Chapter 31

OUR FIRST YEAR IN BRITISH HONDURAS

 

VS House in Orange Walk, 1st NEST in British Honduras

The Colony of British Honduras (now Belize) was, in 1966, the second poorest country, next to Haiti, in the Western Hemisphere. The population was then about 150,000 with two-thirds of that in Belize City, the capital. The coastal end northern area is alluvial and swampy while the southwest is blessed with beautiful pine covered mountains. Much of the interior is semi-rainforest jungle filled with exotic hardwoods. Corozal and Orange Walk Town, in the north, are major towns, as are Stan Creek Town and Punta Gorda south of Belize City.

 

Belize City is on a peninsula, two feet above sea level, jutting into the Caribbean Sea midway along the north/south eastern coastline. Belize has always had a distressing negative balance of trade.

 

The population of the city and towns is of mixed breeds of Spanish and African peoples. The jungles are the home of the Maya Indiana. Stan Creek district, south of Belize City, is populated largely by Garifuna (Carib) people.

The official language of the country is English although Spanish is spoken everywhere. The language of the populated areas is mostly Spanish, English and an anglicized Creole. The Indians speak Spanish, some English and also Mayan.

Ada in the VS House Kitchen

After hurricane Hattie destroyed Belize City in the early sixties, Mennonite Central Committee, while doing relief and reconstruction work, discovered the plight of some Old Colony Mennonites living in the interior.

 

Near the end of the eighteenth century the German-born Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, invited into Russia some colonies of German Mennonites and gave them a one hundred year "privilegium". Near the end of the hundred years, some colonists, fearing the loss of their privileges, migrated to western Canada. After a period in Canada, some of them resenting the forced use of English in the schools, again migrated; to Mexico and then, in the early sixties, to British Honduras. Being very regressive and exclusive and avoiding towns and cities, they had no outlet for their produce and so continued unprosperous. So MCC, in the early sixties, established a store in Belize City; buying the Colonists produce and selling it wholesale and retail.

 

Landis Going for a Cold-water Shower

Later the work was transferred to the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions, and in 1964 Paul Z. Martin of Bownansville, Pennsylvania, became the first Director. In conjunction with aid to the colonists, mission work was started in Belize City, Orange Walk Town and in the Indian village of San Felipe, thirty miles southwest of Orange Walk Town. When we arrived in September of 1966, there was also a two-year-old medical program in Orange Walk Town (a large medical building was built in 1964) with a doctor in residence, and a government-owned clinic in San Felipe staffed by Eastern Board nurses.

 

In 1966 the Eastern Mission Board, wanting to establish another trading store in Orange Walk Town for the benefit of the two northern colonies and needing a home for an appointed missionary and also a meeting room, decided to build a large building in Orange Walk Town with the ground floor to be used as a trading store and the second story for an apartment and a chapel. Our assignment was to build that building with the aid of one Volunteer Service man and national employees.

 

Ada and her Poinsettias

The first year we lived in the refurbished V.S house while the V.S. boys moved into a smaller former V.S. building on the same property. Since they now had no kitchen, they (normally three men) were to eat one meal a day with us and the other meals at the restaurant next door. Of course Ada furnished them with many more meals than that.

Besides my inability to speak Spanish and having difficulty under-standing the Creole, I also had much difficulty in finding building materials. Lumber was locally sawed but in no long lengths. Concrete blocks were made by hand by Colony Mennonites, as was wooden furniture. All other supplies and materials, such as appliances, plumbing, hard-warp, roofing and electrical, were imported from many different countries and so were often uncoordinated. All these supplies had to be trucked sixty-five miles from Belize City. Portland cement was imported from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. (Incidentally "British Honduras" must not be confused with the "Republic of Honduras".)

 

We were met on Sunday evening at the Belize International Airport by Paul and Ella Martin, who also gave us supper. We were given a small room in the hostel at "Mennonite Center", and after the church service, had a good night's sleep. The next day Paul and I and David Zimmerman, my V.S. helper, went over some building ideas. We were to go north the next day, so Ada and I bought a supply of groceries. The beef we bought at Mennonite Center; it would be un-refrigerated during the two-hour, sixty-five mile trip to Orange Walk Town. (There was a butane fired refrigerator in our house.)

 

Landis Taking a Break

The next day Paul and Ella took us over the pot-holed and mostly one-way Northern Highway to Orange Walk Town. The first two weeks, while renovating our house, we spent in nurse Miriam Eberly's apartment in the medical building. She was on vacation. The site for the new structure was next to the doctor's house. Our V.S. house was about a block away around the corner of the central plaza of the town.

 

I spent two weeks, with the help of the V.S.ers, renovating our house and the little "tool house" for the boys to use as a dormitory. The novelty was tiring and the heat debilitating, but we finished before Miriam returned. We had a very comfortable home that year with a back-yard privy and an outdoor cold-water shower.

 

Before doing any more work in Orange Walk, Ada and I were asked to take charge of the hostel in Belize City while Mr. and Mrs. Otho Horst went on vacation. That first Sunday, since I was older and supposedly in charge, Henry Buckwalter, the senior V. S. boy in Belize, came to me with a strange request. There was a national family who had a baby, one of twins, in the hospital. Henry said that they wanted the baby "Blessed." So a number of us, after Sunday School, went over to the hospital and I prayed for the child. Soon after that the family came and asked that we come to their home and "Bless" the other twin. That event was on October 23rd, and I still felt very inadequate; I certainly did not feel like a priest.

 

Masonry Foundation is Laid

Before starting the large house in Orange Walk, David Zimmerman and I built a small concrete-block building having a flat concrete roof, to house a donated X-ray machine.

 

There was a large excavation, where the new building was to stand, that had to be backfilled with marl. With the help of some Old Colony Mennonites, who had a bulldozer, we got the "hole" filled in time to get the large reinforced concrete slab poured before Christmas. Another "Mennonite" who built concrete water vats, mixed our concrete. (The term Mennonite, in British Honduras usually referred to Colony Mennonites, rather than to our people.) The slab was ten inches thick and thirty-four by sixty-four feet in size. The first story, or warehouse, block wall was set on the slab. We had no concern about frost.

 

There were in Orange Walk attending the church and Sunday School, two young men with families, Albert Codd a Creole and Greg Novelo a Maya Indian, who were to be the first to be received into the church at Orange Walk by water baptism. On Sunday, November 27th, Paul Martin came north and baptized them while I poured the water for him. (So I served as a surrogate deacon after all.) That was another novelty for me!

 

Finished Setting Trusses

As I mentioned earlier, we had local hardwood sawed and planed for structural lumber. We could get lumber long enough for joists, but not long enough for rafters. So instead of rafters, I built seven trusses by laminating one-by-six inch boards, four-ply thick. Since they were made of green hardwood and were very heavy, I worried a lot about raising them to the bearing walls. They were thirty-seven feet long overall. On March 8th we did raise and brace them with only manpower. I was greatly relieved.

 

On April the 16th we attended a funeral at Blue Creek Mennonite Colony. A sixteen-year-old boy was killed the day before in a tractor accident. It was a sad but interesting event.

 

By April 30th we were tired enough to welcome a four-day vacation at Mountain Pine Ridge in the mountains of southern British Honduras. Seven of us, three V. S. boys, two nurses and Ada and I, went in the old V. S. Jeep. We had a grand time camping-out.

 

Trading Center Almost Completed

Before May 23, 1967, Orange Walk had 110 v. current from haphazard wires strung through the town, only one hour at noon and a few hours in the evening. Often none at all if the town generator was "down".

 

During our first year they wired the town with primary and secondary lines and installed transformers. A set of new generators was started, in a new building, in May and then we had twenty-four hour electric service. We all got new electric refrigerators.

 

I was building the three-bedroom apartment for Ben and Becky Stoltzfus and their two children. He was to be pastor at Orange Walk and at San Felipe. They arrived as scheduled on July 24th and the apartment was ready. Much other work was yet to be finished.

 

Ada in the Kitchen of the New Apartment in Trading Center

On September 1st Paul N. Kraybill, the overseas director, visited Orange Walk. He said he was pleased with my work. We had planned a vacation to accompany Otho Horst's on a tour of the Honduras Missions. Paul said to us, "Landis and Ada, I heard you are taking off two weeks to visit Honduras; how would you like the Board to pay for your trip and instead of two weeks, stay two months? We need house-parents at the Academia Los Pinares until November 1st, when Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Kraybill can take their assignment."

He then explained that when we would come back to Orange Walk, we would move into the new apartment while Ben and Becky went to Costa Rica for four months, to go to language school. Those four months we could use to finish my work and then we could end our term in twenty months instead of twenty-four. We could then be home for Ron's graduation.

It was so arranged and we flew from Belize to Tegucigalpa, Honduras on September 8th 1967; one year and one day after first coming to Belize.