La Ruta Maya

“Once you drink the water, you always come back” is a popular Belizean saying – it’s been true for me for 12 years! I ‘just reached’ Cayo a few days ago and am glad to be back. The Belize Field School staff and I can't wait for the New Mexico State University students and Professor Michele Nishiguchi to get here!!

Today was the start of the annual La Ruta Maya canoe race. My mission the past few days was to meet up with the Sacred Heart Junior College group to check up on a Ruta Maya Clean up activity that Int’l Friends of Belize funded. Check us out: www.friendsofbelize.org.

The event and the clean-up went really well this morning and there are more plans for on-going cleanup events with young enthusiastic people – I’m so encouraged by this. (They have 2 more clean-ups semi scheduled while I’m here including one with the NMSU students and one on Earth Day hopefully - so I’ll post more photos of those).



La Ruta is a great event - loads of people come out to watch, cheer, and of course hope for canoe wrecks/flips. Watching this morning brought me back to when Charlie Houghton, Robin Davis and I paddled the race in 1998 – the first Peace Corps team - what a trip that was!! No training, just pasta the night the before and wham we’re racing a canoe for 4 days – great memories! So glad to be back 'eena Belize'!