A reliable source told me that I got my Geggs crossed when I wrote (a couple weeks ago) about the gold find and the new port proposal south of the Sibun, because it’s not one Gegg, it’s two — one for the gold and one for the port. Ouch, the UDP should have been spent due to holding hatred for a single member of a family, but when that vice is a core ingredient of your party, there’s plenty enough of it for two.

Hmm, the full story about the 1993-98 gold is yet to come in, but I’m speculating that the Reds’ justification for blocking the pass so the diggers couldn’t go bring out the nuggets might be that the gold-finder, Mr. Gegg, being PUP, was considered a wily so-and-so, and the UDP, which was then a party whose mission was to save us from the PUP, not to be like or worse than them, saw hanky panky in the making.

We’ve all been watching these politicians and politically connected bohgaz a long time – so we know their game always sees them racing off to the bank, or making deals with some foreigner who wap them and runs off with the loot, and we are always left to foot the bill.
Ah, from through the Reds’ lens, a PUP finds gold, yes, an international splash, wow, and foreign investors would be fighting for hotel accommodations in the new California. But the gold rush would come up near empty, and by the time people found out they’d been had, the PUP investor and his PUP friends, and their foreign accomplices, would have had a mint, and egg would have been all over Belize’s face, like the UDP Sanctuary Bay thing. See, having fought the game, the UDP learned it, and then they played it.

Some things and people never change, but we’ll go to hell if we die cynical, so we just ask questions. So, why the UDP was in such a rush to say it wasn’t they that gave the green light to the port project of the other Gegg brother, at Port Miracle, we’ll have to wait for the full exposure on that one too.

John batting 50%

I’m glad to see John Saldivar has grown up and found out that sin da noh sin, that the magnitude of our transgression does count…heck, from our first days we Catholics were taught, so much Hail Mary fu this, and so much more Hail Mary fu that…
Now, if he will only grow up to understand that it is important that as individuals we know how to choose our friends, and that for a political leader, that judgment is absolutely critical. But maybe he does understand, and it his choice to bluster, or he has been advised to play ignorant, ignorant in the Sedi sense.

Dyaahm, it’s accident

Call me stubborn for maintaining that idleness is the mother of invention when all the great people say necessity gets the title. Well, it turns out that both schools are off-base, wrong, and this time it is not an opinion, this time I bring the hayr off the haas tayl eena mi hand. Brother Omar Figueroa said “away” to nasty plastic, Brother Romel Cuello said we got to think this thing through, and the petrochemical companies said we got to find a way to degrade this thing or we’ll be losing a huge part of our business.

Ah, the petroleum industry is in such peril, with electric cars threatening to take over the roads, organic agriculture pushing for proper labeling so it can bounce crops protected by petroleum-based chemicals, and the most dangerous, plastics, being named the number one scourge in the world because it is not biodegradable. Hence the need to do something was great, and all idle hands were sent to the lab, but they came up with nothing to turn back Figueroa’s assault.

They, the petrochemicals crowd, were losing badly, getting blown out, actually, until accident, the real mother of invention, showed the way. Oh no, no, no, I’m not about dismissing all the worthwhile studies people engage in, and they have done such wonderful things.

I’ve told you before that what human beings deserve big points for is their capacity to mimic. We see things in nature, and we bring out the copier. Please, my diss is solely for the arrogance, and they can bex if they want, but whenever they strut out their peacock feathers and want us to believe they are God, I say to them what my father said to me: you’re not that smart.

It was a dyaahm accident that they came upon a mutant enzyme that eats plastic! The article I stumbled on is three years old, and I found it in the British Guardian. The piece, written by Damian Carrington, the environmental editor for the magazine, is titled “Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles”, and the subhead is, “The breakthrough, spurred by the discovery of plastic-eating bugs at a Japanese dump, could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis.”

But boohoo, the story noh done. I gathered from a recent article in Forbes that this enzyme eat tu slow, and it only has a stomach for one kind of plastic, so three years later petrochemicals are still plugging away at a find to save their and our plastics. They shouldn’t give up. The next accident is out there, and it might be the one to provide the solution.

Lord, if You wake me up tomorrow… continuation… (24-1981)

I had a plan when I left HHL, and I needed the land I’d been promised to do it on. As the supervisor of Plant Protection on HHL’s cacao plantation I had seen how effective the new pesticides were in controlling insects and diseases, and I felt that with my knowledge and drive I could do something that no one in Belize was doing at the time, something that could give me enough money to do what had been disrupted when I left the sea to go to school. I wanted to work on the land, and when I got bored, to go work on the sea, and for the latter I needed a boat.

Around 1981, no one was producing winter vegetables commercially in Belize. There’s never been much of a market for our local greens — kalalu (amaranth), chaya (Maya spinach), choa cho (chayote), or susumber. All the money in the market was/is for varieties that aren’t native to Belize, and many of these non-native varieties are stressed by pests and diseases, especially in the cold wet months, so back then our farmers shied away from planting during that period.

Vegetable farmers started making their seed beds around January and February, and there was an annual glut between April and June, especially of tomatoes and peppers. Nobody in Belize grew cabbage on a commercial scale back in 1981.

I knew Mr. Ernesto Castro fairly well through sports, through playing basketball at the Hilltop Court and football at the big field, now the Isidoro Beaton Stadium. Mr. Castro was an economist in the Ministry of Trade and I approached him for information on the importation of vegetables in Belize. I remember the report I got from him showed that our imports of cabbage were steady at around 80,000 pounds per month, and tomatoes fluctuated, between no imports in the dry months, and a lot during the wet months, peaking between November and February. The window was clearly for tomatoes, so that’s where I chose to put my money.

At the Belize School of Agriculture, one of my teachers was Dr. John Hammerton of the Caribbean Area Research and Development Institute (CARDI), so I was familiar with the organization. I visited CARDI and went over all the research they had done or were doing with vegetable crops in Belize.

Next I went to Hofius Hardware Store on North Front Street, to visit Mr. Bert Masson. I don’t know how I got to know Bert. Maybe he had given a few classes at school, but we had a good relationship. He gave me information on the latest varieties that were on the market. I wanted the tomato variety that had resistance against the most races of bacterial and fungal wilts, and I remember we narrowed the choices down to two hybrids, Hope # 1 and Hope # 2.

After I had gathered all the information I needed, I went to my uncle, James V. Hyde, because I needed my twenty acres of land. My uncle, a former Commissioner of Lands, was the Permanent Secretary in the Lands Ministry at the time, so I had everything in my favor in that department.

I needed land that was accessible and had access to water, and he took me to a parcel behind Teakettle, but I didn’t like it, because it was too low — I thought it would go under water when the floods came. In the interim, I settled to go and work on a parcel my uncle had in Camalote, because it was near the river and had a creek, and it had fertile, easily worked land that was removed from the flood plain.

The area on my uncle’s land that was the most suitable for my project was under a three-year-old wamil, which suggested that someone had recently planted crops on it, so, before I settled on the plot I set about investigating its history.

A cousin of mine who lived in the area, Mr. Jorge August, told me that a Mr. Marroquin had done some work on the land, and he gave me directions to the man’s home. When I went to the home the man’s family told me that a couple years previously he had gotten a job in the south of the country, and that a month or so before my visit he had died. They told me they were certain that he had planted watermelons.

There is at least one Mayan temple on my uncle’s land, a very small one, and the story was that Mr. Marroquin excavated it, and one day while he was taking out artifacts a boulder fell on his back. He couldn’t do hard physical work after that, so he got a regular job at a farm in the Stann Creek District, and there he succumbed to his injuries. I was eager to get going with my project, so I decided to take a chance on the plot that I favored. (to be continued)