Getting Settled

From letter dated August 27, 1960

Bucher has been working long days, but he does come home for his midday meal. We have our heavy dinner then, both because he likes it when he is working this way and because it is simpler to manage with Concie here. She and I share the cooking, though more and more she is doing most of it very nicely and with only a little direction.

The food available here now is much better, more varied, and less expensive than it was when we were here before, so we manage a fairly good menu without too much trouble. You can’t depend on having what you want just when you want it, but allowing for that, you can manage quite nicely. Lettuce comes in once a week where we used to have it once every six months or so. The beef is better quality and fairly low in price. We had what they call a roast last weekend—a 4-inch thick sirloin at the us$ equivalent of about 45 cents per pound—and it was elegant.

Since Bucher has lockers for rent at his freezer plant, he also has access to many foods at wholesale prices…chickens, eggs, fish, and lobster. That helps. Canned things still are high, and the children are back to drinking canned sterilized natural milk from Holland, at a cost of about us$1 per day…but expensive or not, they’re going to have their milk!

We have been a little handicapped having neither telephone nor car, but for the past three years Bucher’s partner in B.H. Industries, the boat-parts factory, has been in the States, so we have been using his car.

 

One weekend we drove up to the Sibun River and picnicked in one of our favorite spots. The river was in flood, but there were shallows where we could play in the rocks, build dams, etc., and it was not so swift that we were prevented from swimming cautiously in the deeper parts.

 

Last weekend we drove up to Chetumal, just across the B.H. border in Mexico. It was a fascinating drive through low bush country, fields of bananas, scraggly corn, and sugar cane. As you get farther north, the little thatched huts turn to adobe and most of the people you see are Mayan.

Chetumal was leveled in that hurricane just before we left B.H. three years ago, but it has been rebuilt beautifully and very imaginatively with handsome public buildings, parks, statuary, and every road a boulevard. It is still a small border town, but it is neat, clean, and colorful. The philosophy seems to be that if one color is pretty, two will be twice as pretty, and so on. Not many houses have fewer than three or four and one gem, an older frame house that apparently survived the hurricane, took top honors with every post on the veranda railing a different color.

Their hotel has been renovated and modernized. To one side, down a terraced hill, are four motel-type buildings with four units per building, overlooking a lovely small free-form pool. We had two units, each air conditioned, with private bath and piped-in music.  Since we were almost the only guests in the hotel, we had the pool to ourselves most of the time. The children adored it, of course.

We wandered through town before dinner, all the shops being open for Saturday evening, and I did all the conversing for the family. My Spanish is ragged, but I manage to get by. The meals at the hotel were simple but nicely prepared real Mexican cooking…not pseudo-North American that you get at so many places. Of course I was sick the day after I got home, but it was well worth it. We had a perfectly lovely weekend for practically nothing, financially speaking.