The Drifters Project
By Pam Longobardi
Dropping into Belize City, the once capital of the tiny island nation of Belize, you feel strangely a little like being in Venice where vaporetti, or water taxis, are the primary mode of transport. So too for Belize, except there are also plenty of cars on the mainland, but none at all on the two miniature islands, or cayes, that were my home and worksite for the next 15 days. Another similarity is the general feeling of decrepitude, not as obvious in Venice unless you look closely, visit regularly or know people there, but magnified by 1,000 in Belize City. And the shared feeling of being on the brink; of climate change, plastic invasion, and economic crisis. But Belize also harbors a lot of hope, and a small army of soulful people working to make change in a desperate situation.