Eat.Teach.Belize: Garifuna Settlement Day

This past Monday, November 19th, was Garifuna Settlement Day in Belize. To celebrate, we took a bus to the city of Dangriga which is on the coast. We left the hotel at 4:00 in the morning so that we could see the reenactment which took place at sunrise.

The Sunrise before the reenactment

The reenactment took a little longer than expected (like a lot of things here in Belize), so we spent some time taking in the scenery and ordering breakfast. For breakfast we had johnny cakes, crispy biscuits with cheese, and coffee. We even ran into one of the teachers from our school who told us that the real excitement lasted all night. Most of the people there had not slept and been up partying all weekend.

Johnny cakes

Chrissy and Paige

The boats coming in for the reenactment

Melissa and Chrissy

After the boats came in, the Garifuna people paraded through the streets to the church. There were drums, dancing, and festive attire.

Garifuna women dressed in yellow

Entering the church

The celebration continuing in the church

Settling down for the service

After the celebration, we walked out on an old pier to check out the scenery.

Paige, De'Lise, Lisa, Melissa, Chrissy, Cheryna, and Emma

Dr. John suggested that since it was still so early we could spend the rest of the day at the Belize Zoo. We drove back to Belmopan, which was about an hour, though the beautiful mountains and endless palm trees. On our way we stopped at a place called Cheers for lunch. We actually found a UNF t-shirt hanging from the ceiling!

Cheers

We were surprised at The Belize Zoo how close you can get to each animals. So close that the monkeys were jumping from tree to tree, we were three inches from a puma, and we could reach over the fence to pet a tapir. This would never be allowed in the states. We met up with the zookeeper mid way through the zoo and he went around and fed a few of the animals, so needless to say we saw every one there. Another thing that was different was instead of having a post with written facts of each animal, they had funny riddles that described a few characteristics of the animal. It was completely worth the time and money to see all the exotic animals of Belize.