Ladyville is a suburb of Belize City (which we hate) and relatively boring.

Chris and I spent a grand total of 3 days here at the wonderful Libirty Foundation (a school and home for abused and neglected kids).

The kids were amazing. There were 38 children from the ages of 2 to 15. All were sweet, even Nelson, the trouble maker.

This is where we were suppose to volunteer until some things happened. The room we were given was great and the food was good and the children and staff was nice. But working on the farm wasn’t.

We only worked on the farm one day, but it sounded like they wanted us to do 8-10 hour days of back breaking work because they wanted to ‘get their moneys worth out of us’. We tried to talk to the director about how we rather not work on the farm but it was quickly brushed aside by her straight forward manner.

I loved the place, but I physically can not pull up everything in two different gardens, take a ho to three different plots of land, and plant three rows of small plants in one day, especially when I know nothing about gardening. Add in the heat and you expect me to do this from 7 in the morning till 4-5? No thank you.

You may be giving free room and board, but its not worth it. I wish I could have helped out with the kids, then we probably would have stayed. But it sounded like you were going to let the new guy (who was only staying for a week) help with the kids and put us (who said we most likely could stay at least a month) in the garden. Even after you told us that you didn’t like to put people with the kids who would only be there for a short while.

Sorry. I’m done ranting.

Besides that, we did enjoy it there. Our last day the pigs escaped and we got to watch 9 pigs roll around in the mud and sprint around as happy as can be. Then we got to watch all the big boys chase the pigs back to where they belonged.

But that even had a sour moment when the head maintenance guy (the one we would be listening to if we worked in the garden) hit a pig with a hammer to get it back in.

It may be just a ‘pig’ but I like animal abuse about as much as I enjoy children abuse.

It may sound like this place holds a bunch of sour memories for us, but it really did have some good things to it. Mainly that just revolves around the kids though, who were so full of spirit you never would guess that they have been through so much pain and harsh treatment. They just want attention and to be loved.

Anyway, we left on our 4th morning and our now located in San Ingacio, on the west side of the country. Its so pretty here.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 8:47 am and is filed under Trip Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.