Back to Belize

Excerpt from letter dated August 27, 1960

You can’t imagine how many people have gone out of their way to welcome us back…not just people whom we knew well or even casually, but delivery boys riding down the streets on their bikes, or girls in the little shops, or the women in the stores where I shopped regularly. At first just walking into a store seemed to be a signal for all the girls to descend in a flock to say hello and tell me that they had missed me.

Many of them even remembered my name and asked about the children.

It is much the same thing as having left a small country town, but here where I’m a foreigner, and a Yankee at that, it is terribly sweet and heart-warming. People who used to work for us stopped by to “call.” A young boy who just ran errands for me once in a while dropped by my first day back (heaven knows how he knew I was here) and even a girl who used to be a waitress at the hotel when we lived there came by one morning to say hello.