Busman Arnold

This is where we live! It's a 5-story guest house and we rent out the top 3 floors. Two floors are bedrooms, kitchen and very, very large patio and the 5th floor is exclusively a patio. It's beautiful and most importantly, it's home!

Busman Arnold is the name of the architect. He built the house next door to us as well and it's known as the Busman Arnold house and is known to everyone in the town by the same name.

The bottom two levels are businesses - a cafe, insurance company and a daycare.

Home sweet home!

Up Go The Chimmneys

Adobe Stoves #1 and #2 are coming right along! The white maul takes several days to completely harden. While they harden, we are getting the chimneys and other metal coverings prepared so the stoves can be used as soon as possible.

This is Kyle stepping out of the house where the chimneys were custom made for the stoves.

Here is one chimney installed at our very first stove.

And here is the second chimney going up. Mr. Chee (on the left) is the craftsman who made the chimneys.

Sarah, Lindsay and Chloe work to fill stove #2 with white maul.

We use trowels to level the maul to insure a flat future work space.

Sarah and Chloe strike a "shovel pose" at the white maul quarry.

Anyone who has dug here knows that white maul is hard! It also eats at your skin a bit and leaves your hands and feet peeling.

After the maul is excavated, it is filled into bags. Good work there!

The (HEAVY!) bags are lifted to a transport and taken to the adobe stove sites.

House With A View

Aahh....the view from our house is divine.

Sunset on the Western Highway

Yes, it really is this beautiful! This is an untouched photo I took out my car window as we were driving down the main highway in Belize last week. Gorgeous!

Second Wave Has Arrived!

10 Second Wavers arrived one week ago, and we said farewell to 6 First Wavers today. It's been a fabulous 6 weeks and we can't wait for another great wave. This is First and Second Wavers at a farewell dinner. Thanks for all the great work and projects you've done!

Adobe Stoves

Belize Is On Fire!

Quite literally, the mainland of Belize is on fire! It was the hot season until June 1st and fires raged throughout the country. The air was always smoke-filled and our clothes always had that "campfire smell." It does this every year!

The air was so smoky that everything looked gray for the past month. Like clockwork, though, June 1st came around and the rainy season started. Belizeans say that's how it happens - the rainy season starts on the calendar June 1st and the weather obeys! What a phenomenon!

Thank goodness the rain has started!

Fields and Football

We live in Central America, so of course the national sport of choice is football! You know what I'm talking about, right? The sport we call soccer in the US.

Football is played everywhere - on basketball courts, in fields, in any space deemed large enough to kick a ball between two goal posts.

This is a field near that is half in Belize and half in Guatemala.

It's not glamorous, but this would be considered a nice field here.

It also doubles as a horse pasture when not in use by football players. :)

Vive football!

Gorgeous Belize pics

You're wondering what I learned, right? Well, I'm learning photography! There's a girl on the team, Brooke, who wanted to learn piano, and I wanted to learn photography, so we exchanged lessons.

Brooke put me on "manual" for my camera, so I'm learning to take photos in the right light and not rely on Photoshop to doctor my photos (believe me, for a girl like me that's hard to do!)

For those of you who don't know (and one week ago, I didn't know!) putting a camera on "manual" means you choose things like shutter speed and amount of light that comes into the camera. Manual photography is fun!

Check out what I've done so far: