As soon as I could cook for myself, I became a vegetarian. For all the usual reasons, I love animals and I do not like the way that meat is produced commercially. You are what you eat, and if you eat the meat of animals that have had a horrible life you will become miserable as well.

Here we are in beautiful Belize a mixture of overcast and sun a, nice 30 C/ 86 F, while back in Holland hail drops from the sky. Brakes in Belize are not working and people are perhaps stopping to spray their land with chemicals.

For outsiders, our village looks poor. Houses made of sticks and leaves, men in clothes with holes on rubber boots, pigs and chickens roaming free, cook fires, only one pipe for the water supply and so on. There is not much money coming around here and it shows. No wonder that there are outside groups eager to help 'the poor Mayan people' with a project involving education, agriculture, or hygiene/healthcare. They come very frequently, they teach and build and invest and San Miguel welcomes them. 

Our Mayan neighbours have their own rules about planting, and the moon plays a big role in anything they do. I really try to understand the logic behind it but I never managed to confirm a pattern that I thought I had discovered. Certain plants and trees have to be planted with new moon (the ones that you do not want to grow high, I think) and others around full moon ( the ones that grow high, like hard wood trees I think) Cohune palm leaves, used for thatching of roofs, have to be cut in the week before and after full moon, otherwise they decay fast and attract termites.