December 24: Christmas Wishes
Christmas wishes for you and yours.
Here’s a nice Christmas wish I just got from Kurt, the young
programmer here at Naturalight. Worth passing on, I thought.
We wish you the courage to be warm, when the world would like
you to be cold.
We wish you success sufficient to your needs.
We wish you joy in all your days.
We wish you gladness to overbalance grief.
We wish you humour and a twinkle in your eyes.
We wish you sunshine on your path.
We wish you peace, in the world in which you live and in the
smallest corner of your heart.
We wish you faith, to help define your living and your life.
More we cannot wish except LOVE, to make all the rest worthwhile.
December 24: A Variety of Headwear
– I started this report sometime ago, to use when I was
too busy to write. And this week is it.
Although Belize has a heavy Caribbean influence, dreadlocks
are not popular among the Garifuna, the middle class of which
is quite traditionalist and conservative. They appear to believe
that all men with dreads are cocaine addicts, so we don’t see
much of them in this part of the country. There are some fine
heads of dreads in San Pedro and Belize City, however, and I’m
sure they’re not all coke heads. Here, stylish hairdos on men
and women, boys and girls are mostly many intricate braid variations,
which are called corn rows in the States. They are so beautiful,
though, I’m sure they have much more lyrical names here but I
don’t know what they are.
The most common patterns are of course, the traditional, parallel
rows across the scalp from forehead to nape of the neck or from
ear to ear. Sometimes they are tiny little rows of braided hair,
sometimes wider braids and sometimes just rolls and twists. The
smaller the braid, the longer it takes to do a headfull, of course
and the more impressive. Some of the patterns are astounding – chevrons,
basket weaves, spirals, swirls, keyhole. I sat behind a woman
on the bus once who had the most intricate, abstract, twisted and
braided pattern, it was like a jungle scene with a waterfall
and trees and vines suggested. I have no idea if this is what
she (her mother, sister, hairdresser) intended, but she certainly
was the kind of young woman who could carry it off. I haven’t
seen that approach again though.
One of my favorites is found most often on younger children
whose hair isn’t very long yet. In this technique, the braids
come both up from the nape and back from the forehead and end
in a sort of short, stand-up fanned ruff running from ear to
ear up over the crown of the head. Sort of like Queen Victoria.
On even younger children, there’s not enough hair to make braids
in rows, so each little patch of hair is braided into a braid
that just sticks straight out. Makes them look like adorable
little hedgehogs. Of course, the little Mayan babies have such
straight, coarse hair, they look like little hedgehogs with no
help at all. The Mayan babies have it better, too, because they
don’t have to sit through the braiding, which is pretty painful.
Makes for a pretty tough head by the time you’re two.
Some of the younger girls (young adults) have elaborate extensions
that are then looped up into intricate buns and swirls. There
are some pretty bad extensions running around too and it is
a matter of some social debate whether extensions are culturally
pure. Aside from being artificial, I think they are. J.C.’s girlfriend
came in one day with her own hair just separated into strands
and then twisted into the real thing – what extensions are
supposed to look like, which I had never seen before and it was
beautiful. She says it’s a pain though, because it takes a long
time to do it and it doesn’t last very well through sleeping.
The braids, of course, last for along time. Which is good because
some of the hairdos take 8 or more hours to create.
Another major use of extensions is by women who are very poor
and don’t do anything to their hair except cut it very short.
Many of them have a hat or turban and extensions combination
that they wear when they’re going to church or some other special
affair. Many of the better-off middle-aged women have their hair
straightened and smoothed into very sleek ‘dos and most of the
middle-aged and older men just wear very short hair.
The more
well-to-do women who don’t do braids all have straw hats that
they wear to church. There are lots of locally woven hats around,
but these are just for tourists, farmers and fishermen. The women’s
Sunday hats are manufactured, mostly white, black or natural
with colored ribbons or flowers. And I’ve seen a few yellow,
one blue, two red and a lavender. I have no idea where they get
them because it’s certainly not at any store I’ve been to here.
I always try to be sitting on my balcony on Sunday morning when
church gets out because it’s such a nice fashion parade from
above, sort of like bouquets of flowers strolling down the street.
This is mostly about the middle class, of course, professionals
and shopkeepers. The blue collar folks are more likely just to
have short hair. Partly because they carry things around on their
heads, both men and women. Well, maybe not men. I’ve never seen
an adult male do it, just teenagers. They coil up a cloth into
a circlet around the head at the very top to make a base for
the load. They can carry things that look very unwieldy and very
heavy. I haven’t had a chance to observe how you get those big
loads balanced initially, though and it’s not very common. Often
it’s just a load of laundry or some groceries.
The one person I see frequently with big loads is our neighborhood
bag lady (no such thing as a shopping cart in Dangriga). She
can carry elaborate loads on her head and move along at a very
good clip in her flip-flops, singing and gesturing expansively.
Once I saw her striding along carrying a trunk full of stuff
on her head and bags of more stuff on each arm! And once a big
box, about 3 ft. long that she had vertically on her head. That
one she balanced with a hand, though.
She tells me her job is finding things. She does this by coming
around every morning about 6:00 and looking in all the yards
to see if anyone left anything valuable out the night before.
She gives fair warning by making a lot of noise. Usually she’s
pretty happy and it’s some kind of morning song with lots of
trilling and then sea shanty kind of rhythms. On the days when
she’s mad, though, everyone stays out of her way. Then, the major
diatribe is against Americans, whites, Hispanics, rich people,
men and dogs in that order. And since in her mind I fit three out
of six categories, I make sure she’s well down the block before
I go out on the balcony for morning coffee.
I do have some more Christmas adventures to report on, I hope
to get to them this week yet. Hope you’re all ready for the New
Year!
