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.
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