Fresh off our chocolate high, we wanted to dig into the other major culture in the region. And drumming plays a big role in that. But not just any drumming. Drumming with a very interesting backstory.
Hopkins plays a unique role in the Belizean cultural mix. It’s one of the main settlements of the Garifuna people, an ethnic group of around 100,000 people living throughout the Americas, most typically in fishing villages along Caribbean coast. Their origin legend is that they’re the descendants of two capsized Spanish slave ships going from Western Africa to St. Vincent. Modern historians surmise that the arrival wasn’t quite so dramatic, and probably involved the gradual blending of Indigenous Caribs and escaped West African slave communities. Either way, the population is distinctly its own and fiercely independent. Like the Hopi people closer to home, the Garifuna culture survived wave after wave of European colonization and is very proud of its traditions. One of those traditions is their captivating polyrhythmic musical style. It’s based around several characteristic drum beats that weave in and out of each other with gourd shakers and vocals over the top.
We took advantage of a rare cloudy morning to walk the short distance from our rental to the Lebeha drumming center. It’s a local collective of drummers who teach, perform, and otherwise work to preserve the musical style. We, of course, loved everything about that.
Aimee and I sat down with the kids in front of some of the characteristic drums while our teacher, Jabbar, taught us some of their more basic rhythms.
Within about 15 minutes, Mimi was starting to be more drawn to the Garifuna cooking class going on behind us. Within another 10 minutes, we had lost Quinn, too. But Aimee and I continued to enjoy the lesson as we dipped into some of the more advanced rhythms, or at least as advanced as an hour lesson for tourists could be. And by hour, I mean really more like 45 minutes, at which point Aimee and I decided to call it a win before our kids fully joined the family behind us. I can’t blame them. The food smelled fantastic.
The Garifuna people are just one of several communities with interesting and surprising backstories. A close second place is the Mennonites. I’ll be honest, it’s a striking sight to see a bunch of very, very white people in full length clothing and leather boots walking through the Central American jungle as if it were Western Pennsylvania.
Our guidebook said that those particular Mennonites never quite found a home in the United States after being exiled from Europe over a century ago. Generation after generation kept heading south until they eventually settled in Belize, a country already comfortable with a heterogenous cultural mix and happy to have the hard working families contribute to the growth of Central America’s youngest country. They continue to make traditional furniture for the region, and play a big role in Belize’s surprisingly good cheese selection.
I’ve already talked about the biggest (and original) ethnic group in Belize, the Mayans. But there’s also a big community of American and Canadian ex-pats taking advantage of the tropical conditions and relatively low cost of living. The Canadians, in particular, have a very easy transition, as Belize remains a part of the British Commonwealth. Belizeans seem to enjoy their current balance of autonomous governance and Crown protection. In fact, a recent referendum for full independence was rejected by the country’s voters. One of our van drivers told us that it was because of the ongoing border dispute with Guatemala. It’s still a labile situation, and the Belizeans feel that losing British protection would be an open invitation for partial encroachment.
Speaking of Guatemala, the other big sub-population is farm workers immigrating from other Central American nations. Minimum wage in Belize is US$2.50 an hour, and under the table farmwork pays even less. I don’t think I can look at $0.49 bananas the same way anymore.
Alright, that’s enough of that. I’m not going to fix the structural injustices behind mass migration in a blog that’s 60% stories about me having diarrhea in foreign countries.
Which, now that I think about it, hasn’t happened in quite some time. (The diarrhea, I mean, not the migration.) I can probably attribute that to having kids. It’s not that they directly prevent my questionable decisions (I am “prone to adventurous eating,” as the CDC so wonderfully puts it), but they do inspire me to make less of them. I now pause for an extra half-beat before making any food decisions, wondering how many upset stomachs I’m prepared to manage. It’s got to be some really amazing street food now.
But traveling with kids does have a few additional costs. Or really, cost. Aimee and I have never been much for bringing trinkets back home. We’ve never owned suitcases large enough. But try telling that to a 5 and 7 year old. It was a non-starter. So instead, we tried to corral their excitement into responsible souveneiring. I’m not sure how well we did, but we were able to make it through our only overcast day of the trip with nothing more than a few handmade bracelets and a small, loosely jaguar-ish carved stone. Could have been worse.
