Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

This sign is an ad for an area called Old Belize, which is located on the highway between Belize City and Belmopan.  It does a good job of establishing legitimacy for tourists.

Side note: I got a little sunburned laying at the Old Belize beach yesterday.

This sign:

is on the front of this store:

.

I don’t know if this is a legitimate Payless or not, but they do have a nice selection of shoes. Beyond it being hilarious that you are not allowed into a store to buy shoes if you don’t already own a pair, I think there are deeper implications. In a way, this sign emphasizes how hard it can be to break out of a cycle of poverty to join the consumption class.

I’m in Belize City now and was walking around my neighborhood when this new house being constructed caught my eye.  After talking to the guys working on the house, I found out it’s a new office for Strukture Architects.

The main brick column here is about 6 feet tall.  I assumed that the top of it was closed off, so I set my wallet and two sets of keys on it, which promptly fell into a crevice.  It took the hotel staff about 30 minutes to help me fish out my belongings with wire hangers.  The builder of the building happened to be eating dinner at a table about 10 feet from the column during the event.

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The San Ignacio market has about 10 vendors on weekdays, but on Saturdays the market area is flooded with a huge number of merchants.  In the last year, a new, large structure was built for the market to house the everyday vendors and a new concrete slab was laid for the weekend merchants to set up temporary tents on.

I think it’s great that there is investment being put into infrastructure for something so obviously important to the local economy, but I think there are a few major oversights in the design of the site.  The most major one is that the majority of the vendors are on a north-south axis and the east to west brightly shining sun blasts in on the vendors and their products essentially all day every day.  To deal with this, all of the vendors have strung up tarps or sheets to block out the sun.

Additionally, the design of the stalls just doesn’t seem to consider what will happen in them.  Every stall has added a system of ropes and pipes to hang bananas and other good off for selling.  They are making the most of their space, but the design of the stall could have anticipated and assisted in this and other produce selling needs.

Also:

Today, I was called “a darling and a bunch of plantains,” when I brought a lunch plate to one of the teacher at the school where my group is working this week.

Observation: since I was last in Belize, cell phone carriers have begun directly depositing pre-paid phone credit via electronic means versus selling phone cards.  There are even promotions to encourage this exchange (10% extra credit if you do it this way).  This seems like they’re priming to get people more and more used to their phone as a device for trading money, for mobile banking.

I want to perhaps get in touch with Galen University, a private university here in Belize, to see if anyone has particular interest in sustainable development, technology, and Belize/the Caribbean.

Development/Caribbean Research groups:
- Society for Caribbean Studies, UK
- International Association of Science and Technology for Development
- Caribbean Studies Association

Also, I bought drewcogbill.com today!