U betta Belieze it: Imprints Collated

So today we got back from a cultural excursion at Gayle's Point, traversing the Mayan Mountains and surviving the Hummingbird Lookout Highway (believe me, it's treacherous) on the way back.

But first, let me share with you my host family and service-learning experience. Imagine a kind grandmotherly figure cooking for you and meeting your every need in a rather rustic and lower-income household sort of way; add to this an opportunity to build, from scratch, a septic holding cell for a building which serves as a community center with the local construction crew; and culminate with the feeding of emaciated cows and horses as well as the sampling of the local wines, and you have yourself one heck of a trip, via Crooked Tree, in Belize.

I even got a chance to read through the Defective version of Mandeville's Travels, read through A Book of Middle English and of course cherry-top my reading lust (or is it list) with Piers Anthony's Night Mare (uhm, yeah...a Xanth novel!). Ah...good reading.

I'm now counting down the hours before I depart this country; the kids are extemporizing around the proverbial fire pit, and I just got back with Dr. A from the local watering hole called "Amigos".

All in all, my trip to Belize has been a fruitful one and it was good to see, touch, taste and feel the political, ethnic and racial, as well as the otherwise, cultural Girardian violence evoked by the indigenous hordes. I am the better for it, and I fondly will remember (in the medieval subjunctive):

Whom Jah bless, no man curse...

'Till next we meet Belize, Belizeans and creeping things of this jungle world.

--FTjr.

Belize: Imprint of Day 2

Today was not as eventful as yeasterday; still, we were able to see some Mayan ruins and shop at an old village called San Ignacio--a remnant community founded by Spanish missionaries.

The food has been quite delightful although some folks continue to get sick. The "G-man" survived today although give it a few hours.

I should have mentioned in my earlier post that the "G-man's" legend began with the loss of a hat while investigating the very cockpit of the plane that landed us in Miami. This of course was followed by a slip in the mud, the loss of a sandle, the loss of an oar, possible poison branches scratching his face on a bus ride, the flipping of a canoe, him floating down the river, and who knows what else has occurred.

Suffice it to say that the trip continues to be a rather syncretic mixture of cultural awareness, good food and spectacular flora and fauna opportunities. Tomorrow, we go spelunking.

Belize: Imprint of Day 1

So today we went to the Belize Zoo for a guided, "educational" tour to observe the animals indigenous to this Central American paradise. Look! Let me just say that it was a grand experience--complete with a tapir, the national animal of Belize by the way, peeing on me.

Not to be outdone, I fed a live jaguar named Junior, which incidentally means in Mayan: the one who kills its prey in one bound. After the aromatic zoo, we came back to base to eat a hearty lunch.

Our next trip was to canoe the Sibun River. And yes, some of our members fell in and we did have to rescue them. Awesome! In the midst of water rapids, minor tide pools, the largest orange iguanas known to man, we left no one behind on this expedition. Even the "G-man" was saved. Ah yes, the "G-man" is fast becoming the student explorer of legend.

Dr. A got the runs and I just have bad gas, but other than that we continue to be excited. Up next: Mayan ruins and "shopping" in San Ignacio.

Belize Proem: imprints from a Cruzan Medievalist

I woke up today too early to recount. Why? I was getting ready to go to Belize, my first Third World Country visit. I am traveling with my beautiful fiancee, Dr. A, and 15 students from Eckerd College.

The trip is under the academese rhetoric of "service learning," and I am sure this is indeed the case, but we are really going there for shock value. If an educated American falls in the Belizean rain forest, do the local flora and fauna hear it? Yeah,...I know.

So anyway, what is a medievalist doing in Belize to begin with? Well, I speak Spanish and Creole so my translating skill set should come in handy. By wait! Was it not formerly British Honduras? And then again, is not the official language English, one dialect removed from a king's English?

Yep! So again, why is a medievalist in Belize? Hmmm...this is indeed a question that will be addressed in a more everyday, informal manner. What?! A diary? A journal? Well, maybe more of what Whitman considered his leaves of grass. Perhaps, these ramblings, like Dr. Johnson's narrative attempts, can be considered...uhm...imprints.

So hang in there! I will hold nothing back, and I do mean nothing.

My President's recent 'Achievement'

How do you measure greatness exactly? And, to further complicate my inquest--how does one receive it while still very much ALIVE?

President Barack Hussein Obama, our country's 44th President of the United States received, and added to his ever-increasing list of achievements, a Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.

My first thoughts were: that's great, but for what exactly? is he not STILL in office, STILL in the role of doing?

I quickly altered my thoughts to paranoia: this is a set up; what was meant as promotion from the Swiss billing may backfire faster than Gorbachev's iron curtain renting.

Still, you have to be impressed that such a man while still in office received the award based on pure merit pre-inauguration. I had suspected such a thing could happen via his literary output; and, at best, I expected the MacArthur foundation to reward him, but a Nobel Peace Prize exceeds my (and many other Americans') expectations.

If we say he earned the award via his oratory aspirations to reach across the political table and break bread with mankind, then it is fitting. If we say, it is because of his ascendancy to the 44th Executive Branch of our US Government, then it is not.

In his own words then: "This award is not simply about my administration...[it] 'must be shared' with everyone who strives for 'justice and dignity'."

Now, we sit back and listen as all the nay-sayers and dejected wanna be should have been me's gripe about who won. Jealous? Perhaps...

Well said, and as always well achieved Mr. president.

Dark Roast, Michael Vick and Abelard's Ethica

Three gulps in, the dark brew has kicked in and by now we all know that Michael Vick has received a two-year deal to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. Shock? Disgust? Elation? Reservation?

These are but some of the feelings I am sure many are feeling, but I ask you to consider what follows:

--What better team to play for than the "City of Brotherly Love"?

--Humans have rights too, no.

--We save the whales, the ecosystems, the planet and yet spite, spit and spat against our human neighbor.

Michael Vick, through our legislative branches, has since served his sentence. Some think, it was not long enough. Does the man deserve a break, a chance?

Forget WWJD (for now), and consider What Will Vick Do? He might want to turn to Abelard here:

Sed profecto sicut Deo uel angelis peccata nostra sine aliqua pena doloris displicent, eo uidelicet quod illa non approbant quae mala considerant, ita et tunc nobis illa displicebunt in quibus deliquimus.

[But surely, just as without any of the pain of sorrow our sins displease God or the angels through the fact that they do not approve what they consider to be evil, in the same way also what we have done wrong will then displease us].

For Vick to truly sense and face some semblance of remorse, he will have to be displeased with the self, that part that tolerated such cruel and aberrant behavior in the first place. After all, is this not what is considered a sin, a transgression.

We ALL do our own version of it, and so we deflate the ego and subjugate the id into confession. We also need a little sabiduria, [wisdom] to know non ignoramus astutias Sathanae [we are not ignorant of Satan's devices].

Animals (in general), like its human counterpart seek co-existence and not subjugation, cruelty and even death. What Vick did was inexcusable; what Vick will do in the progressive present is now under a microscope. I wonder if we will embrace him once more? We have done less before, and more.

A evening to mimic

At 10:41 p.m. I sit at my desk in my new study/library. Some jazz piece is on the radio blue noting my bluest eye, but I ain't that type of reduction.

I just ate a piece of Cuban bread with some Camembert cheese (Ile de France). My drink? A Guiness in a frosted 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies (Goliardic Society) glass.

My reading material for this evening? Matthew "Monk" Lewis's magnum opus: The Monk. It should be a seasoned and disconnected re-reading of Radcliffe's The Italian.

The house is at a very cool 75 degrees; the only light source is my academic desk lamp (think With Honors here, minus the green canopy).

Before I turn in, perhaps some Carla Bruni and some more Camembert. The night is truly a beautiful mare; like Piers Anthony's Night Mare (a good read, and one of his better Xanth novel puzzle pieces, no).

Like I said, a night to mimic.