Like most people, I was devastated to hear about the earthquake in Nepal, a sight of particular focus for for me. I learned about the quake while on fieldwork in Mexico and, like most, felt helpless in the face of tragedy. I know that my friends in Nepal are safe. Not everyone can say that.
Sacred Art has taken centre stage in the aftermath of the earthquake, at times and unfortunately pushing human tragedy from worldwide focus. We need to think about people first, and then objects. Yet what I know is objects and I would like to offer what I have.
Find here a collection of photographs taken Nepal recently. I am sad so say that they now can only serve as ‘before’ photos. A lot of what is pictured has been severely damaged or destroyed. These photos were taken during December of 2014 in Kathmandu and Bhaktapur. A short explanation of the contents are in the file names and I’ve grouped them by general location. Please contact me at donna.yates@glasgow.ac.uk for further specifics or higher quality versions.
I am releasing them as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA which means that they cannot be used for commercial purposes and all re-release must be under the same CC license. Please credit these photos to Donna Yates. My hope is that they are of some use to those documenting this disaster or others reflecting on what has been lost…and what must be protected and rebuilt.
Please see the photos here.
]]>Confession: I have five active twitter accounts. I am, for better or worse @DrDonnaYates, @StolenGods, @CultureTraffic, @LegoAcademics and, as of this morning, @AcademicCFPs. [UPDATE: this twitter account was too much work so it is defunct! No shame!] This sounds crazy, but they all serve different purposes and are all a minor part of my normal work flow. They are easy-peasy bits of public engagement: I not only enjoy them, but they very clearly enrich my research.
In November I spoke about being an ‘engaged’ academic to Early Career Researchers at an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded workshop in Edinburgh. My first goal: to not be boring. My second goal: to start a discussion about how academics can (and maybe must) be public without it ruining all of the other academic things that we need to do. My third goal: not miss a flight to Paris. Number 3 was no trouble at all (trams!). Number 1 was achieved through snazzy images and an informal tone (I shall write about my conference presentation methods another time). Number 2, well, I hope that the attendees got something out of my general silliness and that I didn’t terrify them too much. I wanted everyone to realise that there is a lot they CAN do but nothing specific that they SHOULD do. That they needed to develop their own form of public engagement around their own skills and needs.
When I was preparing that presentation I spent some time reflecting on my own work: the traditional academic side and the social, public side. I was trying to pin down exactly why I don’t get burnt out from knowledge exchange stuff (when I very much do for other things). When I distilled it all down two clear criteria emerged for worthwhile projects: 1. Everything I do publicly brings me something tangible for my career and 2. Everything I do I was kinda doing anyway, I just added a public side to it. I think that this is the key, the sweet spot, the balance that all academics need to strike. This isn’t what you SHOULD be doing, this is what you CAN do without much added effort.
A few examples to explain what I mean.
Every morning, while I am drinking coffee and trying to wake up, I sift through archaeology, heritage, and art crime news. It gets my head in the right place for work and it makes me feel on top of things. I not only slowly move towards consciousness, but I feel like I have my finger on the pulse of what is going on in my research area. It occurred to me one morning that, as I was reading all this stuff anyway, I could collect the articles for others to read. That I could transmit them throughout the day via Twitter (thus providing high quality topical content for my account) AND that I could set up a dedicated weekly list both on my cultural property crime blog and an email newsletter. A few thousand people look at the blog entry every week. About 200 people receive the news letter. That number seems low, however half of those people are reporters and most of the rest are very interested academics.
To recap, by adding one step to my morning routine, by simply entering article details into a spreadsheet as I read them and by sending that to an email list on Monday mornings, I become a standard source of topical art crime news for reporters and other academics. People visit my blog (and see my other writing), and interested parties get a weekly email from me. I look active and on the ball. I network without having to network. As an unexpected bonus, my own Culture Crime News posts have become a reference for me…to find links to old articles.
Perfect. The action benefits me and it only required a small addition to something I was doing anyway.
I write. A lot. All the time. Most of it is rubbish. Much of it is crazy. A good portion has some seed of interest in there which will never be expanded upon beyond 700 or so words. To put it mildly, I have a lot of obsessions and I research them thoroughly and if I don’t expel them via writing it becomes hard for me to concentrate on what I should be working on. For example, I should be writing an European Research Council grant proposal right now, yet I am typing this blog entry. But not without purpose: I am ‘warming up’ for ‘real’ writing.
In several cases, the process of writing these blog entries has allowed my thoughts on a topic to mature and take solid form. Some blog entries that I conceived of as one-offs have become full academic papers (published!). If I didn’t have this low key forum to try the words out at, those papers would never have happened. Furthermore, I have received interesting research leads from academics and others who have chanced upon my blog entries. Often these are people with stories to tell about the looting and trafficking of antiquities: invaluable to my real work. I would never have had contact with these people without the random blog entries.
Perfect again. Writing blog entries facilitates more formal academic writing. I’d be writing silliness anyway, the only addition is that I put my silly online.
I am starting to focus in on the theft, trafficking, sale, and preservation of sacred art. I think there are important research and policy questions in this area that need investigation. I am very likely to be the one to do that investigating. As I geared up for that (and started thinking about writing grants), I wanted to create a media and journal paper archive of articles that relate to this topic for my own use. I wanted it to be searchable and tagged in a certain way. Basically, I wanted to lay the groundwork for data collection that I know I will do anyway, to spread it out rather than have it be one awesome impossible task.
At first this database I was creating was private. However, I realised that the only thing that was keeping me from turning it into a public knowledge exchange project was a website to host it. Thus, with spectacular help, the Stolen Gods Website came into being. You want news on threats to sacred art? Go there.
Once again, perfect. I honestly was collecting this data anyway. Posting it to the website is the same as putting it in my private database, and this way I am publicly declaring my interest in the topic, attracting the attention of potential collaborators, and hopefully sparking other research into Sacred Art trafficking by maintaining a useful public repository of resources.
So that brings me to this morning. As previously stated, I write a lot, and I am interested in publication opportunities because I want to be able to put food on my (academic) table. I found that the few twitter accounts dedicated to Calls for Papers were either uber Sci-Techy or were way too disciplinary focused. I’m multidisciplinary…not so multidisciplinary as to look at Comp Sci calls but multidisciplinary enough to feel that archaeology CFP accounts won’t show me the full range of what is on offer.
In my twitter application I started following the terms “Call for Papers” and “#CfP” with the intention of scrolling through those a few times every day. And then, like before, it occurred to me that as I scrolled through I could retweet the promising ones that fall on the Arts/Humanities/Soc Sci side of things. If I wanted this dedicated CfP twitter account to exist, others would as well.
Word of advice, academics: if you want something to exist you have to make it.
Suffice to say, @AcademicCFPs is now a thing. It has 59 followers and has only existed for 12 hours. I’ll keep it up provided it doesn’t take up much time. As it stands, I get academia kudos and I stay on top of publishing opportunities. I’ve already found a volume that I am going to submit an abstract to tomorrow.
So, dear reader, I challenge you to evaluate your normal routine. Think about the information you collect on a daily basis, think about the stuff you aggregate for yourself, and think about the data artefacts that you generate. Is there something that you do already that could go public with very little effort? I think probably so. Is that thing useful or interesting to other people? Very likely if it is interesting and useful to you. Will sharing it help your career/research/life? In my experience, yes, but you’ll have to consider that for yourself.
And be bold! Absolutely no one notices when a digital knowledge sharing project fails. I’ve tried so many projects that I have later abandoned because they were unpopular, they were too much work, or they didn’t have the expected benefits for me. One example was a Spanish language twitter account focused on archaeology and art crime news translated from English. The market for that was already saturated, it was quite time consuming for me, and the contacts in South American heritage management that I had hoped for never materialised. I scrapped the thing after a month.
Don’t start a blog if blogging isn’t your thing. You are just going to burn yourself out. Same goes for twitter or, really, anything else that you are told that you should do. Don’t force it. Rather, enhance what you are good at, what you are up to already. Always ask ‘can this have a public face’ and don’t be afraid to give it a try and abandon it if it doesn’t work for you.
]]>Lately I have been getting a lot of emails from undergraduates looking to gain experience in heritage/cultural property/art crime. I love these emails, they also break my heart. My responses are quite formulaic: I’m excited you are interested, we have no money to pay interns, we don’t believe in unpaid internships, let me know if you are looking for a masters program. Often that is the last I hear from the students. Others stay in touch.
One such email exchange happened today, coincidentally as I weighed the pros and cons of asking the internet for an unpaid student volunteer to help me with a totally unfunded project (more on that in a moment) and a Times Higher Ed article about my thoughts on online presence for Early Career Academics. This particular undergraduate seemed bright and engaged. I told them that our project had no funding and didn’t believe in unpaid internships. The student responded that they couldn’t afford to work for free anyway and asked that I get in touch if we ever have any paid research assistant positions. “Sigh” I said. Why?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating for unpaid internships. Museums that take on unpaid interns should be shamed. For-profit groups that do should be kicked in the shins. When you work for *SOMEONE ELSE* you should always get paid. They are making money off of your time and effort. However, when you work for yourself the reality is that there is no money there.
In the past I have written about how lucky I was to land a series of paid archaeological jobs while I was an undergraduate and how I never took an unpaid internship. What that post did not discuss was how much unpaid work I did as an undergrad and as a grad student…and how much unpaid work that I do right now. The work is for me: either to get me to where I want to go or to promote a cause that I think is important. It takes up a lot of my time but also fills a lot of space on my CV.
So here it is, for better or worse, some of the work that I have not been paid for:
As an undergraduate I was not paid to sort macrobotanical samples in the department lab to help a PhD student. The PhD student taught me everything I needed to know to do the sorting and I learned a lot from it. I also volunteered to do an initial inventory of random artefacts that were just in the department stores. Orphans. I got no pay for this but my reward was to play with the objects, teach myself to research their histories, and to force myself to think about provenance and ethics. I also started my first blog in 2001. During one summer I took a terrible part-time secretary job and spent at least 6 hours of every day in Harvard’s Tozzer library reading about the Maya because I felt I needed to learn. No one paid for that. I also worked, unpaid (food provided) on an archaeological project in Guatemala. That was an ordeal, let me tell you, but was a significant turning point in my life.
Between undergraduate and my masters I volunteered to help compile auction catalogue data to be presented at a US State Department hearing regarding a bilateral agreement to ban the import of illicit Italian antiquities. This took me a significant amount of time and effort but that time and effort taught me the basics of the antiquities market and gave me the inspiration I needed to apply for a masters. I also worked for two seasons at an archaeological site in Bolivia. I was not paid, but food and lodging were provided so I broke even. I was given a significant amount of responsibility and directed my own excavations within this UNESCO World Heritage Site. I presented my findings at several major international conferences, all before I started my postgraduate work…all unpaid. I paid to go to the conferences myself from my ‘secretary’ earnings.
This work was enough to get me into Cambridge for a Masters and a PhD. During my postgraduate degrees I volunteered on a number of college committees but, more importantly, I served on the editorial board of a postgradaute journal and started a postgraduate society which took over the organisation of a seminar series. I wasn’t paid for any of that. I did countless small things: I started a mini project for archaeologists in the department to create their own displays in disused display cases (I made the first one, it was on archaeo-tat and souvenirs). I organized a weekly beer and chatting afternoon. I taught on training digs. I did talks to school kids. I made the websites of various conferences and little projects within the department. All for free. I also started up this very blog as an outlet for heritage thoughts.
But, seriously, post PhD is when my unpaid work has hit high gear. I am not paid for any of the following: this blog, Anonymous Swiss Collector, Culture Crime News (which takes me up to an hour of work each day), Stolen Gods, and everything I do on twitter. Also, I get no money for @LegoAcademics, although my followers were kind enough to donate money for a new camera when mine broke. I give free talks. I do free podcasts, speak on the radio for free, and give free interviews to reporters. I (at times) write for free. I guest lecture to friends’ classes for free. Heck, much of my day outside of the office is spent curating information for other people to use…for free.
I was speaking to a friend of mine about this earlier today. He, a programmer, noted the importance of volunteer work in the programming community. He indicated that the free and open-source software that he has made “is a visible and real marker of quality” and that such things “give people a way of getting in depth with how you work”. He said it is a massive help in getting a good programming job.
I think I can safely say that, should I find myself employed once my early career fellowship ends, it will be largely because of the intense knowledge exchange and info sharing that I do for free. The point of this post is not to pat myself on the back for doing all this (and never sleeping), far from it. Rather to assert that, for better or for worse, this is the reality of academia. You aren’t paid for most of what you do and if you don’t do it you won’t get very far.
Potential postgrads, you need to expect this. Undergrads who want a culture/arts/heritage job upon graduating, you best get on making a name for yourself.
So back to my Stolen Gods volunteer issue. I’ve had a blog post/call for volunteer written for several days but I can’t make myself post it. I want to show an undergrad the ropes of online sharing of heritage info and teach them at least one CMS, some image editing, some outreach and social media stuff, some traditional media stuff…basically what I am good at. I also want them to spend about two hours every week helping me populate Stolen Gods with articles and information. I want them to be featured on the site as part of the ‘team’. I want them to have a say in how the site develops, to come up with their own projects, and to get inspired by it. This is exactly the kind of thing that I would be all over as an undergrad…the kind of thing that would land me with a masters project and a pile of marketable skills.
However, I can’t pay the volunteer. Stolen Gods is just me, it is part of MY free work. I am doing it because I think the theft of Sacred Art is something that no one is talking about. I wanted a resource to exist…so I made it. There is no money. In essence, the volunteer gets paid the same as I do (nothing) but gets some transferable skills and a job rec out of me. Yet I still haven’t posted it. “Hey anyone want to work on this project with me” seems fine, but if I think too hard about it I start to feel I am veering into promoting a model of unpaid work in heritage and museums. This feels different, but is it? Thoughts welcome.
Update: Thanks to your comments on twitter, I am advertising for that volunteer: Stolen Gods is looking for a student volunteer contributor
]]>In 2001, Prince Dipendra (who was heir to the throne) got mad, got drunk and, well, machine gunned his whole family including his dad, King Birendra. Dipendra then killed himself. From 2001 until 2007, notes were issued with the image of the new king, Birendra’s brother Gyanendra.
As you can imagine the monarchy was a bit of a mess after the mass murder, and no one really liked Gyanendra. Worse, Gyanendra went for hard and heavy rule, which flew in the face of the constitutional monarchy that his late brother had set up. The political parties weren’t into that. The Maoist rebels weren’t into that. Gyanendra wasn’t going to last long with that attitude.
And he didn’t. He WAS on the money though.
In 2006, during major protests, people were killed and injured during royal government curfews. This made everyone even more mad and, eventually, Gyanendra was forced to reinstate the parliament. Parliament then took away all of the king’s powers. In 2007, all properties that Gyanendra inherited from his brother were nationalised. On 27 May 2008 Gyanendra was told he had 15 days to get out of the palace.
Now Gyanendra is not the king of Nepal, although he periodically makes noise about coming back to the throne. This will not happen.
So what is Nepal to do in the wake of the fall of one of its major families? Who goes on the money in a country with internal political and social struggles? There really isn’t, like, a hero of all Nepal that isn’t controversial in some way. So who goes on the money?
On every Nepali note and every Nepali coin, in the place where a portrait usually is, you will find Mount Everest.
I love it. Everest is the king of Nepal.
This isn’t as absurd as it sounds. Why have a person at all when you can have a symbol of national pride? Everest is what Nepal is for most of the outside world and, internally, companies that use Everest as a symbol pair it with words like “strong”. A weak king replaced with the strength of the king of all mountains. I don’t know of any other country that has scrapped the whole idea of the portrait on currency.
Aside: New Zealand’s $5 note features Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the two people to first summit Everest.
It does not, however, have Everest. Hillary insisted that if he be put on the money, the mountain with him should be Aoraki/Mount Cook. A New Zealand peak for a New Zealand bill. The money folks agreed to that (couldn’t say no to Sir Ed). And that is the sum total of my knowledge of Everest currency.
]]>Right now I have the best job in the universe. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing: researching the illicit antiquities trade in the wonderfully supportive environment that is the University of Glasgow. I love it here. I hope it continues. There is some indication that it will…but there is no assurance yet.
A bit more detail. This is my first job post-PhD (Cambridge, Archaeology. Officially awarded in 2012). I hold a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and a Fulbright which has paid for fieldwork in Bolivia. I am typing all this because all that, I think, is pretty fancy. Also, I think it is important that other recent PhDs and Early Career Researchers (ECR) see that fancy things are not always a guarantee of solid employment. Before that string of luck, I was SUPER unemployed. Right now I feel I have some street cred but it is unclear what I can exchange that for.
Lemmie tell you, I:
So who is hiring?
So, yes, in 11 months my grant ends, my visa runs out, and I am (?). Yet this is an unspeakable and I am terrified to publicize it. Why? First, I have a lot of confidence that the project I am on will find more funding and continue. We are remarkably rad. Trust me, you want us in the meetings we are in, gadflying for the right. You also want our research. And our website. Our website rules. We are applying for more money, I hope we will get it, and to raise any sort of fuss about my future when that kind of stuff is on the cards seems almost to be a break in ranks.
Yet…nothing is solid so I am ripping off that bandaid. If I don’t apply for what comes up, next September could hit and I will be out of my new flat (IT HAS A PASTRY MARBLE BUILT INTO THE COUNTER!!!!) and back onto the unemployed scene. This is an ECR stage that we rarely talk about: what do we do when our foot is in the door? I know what my ideal is (continued awesome here in Glasgow with who I work with now), but I can’t let time slip by me.
What’s an ECR to do? I don’t have answers yet.
I will say that you all should forward me opportunities as they arise. Also, I’ll be accepting all invitations to promote myself and add CV lines, so if you are looking for an awesome seminar or a paper on anything for your book or journal issue, drop me a line. I likely already have something half written since I don’t sleep. Collaboration? Sure. Let’s do it.
Ideas? Accepted.
]]>This morning I woke up early and kicked around the internet a bit. I had been told that there was a bus to San Filepe would leave from the Orange Walk market square at some time, but the time was unclear. I had been told either 11 or 11:30 so I started out a bit after 10. As I passed the Orange Walk Department of Transportation I ducked my head in to ask the bus departure time. The fellow at the desk looked confused, then said he thought one left at 10, but that they leave every hour. Since it seemed I had plenty of time, I went to a sweet bread shop and bought some lunch to bring with me and lugged my bag over to the market area.
At the market it became clear that a) the bus to San Felipe had left at 10 and b) there would not be another one until either 3 or 3:30. I sat around until 11 just to make sure that this info was correct (one person said 4; another person said, oh it will come soon). When 11 rolled around, I walked down the line of buses and felt myself squinting at a bus to August Pine Ridge. It was the right direction. Should I take it and hitch from there? As I was pondering it, a super nice guy who was associated with the bus asked me if I needed help. I told him the situation and he agreed that going to August Pine Ridge and trying to hitch a ride was likely my best bet. I wouldn’t have any trouble. I hilariously got on the wrong bus and he pulled me off again and set me right.
As the bus took off, he told me that I should get off at the August Pine Ridge gas station, that anyone heading to either San Filepe or Blue Creek (which I told him was my real destination) would go by there and that I would eventually get a ride. He said it was safe. At the gas station I stuck my thumb out. All of the fellows doing road construction right there were kind and helpful. There were no real takers though.
Eventually a fellow that everyone knew pulled into the gas station to put water in his truck. All the gas station people said “he is going to San Felipe”, but I couldn’t quite get an answer out of him, if he would take me. He did end up taking me and, as luck would have it, was bringing a woman all the way to La Union, right at Blue Creek. I put on my best ‘chatty’ personality. Laughing at what he said, listening to his stories. He said his son works with the archaeologists at Blue Creek.
At the La Union road next to what is at least called the Blue Creek Police Station, I called the archaeological project and they came and got me. They gave me a cabin to sleep in and were just honestly warm and inviting folks. They said their original plan for the evening lecture hadn’t materialized and asked if I would do it. It was, honestly, the least I could do.
Mark Wolf, who I hadn’t seen since Holmul days, is here. I don’t know anyone else but a couple of people I know from the internets.
Strange computer problems kept my lecture from having slides but, as it seems, it went really well. There were a ton of great questions after and much enthusiasm. I try to give the sorts of lectures that I like to hear: filled with open ended questions to ponder and professions of my own hypocrisy.
They gave me a lot to think about. The Maya Research Program is spectacular. Hooray!
]]>The plan was to head to Orange Walk and get from there to Blue Creek on Monday, but as the day began to pass I was feeling worse and worse. I find myself wishing I was home, wishing I didn’t have over a week left. Dark.
It was a calm ride all the way to Belize City. I bought tamales in Belmopan that I could only partially eat. I snarfed the rest in the Belize City terminal. The Orange Walk bus was crowded and the whole time I had my pack on my legs which hurt, and I was drifting in and out, feeling ill. I found a clean but slightly depressing place to stay in Orange Walk and set about to feeling sorry for myself.
There isn’t much to say about Orange Walk Town. Here it is. Right here. On the river. I did see two of Belize’s stoplights (there may only be two), and they seemed to be regulating a bit of traffic! Belize, I should say, is a land without McDonald’s, a land without Starbucks. When that horrible article was going around claiming Bolivia had banished McDonald’s for health reasons (there are Burger Kings, Subways, and local fast fried food chains EVERYWHERE), I wondered if Belize had gone down that road. Nope.
A dinner of fake laughing cow on fake Salvadorian doriots? Seriously Donna? Not doing great.
I realize there are two things I must have here that I don’t have now: 1) vehicle; 2) permanent living space. 3) would be a field companion but that is a tall order. Anyone reading want to volunteer? There is at least a masters degree in helping me out for a few months. I can see a whole PhD here in criminology or sociology on antiquities trafficking stuff. Any takers?
The work isn’t going bad. Everyone is receptive and I have good ideas. Feels successful with lots of possibility. That wasn’t the issue.
I didn’t change my tickets, although I got close, and am now happy to find myself headed to Blue Creek for two nights. I’m just lonely and sickly, but better with loads of water, some ibuprofen, and the aforementioned Salvadorian doritos. I’ll sleep well, with relief.
]]>I decided to leave San Ignacio. I decided that and then couldn’t quite decide where to go. This morning I was quite groggy, perhaps from the sleep aids I took, and found myself drifting in the morning heat. Almost falling back asleep. I tried to drift into a plan. It nearly worked. Or it did work. It worked.
Guatemala had been on the cards in my head but I wouldn’t have any travel insurance there. Sure that usually wouldn’t stop me but it was a convenient way to rule it out. I could go straight up to the Orange Walk area, where I think I would like to be on Monday, but beh. The laziness, the drowsiness, I wanted to laze and drowse for a day…a day at least. I kept thinking of the rock pools from yesterday, thinking how I didn’t want to leave there, that I wanted to just lay around for hours. I decided, then, I should find some creek to laze in. Thinking harder about it, I realized that I really did want to come back to the Hummingbird Highway area.
It really is the prettiest part of Belize. Lush, river-fed jungle encased (and rolling over) and oddly shaped cartsic mountain landscape. Fruit trees everywhere. Hummingbirds. I think it is still top of the pack it in list.
I interviewed an archaeology person at Cahal Pech. Just leaving the hostel I ran into the person who works at the tour company I went with yesterday; I think he was John’s cousin. He greeted me and said that Cahal Pech was too far to walk. I said it was only a mile, he said “But there are two hills…good exercise”. The hills were not the problem, the problem was the heat. Full sun. Farmer’s tan.
I took the bus to Belmopan without trouble. There I switched to the Dangriga bus. There were some Europeans waiting and they asked why I was standing in line if the bus wasn’t coming for another 15/20 minutes or so. Asked me because I was the only other white person who wasn’t Mennonite which made me feel a bit sour. I didn’t explain well and just said that the bus runs on approximate times, that it will leave after it gets there. I didn’t say that there are often limited seats and I and everyone around me were prepared to push through the station’s wire door to get on the thing. Deep down I knew they didn’t know that but I let it slide. I was kind of hating on the woman’s “I am traveling in Latin America” clothes that she would never wear in real life and that people in Belize would never wear. Plus the total racial choice to talk to me, a person with a large pack who is the least likely person in the station to know what is up with the bus. In English. In an English speaking country.
Traveling rule of thumb, do what everyone else is doing. I got on the bus. They didn’t.
It was a bit of a stressful ride because I wasn’t sure where I was going. I had found a place online that allowed camping for 10USD and I thought that sounded as good as any place. On the Hummingbird. Rock pools. Sold. But I just knew it was at Mile 29, not where Mile 29 was. I couldn’t remember the mile for Yam Witz, where I stayed before. Was this place before or after? After. I saw it go by and only had a little walk from where the bus dropped me. Down the road, up a drive lined with fruit trees, to the owner or caretaker, I can’t quite tell. Owner perhaps. And his adorable little boy who was somehow being James Bond with sunglasses. He gave me two nights for 15USD (I probably should have just paid the 20USD I expected) and said I could set up my tent anywhere. He showed me the rock pool.
I went swimming as soon as I could (although I was waiting for a call from National Geographic that I took later). I decided to be someone who didn’t mind water vegetation and didn’t mind little fish. For a while I perched myself against a rocky submerged bank and looked up at the sky thinking not very deep thoughts about what the Maya would have thought of clouds. I scrambled up on a rock to feel the heat of it on my back and continued with the cloud watching and Maya thinking. “Did an ancient Maya person lie on this very rock?” What a dumb thought, you! It was an afternoon for super lazy dumb thoughts.
At one point the wind blew very very hard, a big gust, and a shower of yellow leaves fluttered down into the pool. It was lovely. I will likely make a day of that tomorrow.
]]>A certain shape of the days ahead is growing in my mind. That shape, at least today, might include Guatemala. Might. Guatemala is probably ill advised, but it is calling to me. I am not too far from the boarder. I saw Guatemala today as the Maya saw Guatemala: from atop a massive temple.
I left Belmopan this morning for San Ignacio (Cayo to its friends). I did some quality bus crowding with my massive pack and got off in the Cayo town square. It seems a bit familiar here. Touristy though…which I guess is familiar too. The ice cream place is the same. I remember this shop and that. I walked up the hill.
Two absolutely adorable kids asked me if I wanted a room. I had planned to stay where they were sitting anyway, but it was fun to let them think they had sealed the deal. They were about 7 years old, a boy and girl cousins (“But like brother and sister”) and were bored enough to be throwing ice on the street to watch it melt…and proud enough of the melting ice to show me it. I said they could start measuring the temperature by how long it took the ice to melt. The little boy speculated that it was a 5 minute ice melt day.
They followed me to my room and, somewhere along the way, decided I was Canadian. I let that one just ride. They asked me if there were wolves in Canada and I said yes. Then they told me how wolves were coming down from Canada and following deer and that you should never run away from a wolf because they will chase you. “We saw that on animal planet”. Also if there is a grizzly bear you should make yourself look very big but if it is a black bear you should make lots of noise. “We read that in a book”.
So I set out to visit Xunantunich, the 5th time I have visited that site. The cab driver tried to charge me way too much, halved it when I reacted badly and I decided just to pay even though it was still over priced. Too much hassle not to. The ferry across the river was new but the ferry driver was the same. Mike. He claimed to remember me. He has run the ferry since the 80s. He said there were archaeologists afoot which surprised me…and there were a lot of them. I stayed away though, for the most part. I was shy. Too shy. I sent an email later.
So there it was. My first Maya site in over 11 years. A place of memory. Manicured memory. I can’t even fully remember being the person who was there before. What was going on in my head. I should try to revisit my livejournal entries on this topic. On all of Belize. In a way it is good that I don’t have access to them right now or else the would cloud the right now…but they do cloud the right now.
I put myself in the same position that I was in 11 years ago: a matching photo. I suppose I should come back in a decade and do it again.
On the way back I took a collectivo taxi for a far more fair fare. The driver only spoke Spanish but, yet again, I felt, well, pride and delight that I could communicate in that way. I think the difference is that with Spanish here it doesn’t have to be even close to perfect, everyone expects a muddle. Okay enough Spanish. Okay enough English. Maybe even okay enough Kriol. There isn’t a lot of pressure. There is a lot of meeting halfway. Language in Belize, it seems, is like race in Belize: whatever.
]]>A positive interview at the Institute of Archaeology and I was on top of the world. Soursop juice tasted like victory. I bought packets of soursop, tamarind, and horchata Tang. It made me wonder if, at this point, Tang exists only in Latin America. I think the last time I drank Tang was in Guatemala in 2003. I discovered a live fish could live in a mixture of cheap rum and Tang for over half an hour. There were live fish in our drinking water. I had poured him in without noticing, mixed everything up, then left the drink while I had a meeting. It is no wonder people got dysentery.
Walking away from the Institute of Archaeology with my juice and my Tang I decided what I had done in the morning counted as a victory and I could celebrate with a trip to the Belize zoo. I bought a slice of pizza at the bus station, mushed on to the bus, and set out along the Western Highway. Past Amigos (is JB’s gone? Probably. Heck, JB is probably gone), past Monkey Bay, past Cheers, and off the bus.
The motto of the Belize Zoo is “the best little zoo in the world”. Frankly I think it is the best zoo in the world. It is the best one I have ever encountered. No surprise: I find zoos mostly terrifying. Say what you will, animals out of context feel like artefacts out of context. A wilting polar bear on a hot day in California or a lion facing a Scottish winter should, I think, seem insane to any reasonable person. As an undergraduate I spent a few hours sitting in front of the gorilla pen at the Boston Zoo completing an observation assignment for some sort of physical anthropology course. I watched them whap each other, play with their baby, do their thing…and I thought “what are you guys DOING here”. I just wrote up the whapping and the baby playing for the assignment.
The Belize Zoo isn’t like that. Not at all. In this bushy area you only meet animals from Belize who are chilling in temperatures they are used to, around plants that they are used to: contextualized. The animals in the zoo are all there for a reason. Some have issues: a stork that fell out of a tree and now can’t fly, an albino coatimundi, a deer with malformed antlers. Some are rescues that became partially tame during rehab: an ocelot brought back from the brink after a hurricane, a hawk that refused to be reintroduced to the wild. Finally some have had bad scrapes with humans: the baby, born in the zoo, of a pregnant jaguar that was eating farmer’s livestock, a tapir that had been shot in the face. The worst, in my book, are the victims of the illicit trade in animals: a black jaguar that nearly starved to death in a cage that no one thought would live. Birds with their wings clipped saying human words.
Of course there were some monkeys doing their thing, not even in a cage or anything. They just rock it at the zoo which is their territory.
The Belize Zoo is filled with hand-painted signs with cute rhymes about the animals. Catchy and useful, each sign is meant to instill a sense of pride in visitors about the natural abundance of Belize and to dispel folk falsehoods about animals. Animal smuggling and pet keeping is wrong, these animals don’t harm humans or livestock, hunting common animals leaves nothing to eat for rare animals. The word “heritage” was everywhere. I watched a monkey eat a banana.
I missed the bus a few times on the way out while chatting with the security guard. Back in Belmopan I bought a mango and two Belkins but the lady who owned my guest house asked if I wanted to get a beer at the nearby cevicheria and I said yes. We had two and I had ceviche for the first time in a while. In Belize, apparently, you eat ceviche with chips, not a spoon. It was pleasant.
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