Short Blog

Beginning with the end of the week, the picture above is of children gathering at ITVET behind my house to celebrate Sports Day, hosted for the second year by the Department of Human Development for the children in residential care throughout the country.  The day was hot, but dry, and the children seemed to have a great time!  One group of children could not get here due to rain and flooding in the south part of the country, but others came and provided the opportunity for sibling groups to see one another.  (An attempt is made to keep sibling groups together, but for a variety of reasons that does not always happen.)  I walked back and forth from my house and even did some errands that day, which was the Fourth of July.  I guess I took most of the day off!

Early in the week, the Florida mission team from Dunedin came to the Children's Centre to host Vacation Bible School, take children on outings, and do construction on the facility.  The first day, which was the first full day of vacation from school for the children, was a wild day with children going in all kinds of directions: sports camp, art camp, summer school, etc.  By the second day, things were a little more organized, and I think that children and volunteers had a good time.  The children went bowling, went to the park, went horse back riding, and cooked dinner at the house that Laura Connelly and Natalie Lanni have rented for the summer.

On Monday evening, the staff was invited to Laura and Natalie's house for dinner.  The house sits on the sea, with a beautiful view from the big veranda.  The house itself is very spacious and beautiful, and the evening provided a wonderful respite for staff.  The staff and the volunteers were able to party together!  And most special, perhaps, was that Laura and Dave and I drove the staff to their individual homes in South Belize City late in the evening!  Something of an adventure on small, dark streets!

An irritating factor in our lives has been the intermittent internet service for the past month.  BTL, the provider, has told more than one story as to the reason:  the power outage affected the service, they are upgrading the system, they are under cyber-attack.  Whatever the real story is they seem to have no idea how to fix things.  Unfortunately, Dave and I have followed their advice in "fixing" things on our end. We shut off and rebooted our Wi-Fi modem.  We changed the DNS address on our primary computer, after which absolutely nothing worked.  And then Dave went to the other provider of internet in town and purchased a mobile wi-fi hotspot, which is what I am using at the moment.  We don't know how much service we need to purchase in a month, so I guess we'll see how this first month goes.  But this is costing us money, since the modem was provided by our neighbor.

Dave did not fly much during the week and then only late in the day, meaning that we did not work out as often as we should have.  I seemed to have an "off" week, yelling at kids that seemed to get under my skin more than usual.  I am ready to present a one-day training on positive discipline, and I think I need to pay attention to my lessons!  At least the officers and I can feel that we share the same rocking ship!  Perhaps next week will seem a little more under control--or not.