Back from vacation and I picked up some kind of congestion in my chest. Probably just ran around too much and weakened my constitution, so I’m struggling through the day dealing with a chest full of goo. Anyway, one of the stops we made on our trip was to Belize. Now I hadn’t really heard of Belize before, if asked I would have thought it was a city rather than a country. Still that’s where the cruise ship went, so we went too.

We signed up to do some ziplining across the jungle canopy and it was amazing. Picture yourself zooming along a line on a harness and pully while 300 feet below you, the jungle opens up. We saw some incredible views and sweated a lot in that muggy rain forest. Good times.

To get to where we would be exploring though, we had to take an hour and a half bus ride through Belize. We drove through Belize City and then out into the wilderness, eventually turning off the paved road. Belize is not a very rich country. Everything has that third-world rundown look to it and buildings I thought were abandoned turned out to house families and businesses. It surprised me to learn it is an English speaking nation but Spanish and Creole were also common.

We drove past a lot of kids in uniform going to school. The country provides school for all children up to 14 and they all wear uniforms. Now the schools themselves looked pretty rugged and prison-like. Lots of cinderblock-type construction. We also drove past a pre-school. In the front of it were a couple of metal poles that held up the roof on the porch. On these poles were a few small children climbing up and sliding down them. These kids acted exactly like my kids would act if they had a pole in front of them. In fact, seeing the kids walking to school, they all acted just like any other kid would act.

And that really showed me how people are people. We are a lot more alike than unalike, even between America and a Central American country. It will be a while before I immediately categorize someone I meet up with thanks to my Belizean encounter.