He clicked on the link in the email from his parents, a URL labeled “Vacation Rentals Around the World”. Apparently, they were members of this fancy anywhere-in-the-world timeshare and wanted to share it with us. The room was dark, but the light from the monitor illuminated the stubble on his face and his unbuttoned dress shirt. I sat on the bed behind him, helping him muse over the list of available locations. We were in our tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was January and freezing, and I was wrapped in the faux fur blanket I stole from the couch. Sometimes, in this apartment, with its exposed brick wall and coffin-sized kitchen, I’d feel the walls closing in. But not now. Now, through that URL link, the whole world was open.

I was still getting used to this lifestyle. My parents split when I was 12, but before that, in the final days of their struggle, we hopped from motel to motel trying to stay afloat, following job opportunities. One week, we couldn’t scrape enough together for a motel, so we stayed at the gymnastics academy where my mom worked the front desk. We’d sneak in at night, my parents, us 4 kids and our dog, and sleep on the slightly bouncy floor where the girls in leotards did their routines hours before.

Once my parents divorced, we went with my mom, which created more stability but still saw us in Section-8 housing, buying 10-pound bags of rice and sewing patches in jeans.

I met Blake in May of my 19^th year. We quickly bonded over our shared love of fantasy books and poetry. The connection felt instantaneous, but he left a week later to travel Europe for the summer. During that time apart, we wrote each other constantly, the emails stretching on like novellas. He came back early, for me, and we spent the rest of the summer together. But he was moving to NYC in August, starting his first year at Columbia Law. I visited a couple times before he asked me to move out for him. And, in October of that year, I did. It was my first time officially out of my mother’s roof. I had just turned 20 and knew nothing of the world.

His parents had afforded him a lifestyle I was completely unaccustomed to. Their house sat on a lake, boasting four stories with an elevator. They paid his way through life, including a monthly allowance higher than anything my bank account had seen. They paid our rent in Manhattan, a luxury I could not fully appreciate until much later in life. And now they were insistent on sending us out of the country for Spring Break. I had never been out of the country; I didn’t own a passport. Easy solution, his parents expedited one for me on one of our visits back home.

Now it was January of the following year, we had known each other 8 months, and we were planning an international trip.

He read through the options slowly as we scrolled, “Paris, Belgium, London, Barcelona, oh look New York City, Prague, Edinburgh…”

As he listed them, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Europe wasn’t the first place I wanted to go. I felt spoiled even considering that, but I had a relentless image of Mayan ruins in my head.

He sighed, turning to look at me, “Where do you want to go?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Belize.”

“Belize?”

“I know it sounds silly, but they have some excellent ruins there, and caves with sacrificial victims still in them. And if you feel more like the beach, they have that, too.”

I waited for him to scoff, but rather he looked considerate.

“Well, I have done Europe three times already.”

He did a search on the site, yielding zero results of Belize, or anywhere in Central America. So much for a travel-the-world site, I thought.

“That’s okay, we can choose from what’s listed. Europe has ruins, too,” I was already imagining what those might look like when he closed the link entirely.

“No, let’s just book it through a Belize site.”

I was taken aback; I didn’t know that was an option. So easy, just to decide to book something. No thought of prices, availability, etc. Just assuming things will work out in your favor. It was a mindset I was beginning to understand. Money buys ease.

Two months later and we were waiting in the John F Kennedy airport. There was a bird in the rafters. The ceilings were high. White and industrial, with fluorescent lights at the very top, like tiny suns that wouldn’t let you sleep. It was dark outside, and rainy. The windows lining the walls were black with the sky, reflecting the light from inside. The bird would fly towards them, then back to the pillars. Confused, I thought. Keeps thinking the grass is greener but realizing its all the same. I wondered if the grass would be greener in Belize.

They were burning their garbage. I was on a small, cramped shuttle van, with the words “Cheap Rides” spray-painted on the side in an ominous red. It was taking us from the airport to the jungle cabins where we’d be spending the next three nights. The whole ride, I couldn’t take my eyes away from the window, where the ramshackle neighborhoods we passed looked like the locals had put them together themselves. Baked mud for the walls, the roofs an array of large-leaved plants. And they were burning their garbage.

This fact alone I needed to digest for longer than the shuttle ride. My mind was racing. I started my undergrad in Anthropology, the study of people. I spent a good amount of my free time observing strangers. Watching people meet up for coffee, discerning if it was a first date or an old friendship. Taking note of the feeling of crowd’s at theme parks, in concert venues, at protests. Enamored at how people affect people, how intimate relationships work and how often people’s true nature comes out in public. But I’d never seen anyone burn their garbage outside shacks.

I’d only ever studied people in atmospheres I was familiar with. But here I was in 2011, 20 years young and bewildered, having landed in Belize only an hour before, intent on coming to study the culture, be awestruck by the Mayan ruins. I did not account for the poverty. My heart hurt as I watched the figures standing around their burning compost, dirty and half dressed, many of them children. My eyes rimmed with tears as I was hit with the sudden realization of my Western life. According to the Pan American Health Organization, “Belize’s 2009 Country Poverty Assessment found a child poverty rate of 50%, which exceeded the national average of 41.3%”.

We arrived at the jungle lodge. A little piece of luxury amidst the wilderness. The abodes were made to look like huts, with straw strewn on top, the rooftops with a point in the middle, like a teepee. There were ten of them, all connected by a wooden bridge to keep us off the jungle floor. The bridges also led to a commune area in the middle of the property, where cafeteria tables let us eat dinner together in the evenings. To the left of the dining area was a large field, exotic plants lining the outside, that led down to a small body of water. Our rooms were quaint, with Wi-Fi, a bathtub and a window overlooking the lake. The air smelled heavy with green life. I brushed my fingers over a leaf from a low-hanging tree. It was large, bigger than both my hands. A plant I had never seen before, in a world I had just arrived.

The man that ran the place was an expat from Australia. Despite his white skin and thick accent, he was incredibly knowledgeable about the country. He had a dozen activities we could choose from, so we lined our few days there with as much adventure as possible. It was easy to forget the level of poverty an hour from our resort when we kept busy.

The second morning we headed out early with a group to spelunk a nearby cave with, you guessed it, sacrificial victims still on display. The cave was cold and dark, as most caves are, and the glow of our bobbing headlamps created an air of surrealism, like we were in a Nancy Drew murder mystery. But unlike the lightheartedness of young adult books, the death here was very real. Under the careful direction of our tour guides, we each took turns climbing a short, wobbly ladder imbedded against a rock wall. Five rungs, then a clear view of the top. A woman, they told us. Stabbed in the heart and through the back. The bones arranged tucked together, wrists and ankles tied. She looks so small, I thought, and in the same position in death as she was at birth. I looked in eyes that were no longer there and wondered if they held fear in her last moments. Did she believe she was dying honorably? Was she willing?

That night, most of us melancholy after the day’s excursion, we drank wine with our fellow travelers, ate a delicious meal prepared for us by the kitchen staff, and fell asleep to the peaceful sound of Howler monkeys. If you haven’t heard the melodic songs they lull you to sleep with at 3am, I encourage you to google it.

On the third day, we took a six-hour bus ride roundtrip to see the ruins. It was only ten miles away, so I was confused at the reported length of the trip until we turned onto the side road. Quickly the journey went from paved streets to a dirt one lined with massive potholes. The small bus we were on decreased its speed and made dramatic turns left and right to avoid them. Belize has a network of roads consisting of over 1,900 miles, but only 357 of those miles are paved. As we blundered along, I saw a smattering of tattered huts, stretching out for about a mile. Close to ruins themselves, I thought. Halfway through this small village, I noticed a gathering of people in the same, dirty clothes. Maybe 30 in all. A few were raising their hands. Curiosity got the best of me, and I made the tumultuous walk to the front of the bus.

“Excuse me, but why are they in a crowd?”

I saw the bus driver’s eyes flick up toward me in the mirror, then right to the small crowd, then back on the road. He was wearing a baseball cap promoting Belkin beer, and had a white tee on inside out.

“They’re having a town meeting, if you can call it that. They meet twice a month, maybe more, maybe less, to see if they’re sharing provisions equally. If some are low on food or water, others share what they have.”

The simplicity of this effective kindness struck me. Such a selfless and obvious act, helping your neighbor, and yet so foreign in the States. I didn’t even know the names of our neighbors in NYC, or the neighbors in my mother’s apartments. The way I had been raised was to keep your head down, figure out your own way through life and don’t ask for favors. But with these people, they weren’t favors, they were second nature. It was how they all survived, how they continued their little village.

I understood then their struggles. I could relate to the tattered clothes, the hunger, but I doubt they shared the same shame I had when friends saw where I lived. The high school I went to was upper middle class, and I had always struggled to maintain an image, to at the very least be accepted, if not popular. I always envied how much my friends had, how big their houses were and how happy they all seemed, going to the mall as they pleased and ordering expensive food from our school’s cafeteria. I had a habit of sitting in the corner of the bathroom during lunches, unable to afford to eat and not wanting to be seen not eating. I secretly resented them for not offering me a dollar or sharing their lunch. I was always wanting a community to help my family, but now I see my family was my community. My mother and all my little sisters, we were unnaturally close due to our struggles. My sisters would mend my clothes, style my hair, console me after bad days. My mom was always trying to be as creative as she could in the kitchen, making what we had into fun meals. We were ‘forced’ to sit together for dinner every night, but I saw that now as her struggling to keep us together, to keep us feeling as one. Despite our trials, we had each other’s back, as the people in this village had one another’s. I only felt shame because I was thrust in world’s different than mine, but the people holding their bi-weekly meeting had only themselves, they were so far off the road to tourism and civilization.

As we passed them, I saw the whole group laughing and pointing as a small child danced near the front.

The folk I saw burning their garbage days back, I was suddenly sure that they were happy. They had their struggles, as did all humanity, but I was sure they found happiness in their own circumstances. Trials of life vary from individual, but they can all result in the same appreciation for what you have. I imagine all the people I had seen living their lives in their huts and worn clothes had joy in their own ways, and that they didn’t consider themselves as unfortunate as I first labeled them. Who was I to decide how sad they are, how aware of their statistics in the world they are?

Touring the ruins later that day, I had a new perspective on the people that occupied them thousands of years ago. I imagined their daily lives, what they shared among themselves. I imagined them holding village meetings and passing along provisions to those in need. I imagined their laughter and their pain. I pictured the funerals and births and wondered if they celebrated birthdays with the same manic importance that we did. They held their calendar in high esteem, after all. I wondered if a small, dancing child had ever made them laugh.

Works Cited

Belize. Health in the Americas. https://www.paho.org/salud-en-las-americas-2017/. Accessed 5 August 2020.

The Roads and Highways in Belize. Barefoot Services Belize. June 2016. https://barefootservicesbelize.com/the-roads-and-highways-in-belize/. Accessed 5 August 2020.