Restriction and Limitation

Much of what we have learned by living in Belize concerns dealing with limitations. There are frequently apparent limitations on what we think we can do or accomplish. In many of these cases, we cozy up to the limit, get used to it, accept it, and ... it vanishes. Suddenly we are able to do what we previously thought was impossible.

It would be wrong to suggest that we do not get frustrated when we encounter limits. We do. But we also have plenty of firsthand experience to suggest that many limits appear to only steer us in the direction we wanted to go anyway.


Some months ago we moved from town to our house out past the village and in the bush. During the move, our car died. We got it repaired later, but -- during the critical time -- it was unavailable to us. We learned to live without the car and rely on the bus. We had no choice. We were too busy to get it repaired at that point.

We had no electricity out here. All of our electronic devices were useless and we learned to live without them. Just to be sure we could not use them, most of them broke: two used camera phones, a desktop, and eventually an old laptop. It was very clear that we were to learn to live without them. Even our flashlights began to break. We always tried to have four, but never more than one would work. We were apparently supposed to get used to the dark. We did.

We have a well, and a pump. We run the pump from a generator. We have a water tower, it gives us good pressure. But as of yet we still do not have water into the house. We will. But for now, we haul water with buckets from the tower.

Rebecca is doing laundry right now, by hand in buckets. While she was gone, all of us were doing this. We got used to it. It is harder than using a machine, but not much harder, and it might be faster by hand.

The generator provides some electricity. However it is noisy and gasoline is expensive here. Other than a power drill and a hair clipper, we did not use it for anything other than the water pump for many months.

We needed a method of limiting where the sheep can go, so as to stop them from limiting what survives in the garden. Eventually, we purchased an electric fence controller. This would of course require electricity to work properly. We got an inverter, a box that makes household electricity out of battery electricity, and two rebuilt car batteries. These are not the right sort of batteries for what we want to do. The right sort are heavy-duty deep-cycle batteries. But the right batteries cost about four times as much as the wrong batteries. So, for now, we are using the wrong batteries. The care and feeding of batteries is apparently tricky anyway, so it might be best we make our mistakes and learn our lessons on $40 used car batteries.



With the arrival of an inverter, and two batteries, it became possible to contemplate other luxuries that require electricity. The first thing on the list was a computer. We had our old laptop, purchased in 2005. It was on its last legs, the screen was going out, and there were other indications that it would not last long. It didn't. In Orange Walk, I was able to purchase an older Dell Desktop with a monitor for $225. It worked well, but sucked down a battery in an hour. I may sell it to someone here that has utility power.



Now we have, thanks to some assistance from a remarkable person, a new laptop. It is a very energy efficient one, and we get about four hours of use from a car battery or about eight hours of use for one hour generator run time.



We will get more batteries. Possibly the right kind; but maybe not. We will get a battery charger. Currently we can get eight amps of DC charging current from our generator. A battery charger that could deliver 20 or 50 amps of charging current from the AC side of the generator would reduce generator run time.

Eventually, when we can find them, we will get one or two solar panels. We have abundant sunlight here.

We want a few lights. Perhaps a few compact florescent lights -- one in each bathroom on a switch. I understand some of them burn as little as eight watts. We currently scan the bathroom for scorpions and snakes with a flashlight (We flush the toilet with a water from the wash basin which we fill with a bucket). We will need a small light in each sheep paddock to keep the vampire bats from biting the sheep. I might be able to figure out a way to power a light off the electric fence.

Anyway these limitations that we encounter -- and sometimes impose upon ourselves -- often serve to help us find better ways of doing what we want to do. With every luxury taken away or set aside, we can pick and chose what luxuries we really need. We can do that after becoming a bit tougher, a bit more self reliant than we were before. We can restore those luxuries we really want, and perhaps add new ones we never thought of.

For instance, we ran out of tea once. We had coffee for guests. We tried it ourselves. Now a little luxury is we make a pot of coffee.

This is a picture of the cat's cage. She can easily get in and out of her cage. But Enki, the dog, can not. And Enki likes to eat the cat's food. So the cage protects the cat food and provides a place of refuge for the cat, though she does not seem to need it.



Here is a fence post. The best tree to use for fence posts would be Madre Cacao or Gliricidia sepium. But we don't have any of those in our forest. One of the worst to use would be Chaca or Bursera simaruba. It is soft, rots and breaks easily; unless it is alive; in which case the tree sends roots all around and anchors the fence post solidly in the soil and it is no more likely to rot than a living tree.

Fortunately for us, Chaca, will strike, that is to say: cut down a chaca tree; cut it into fence posts; stick it in prepared post holes with a fist full of fertilizer and a bucket of water; fill the hole in and water it every three days for a while; and the fence post will live.