On Wednesday of our second week we took a field trip to Hopkins, Belize, a town about 3o minutes away from Dangriga. Our reason for going there was to introduce the coding game to some students at a school in Hopkins, but we decided to go with the whole business group and both our instructors to make a fun day out of it.
First we went to Sandy Beach. It was so beautiful, the pictures I took looked like a desktop screensaver. Whenever we were swimming in the ocean we saw two manatees poke their heads up in front of us, they were barely 5 feet away. Alex and Suzie tried to swim out and touch them but the manatees swam away.
After we swam a few residents of Hopkins prepared us lunch, they made a traditional Belizean dish called Hidut. Hidut is a coconut milk based broth with cooked red snapper in it. On the side it always comes with crushed up plantains. It was unlike any dish I’ve ever tried before but it was delicious!
After lunch the rest of the computer team and I split off to the school and the rest of the business team stayed to enjoy the beach more. Once we got to the school we played the coding game with the students for about an hour and they all loved it. They even said they wanted to play at home so we also gave them more coding websites to check out.
After we left the school the whole business team drove down to the Jaguar Wildlife Preserve to float the river. It was about an hour and a half float down the river, the scenery was amazing. Luckily none of us encountered a jaguar!
-Julie
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Learn more about the U of A Community Development in Belize summer program at http://studyabroad.uark.edu/belize
Search for study abroad opportunities like these in over 50 other countries: http://studyabroad.uark.edu/search
