Pride in Action!
Jason Houston spends a few days exploring Pride in Belize and the communities the conservation campaign is targeting. Watch video of Olivia and her Pride mascot Jumbo Roo!
The poster hanging in Crooked Tree Village featuring Jimbo Roo the Jabiru Stork
Most of Olivia’s Campaign on the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary is focused on Crooked Tree, a small rural village on the main island literally in the middle of the Sanctuary’s protected area (see the first post on Crooked Tree). This is the community with the largest influence (and dependence) on the sanctuary, where the most challenging community dynamics exist (see second post on Crooked Tree), and so for us it’s where we can learn the most about how the Pride methodology can fill in gaps in more traditional conservation work when a local community’s involvement is difficult but required.
This is where we’re staying and where we’ve spent most of our time, participating in Olivia’s campaign events or wandering in the community, talking with people—some friendly, some reluctant—to get their perspectives. We’ve been invited in for coffee, stayed for lunch, were asked to and attended a Village Council meeting, and even hitched a ride to the championship cricket game with the team. (As it turns out Crooked Tree has one of the best cricket teams in the country and they’re playing for the national title.) Even though we’ve only been here for a week (it feels a lot longer) we’re starting to get a sense of this community outside of the Pride campaign—the inevitable complexities of conservation versus development, needs versus values, and the many individual agendas that drive progress in a small, insulated community like this.
Crooked Tree Village is definitely a central character in this story and it really is singularly important. But there are also four other communities Olivia is working in—Biscayne, Gardenia, Lemonal, and Belize City—and we’ve spent the last two days visiting them and doing more of the traditional-type Rare Pride Activities, like school and mascot visits.
Lemonal, Belize. One of the five communities Olivia Carballo-Avilez is working in with her campaign for the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary.
Day One on the road began at 6am, with an epic, standing-room-only bus ride into Belize City. We arrived an hour-and-a-half later and walked over to Belize Audubon’s offices, first through the run-down part of downtown—a place guide books warn against. Then next, and worse, several blocks through (and there was a sign) the ‘Tourist District’—a place guide books direct you to—which was really just a horrible gauntlet of pushy taxi drivers, shady tour operators, curio stands, and the occasional solicitation for less-than-legal endeavors.
The Belize River in Belize City, the ultimate destination for all the water that flows out of the Chiquibul-Maya Mountains (see my first post from this trip, “Capturing Belize”) and through the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary.
The original plan was to spend some time on the streets of Belize City this afternoon with Jimbo Roo the Jabiru (Olivia’s mascot – the Jabiru Stork), encouraging people to come to a video showing later this evening in Lemonal. Many people who live out along the northern highway in the small outlying villages work in the city, and sometimes coming here is a good way to reach them. Lemonal is a small community (several hundred people) at the southern tip of the Sanctuary. But when we arrived in the offices Olivia told us she’d made arrangements with the Village chairwoman in Lemonal to try to get most of the village to attend, and since we just had a small community center to use she didn’t want to over-book the event. Good news for her show, but we were disappointed not to get to see Jimbo Roo out on the bustling streets of Belize City.
Me outside Deep Sea Marlin’s in downtown Belize.
So with several hours to kill before heading back out of town, Matt and I put our heads down and plowed back out through the Tourist Village and across the river to old downtown. We found a little local restaurant—Marlin’s Deep Sea Restaurant—right along the Belize River. We sat out back for a three-hour breakfast of Belizean chicken and fried beans, complete with multiple cups of instant coffee and a tall stack of fry jacks, Belize’s version of a not-too-sweet doughnut. Off the open back porch where we were sitting flowed the Belize River, a prominent feature in the city, active with small fishing and delivery boats coming and going.
Setting up the screen and banner for an outdoor video screening in Lemonal Village.
The event in Lemonal didn’t get the whole community, but it did get maybe 40-50 people, which is a great percentage of the population, and it filled most the chairs and makeshift benches we’d set up. The night was beautiful, calm, cool, and not buggy, and so we were able to do it all outside in a field in front of the community center. As the evening came on, the crowd gathered. Kids piling in right up front, excited as much by the event as the display of technology. Parents filled the chairs, and out in the distance there was third ring of curious but non-commital passersby.
The screening of Belize Audubon’s short informational video on the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary.
Day Two on the road was much easier (Day One, if you do the math, totaled about 16 hours of activities). We headed about a half hour south of Crooked Tree Village to the village of Biscayne for a school visit. We did three sessions that together included every kid in the school.
