A week in Toledo

I have just spent four days in two Maya villages, Blue Creek and San Jose, in Toledo district in Southern Belize. One of the poorest regions in the country, it is incidentally where Maya Gold chocolate comes from. I stayed two days in a guesthouse, and two days with a family. I didn't take any pictures, due to my usual reticence in treating humans as photo opportunities. Here though are a few of my crowded impressions from those impression-filled few days.

Sharing the joy in accomplishment of reading with Juni, 8. Doing English by pointing at pictures with the smallest daughter. Eating hot bowls of chicken or pork caldo with fingers, accompanied by huge calabash-pots of corn tortillas, freshly cut, milled, patted and fried.

Many first-time experiences. Seeing glow-worms glimmering in the grass, like a trip. Riding with seven guys in the back of a pickup going to the village meeting. Sleeping (just) in a hammock. Washing in a stream surrounded by rainforest. Watching the mother wring a chicken's neck, helping to pull out its feathers, then only four hours later eating it.

Listening with growing incredulity as the village school principal talks enthusiastically, in complete seriousness, about the discovery of the lost city of Atlantis in 2004. "Somwair neeah Japan I tink." They are Maya, but they learn the Caribbean-inflected English used throughout Belize. It fits them, somehow.

Being interrupted mid-shave one morning by two giggling, wriggling sisters, hiding smiling behind shocks of jet-black hair, holding onto each other for support, feet bare, toes splayed, as they inform me: "Yur brekfass reddy!"

Finding myself naturally helping the women (sweeping the floor, plucking the chickens, playing with the children), unable to sit idly by while they work. Yet shying from offering my services with the men's work (raising a roof), embarrassed by my soft hands, weak arms, unsuitable for the task.

The 14-year-old neighbour sitting on the porch with me, telling me about the Romans, and his plans to study history. But when bidden inside by Valentino, he says his goodbyes; he won't come inside the other man's house.

No electricity: at night, the only light is from candles. And in San Jose, old mustard jars filled with kerosene, a length of wick piercing the lid. Sophia knocks one over in her excitement to show me the Maya Atlas. I, worried grownuply about fire hazard, recruit Valentino to help clear up, forgetting that he has been drinking. He snarls at the children and they scatter. He violently mops the tabletop with a nearby pair of trousers, spilling the vase of plastic flowers. Sophia appears, too late, meek and crestfallen, with the Toilet Peepah.

The children wonder at my truck. "It beautiful!" says Juni, simply. I demur: I well remember what a wreck it has looked in parking lots along the way. Yet here, 15 miles of dirt track between us and the rest of world, yes, it somehow does seem quite luxurious. Embarrasingly so.

Eggs and oranges undescribably delicious, eggy and orangey beyond where I had calibrated Eggness and Orangeness to be. Yet their chicken, free-range, organic, freshly killed, is surprisingly tough, gristly and dry.

Mostly, I am inspired and glow from the primal joyousness, the wholehearted dedication to living, the cheerfullness of the children (Valentino has 10, 2 boys and 8 girls. He tells me matter-of-factly that two have died: one in infancy, one at 19, of Hepatitis.) According to the Atlas, in most Maya villages children account for 60% of the population. Into adulthood, harder truths are apparent. The subordinate nature of the women's role. The alcoholism amongst the men, and the status games, the playing at being important, speechifying, self-congratulation.

But what has worked for centuries ought, perhaps, to be left to work now. They are paving the road to the villages, they say. Things will, of course, change. But the Maya people have been around since before the Romans: somehow I don't doubt that they will survive whatever comes their way.