Julio and Janeth, from Janeth’s real Belizean cooking to Julio’s stories of growing up in Guatemala and Belize, to spending time with the whole family.  September might be a little more complicated because school starts and the two youngest sons are still in primary school in the village, but it’s also less busy with booked guests, at least so far, so they will get a little bit of a reprieve.  It’s going well enough that Julio mentioned to us that they would be interested in continuing this arrangement on an ongoing basis, but at this point we want to take a few more months and then evaluate how things are going, not least because we want to make sure Julio and Janeth and their family still enjoy the work after going through a busy season.

We have lots of stories, comments, and rants, both from the past month of living here and from the past 10 months of getting ready for the move, but that’s about it for the background and overview of how we got where we are right now, and what we’re doing.  I will try to keep the future posts shorter and more to the point!

The Transition: Making It Happen

It was funny, because immediately after making the decision, we had another spate of activity on the property, and we started to think that after all the effort to engineer a solution so that we could move and start the new job and still keep the business open, it was going to sell and none of it would matter.  But, those leads dried up and we continued to work to implement our plan.  Tom and I treated this like any other project.  We knew the timeline, we knew the tasks, we knew what resources we had, and we just had to put it all together.  Of course none of it really went according to plan…but planning for that is all part of the plan, as any good project manager knows. 

A big part of the plan at this point was to get Julio and Janeth ready to step into the business.  This involved not only training them, but also helping them get their personal life in order so they could do the job.  While Tom and I continue to do the bulk of the administrative work, when guests are around it’s a 24/7 on-site commitment, and Julio and Janeth have been living in the village for their entire marriage, so moving three miles out of the village is a fairly significant change, and they still have kids who are at an age that they can’t have both parents spending significant amounts of time away from home.  Fortunately for all of us, a few things changed in their life just as this transition was happening.  After fifteen years as village chairman, Julio had decided not to run again, so as of mid-June he no longer had that very time consuming in-town commitment.  And Odaly, their only daughter, was graduating from primary school, which meant that she would be home for the summer and would have time to backfill for Janeth at the house and help take care of her brothers.  (I know, I know, why is it assumed that the girl has to be the one to take responsibility for the housework?  It’s just that way here and even though I told numerous stories of how my three brothers had to chip in on the housework at a young age  after our father died and our mother had to go back to work…it’s just the way it is here.)  Julio and Janeth made arrangements with friends and family in the village so that their kids would be cared for if they weren’t home at night, and they had some serious discussions with the kids about how this was going to be a family project, and they were going to all have to step up to the plate.  We made sure we had enough beds at our place that all of them could stay there for an extended time if they wanted, and made it perfectly clear that whatever had to happen for the good of the family, we were supportive.

The other big piece of the business we had to prepare was communications.  Because Tom and I are doing so much of the administrative work, we had to figure out a good way to keep Julio and Janeth up to date, both for planning purposes and last minute updates.  We have the telephone, but the phones here don’t have reliable messaging systems, and mobiles don’t work, so unless we knew someone would be by the B&B phone and someone would be here, that wasn’t a total solution.  Tom and I had always run the business using our computers, but Julio has never really used a computer and just isn’t comfortable with it, and we’d never pushed it.  Then we had a brainstorm.  We had a local friend’s wedding at the B&B in the beginning of May, and our neighbor Tatiana was taking pictures with her iPad.  Julio was fascinated by it, so after the wedding we started showing him our iPad and how it works, and that not only is it a camera, but it has email and web surfing and calendars and address books and games and books and maps…  I think Julio had sort of wondered at our attachment to the iPad, but when we started showing him all it could do, he was definitely interested, and it isn’t even too much like a computer.  Somewhere along the line G had shown me his new iPad Mini, and I decided that I needed a Mini, especially since everything we need to work up here is in the iCloud, so it would be a good work tool for this job.  I was so convincing in my need for a Mini that Tom decided he would need a Mini too – and the lightbulb went off that we each get a Mini, then put all of our B&B computer tools on the iPad, and give it to Julio.

Tom has accused me of selling crack to babies, but knowing Julio’s aversion to computers, I put some thought into how to make the iPad not just a necessary evil of the job, but something that Julio would enjoy using, since more use makes for more proficient use.  My first line of attack was to find out what version of the Bible they use in his church, and get a copy of that onto the Kindle app.  I showed Julio all the reasons why the iPad/Kindle Bible was a good thing – the iPad is smaller than the print version, you can search, it’s really nicely indexed, it’s backlit (very important for use in a town that doesn’t have electricity), text size can be changed, and so on.  Julio immediately saw the attraction, although his family was initially concerned that he looked pretentious, marching into church with an iPad.  But they too soon saw the benefits, and when the novelty wore off, everybody agreed that it was a good thing. 

If the Bible wasn’t enough of a hook, my next effort was to introduce Julio to Facebook.  One of Julio’s nicknames in town is “Pates de Chucho,” or Puppy Feet, because he’s always wandering off to visit and hang with his friends and just be the social creature that he is.  Facebook is made for such social creatures, and within a very short time, Julio had lots of Facebook friends and was enjoying their status updates and chatting and being enlightened to the joys of online social networking, including being able to spy on his children.  Julio also likes to keep up to date on current events, and is as much of a news hound as someone can be while living in an area without TV and radio reception, where daily newspapers aren’t delivered.  The jungle wire generally works well enough that Julio would know when he had to carry the transistor radio off to a place that would get radio reception so he could hear some juicy bit of news, but learning that Facebook users can “Like” different news agencies and reporters and get the news even before it makes it to the radio or TV…like I said, it was like getting a baby hooked on crack.  Suddenly the iPad was Julio’s constant companion, and learning how to use the networked calendar and contact book and email wasn’t so much of a burden.  So, I can now make a change on the calendar from my desk at the farm, and it will appear on Julio’s iPad when he turns on the WiFi at the B&B, and as long as I remember to make good notes on the iPad, the system works.

Actually training Julio and Janeth to do what they need to do at the B&B with guests was quite easy.  Julio has been working with us for a few years, so he knows what he’s doing, and he knows how we expect to have it done.  Janeth has also worked with us off and on, and while she hadn’t been running the kitchen when I was there, she also understood what was required and knew what we expected.  The month before we moved ended up being busier with guests than we had anticipated, so we had ample time for training and hands-on experiences for Julio and Janeth, and they both put a lot of thought into what they were doing and asked great questions, and even made a number of excellent suggestions about how we could do things better.  Tom and Julio had to work out what tools were needed to keep the B&B going, and Janeth and I made lists and went on a few shopping trips to fit the kitchen since I was taking most of the dishes, pots and pans, and utensils.  I finally took the time to write down most of my recipes so Janeth would have them, although she also has many recipes.  Tom took Julio and Janeth out on our pre-guest shopping trips so they would know what we like to buy for the business, for food and other supplies, and where we get our favorite products.  June and July were very busy months at the B&B!

While all of this was happening at the B&B, we were also staging for the move and the new job.  As I mentioned before, our new house was undergoing significant renovation, and G had assigned the whole staff to work on the project to get it done in a couple of months.  But, he didn’t have time to manage it day by day, and didn’t even know how to answer a lot of the day to day questions since they were mostly about what Tom and I wanted.  So, he asked Tom if he would be able to take on managing the house reno project, which Tom was happy to do for a number of reasons.  He knew it would help the job get done more quickly and more the way we wanted it done, and it would give him a chance to get to know the staff before he was actually their boss, which would change the work dynamic.  His original plan was to spend one day a week on the project, but of course he got sucked in and was spending every spare minute not just managing and advising, but also taking on a few minor subprojects…like the kitchen and the bathroom.  The staff was still doing plenty of work, and Tulio is a talented builder, but he is also a wise man who knows it’s better to let a woman’s husband work on the sensitive areas.  And, as I said, he had plenty of work to do elsewhere in the house.  I was also making frequent trips to check on the house and help with key decisions about things such as horse fencing, as well as trips out to building supplies stores to pick out paint and tile and fixtures and appliances and horse fencing. 

We also fit in a few meetings with M&G to finalize our contract, and to better understand some components of the job, especially since, as I’ve said before, neither of us has any work experience on conservation projects, and we both wanted to be up to speed when we started so we could hit the ground running and not spend months figuring out what we were supposed to be doing.  Of course these meetings generally involved dinner and frequently a swim or a hike; after all, getting to know the property was part of the job orientation. 

Even before we had set an official start date, we had started moving some of our belongings to the farm.  We never envisioned that this was going to be a traditional move where one day the moving van would appear, all of our stuff would be packed and loaded, and the move would officially happen.  So, we made it a point to throw a few things in the truck every time we went to the farm.  In the beginning, we just moved random things like driving horse supplies, which was easy since we don’t have a driving horse right now, so we knew we wouldn’t be using them.  We also had a pile of boxes stored in the shop which had never been unpacked since we moved to Belize.  Not seeing any reason why would suddenly need those things, moving those boxes was a no-brainer too.  We became progressively more selective as the real moving day approached, but by the time we came down to the last couple of weeks, Tom had moved enough stuff and organized enough additional stuff that we only had a limited number of well managed truckloads to make it final.  The staff cottage next to our house was open, so we had a place to store a whole house’s worth of stuff, so we didn’t have to worry about no place to put things until the house was done.  We had a few big things to move, like our bed, but we managed to fit even that in on a multi-purpose trip.  We scheduled a break from guests so that we could get moved out and Julio and his family could get moved in without pressure…and it worked.   The move was complete when we rode two of the horses and ponied the third through the jungle and up the hill into the Mountain Pine Ridge, then took a farm vehicle down to pick up the last of the horse supplies and the dogs.