Permaculture Farm in Belize

We woke up early on November 27th, in Livingston, Guatemala, to catch the 8:00am boat to Punta Gorda, Belize. We were scheduled to spend a week helping on a permaculture farm in the jungle near Punta Gorda. The boat was a lancha, nearly identical to the one we took down the Rio Dulce. Needless to say it didn’t handle the waves well during our ocean crossing. Sitting at the very front, we felt each wave directly in our tailbones, with larger waves launching us into the air. The ride took just over an hour. We disembarked in Punta Gorda and quickly made our way through customs.

I took a photo from the dock before a customs official told me to put my phone away.

As we walked into town I started to feel what initially seemed like sea sickness from the boat. Settling down in the town square to wait for our host, Leane, I hoped the hour long wait would be more than enough for my stomach to settle down. Unfortunately by the time her and Jessi, one of the other volunteers, arrived I was feeling a bit better but not great.

The trip from Punta Gorda to Leane’s farm was interesting. After running a few errands in town Leane drove her tough 4×4 truck down a dirt road into the jungle. Eventually we arrived at a river where we loaded everything into a boat. After a beautiful boat ride down the winding jungle river we arrived at Leane’s small dock. We unloaded the boat into what Leane called a trike, sort of like a trailer with the front half of a motorcycle mounted to the front. The brakes on the trike had previously stopped working and we took a few minutes to check them out. Eric managed to lend a bit of knowledge to get them into a semi-workable state. Leane drove off with our things and Katie waving royally from the back while Eric, Jessi, and I made the short, muddy hike to the farm house. We had been told to bring proper rubber boots and we needed them, the mud went well past my ankles.

We learned during the trip over that Leane used to work as a Software Developer for the finance industry in London. She made plenty of money but did not find her work fulfilling. After searching around Central America for a while she eventually settled on Belize as a good place to setup a permaculture farm and a conservation organization. Two other organizations and her purchased a massive 1100 acres of Belizian jungle with this goal in mind. During the time I was at the farm she was really still getting started. Things were pretty rough but they had been rougher and were improving constantly. I think Leane is a pretty incredible person to attempt this and to do as well as she has.

The farm house was a simple wooden, thatched roof structure. The water came cold from a rain water reservoir at the top of a concrete tower. Power came sparingly from batteries charged with solar panels and a generator. There was some internet but it was expensive and not available for recreation. The house had one big room with the kitchen and Leane’s big bed, a side room with a hammock and futon for us, and a loft area with a blow up mattress for Jessi and her partner, Reevsie. There weren’t really any walls, just metal mosquito netting, including around the very public bathroom/shower area. Going to the bathroom or showering always involved asking everyone not to look in that direction. The kitchen had a proper stove and fridge. Leane had 5 large, loud dogs with complex social dynamics which ranged from funny to annoying and loud.

On the afternoon we arrived we got to know the space, along with Jessi, Reevsie, and Leane. There were plenty of jobs to do and we took some time to figure who could do what. At this point I was still feeling sick and exhausted. I took an hour long nap in the afternoon and woke up feeling like I had a cold. I’m told I slept through dog barking and people repeatedly pumping into me. I didn’t have much of an appetite all day and went back to sleep early. I slept in a very comfortable hammock while Katie and Eric slept on the futon.

I woke the next morning feeling much better. We had a quick breakfast then got to work. Eric and my first task was to extend a small cabinet into a sewing desk. I enjoyed working under Eric helping measure and cut things and think our way through occasional problems. Part way through the job Leane asked me to help with something else. She had a freezer full of pig meat (one of the farm’s products are pigs) which had frozen together. My understanding is they had loaded the freezer up in a rush and didn’t have the time or supplies to do it correctly. She now needed to extract a piece of meat to sell. We spent the next twenty minutes or so chipping at frozen pig flesh and hauling at the giant piece of meat to try and get it out. It was nasty, sweaty work and we made very little progress. Eventually we decided to give the meat more time to thaw. I returned to the sewing desk with Eric for a while then spent another 15 minutes or so on the pig meat. After again making very little progress I gave up. Although I wanted to help, three meals a day and a bed weren’t worth the effort and general grossness of the job.

After another good night in my hammock we woke up and got back to work. We started the day with another simple carpentry task, building out a little storage area in the house. We got most of the way through that before joining Katie out in the fields to enjoy the beautiful day. We started by chopping up some small fallen trees using machetes. Finishing that we used the machetes to clear weeds from sections of the field. One of weeds was the sort that gives little paper cuts when you rub it the wrong way. By the end of the day my hand looked like something out of a horror movie, I even managed to get some blood on the machete. Katie and Eric didn’t have this problem, I’m not sure what I was doing so wrong. Despite the cuts and blisters I enjoyed the not too difficult work with my friends. A “hyperlapse” we took of us working showed me spending far too much time standing there talking to Katie and Eric while they chopped away at the weeds. That evening we finished the storage space and had a delicious dinner of non-traditional homemade pizza and garlic bread. The extremely high cost of cheese and availability of toppings like potatoes, squash, and onion made for some strange but excellent pizzas. After dinner I spent some time going through my Spanish flashcards, bemoaning how quickly my vocabulary was shrinking just days after I had left school.

Jessi and Reevsie left on the third full day. After a late morning Katie, Leane, Jessi, and Reevsie went into town while Eric and I stayed at the house. We spent the day making a set of shelves. This was a more difficult job then the previous two and we had a few problems on the way. Again I enjoyed the craft and simple problem solving. Katie and Leane came back late that evening with groceries and chocolate cake for dessert. After dinner we sat down to watch one of the movies I had brought with me on a USB key. Our plan was to watch all the Harry Potter movies over the next few weeks. We sat down with our chocolate cake and started the movie. Dumbledore arrived on Privet Drive, shut off the lights, approached the Dursley’s house, and said the first line of the movie… in Hindi. I had brought the movies all the way from Vancouver, Canada to a remote farm in the jungle in Belize and they were in Hindi. Always remember to check your torrents. After I was thoroughly made fun of we settled on a few episodes of IT Crowd then went to bed.

Our last full day started with a very lazy morning. We had a long, late breakfast and hung around the house with Leane. Eric, Leane, and I moved a rented generator down to the dock so it could be returned the next day, Katie worked in the piguery, Eric and I did a little bit of plumbing work. While we did get a few projects done it felt like a lot of time was spent hanging around the house.

Leane’s farm was an interesting experience for me. I never quite got accustomed to how dirty a lot of the house was (a house in the jungle surrounded by mud is extremely difficult to keep clean). It was great to spend some time in a true jungle and learn a little about permaculture farming.