My relationship with Beno was the most…

… beautiful
… intense
… rewarding
… terrifying
… dramatic
… insightful
… tragic
… enriching
… extraordinary

I would not have changed it for the world. At the end of it, I was left completely broken down. At the same time, it made me the richest woman on this earth.

I stayed in Belize for half a year. Every month I’d show up at the immigration office, tell the same story about staying at the same place with the same people, pay the same visa extension fee, and I’d be free to continue my life as the perfect housewife until the following month.

In Belize, nothing was the way I knew it. From language to food to family relationships to way of life in general, everything was new to me. Friends of Beno didn’t talk to me in English. They spoke Creole, and as hard as I tried the only word I could ever make out from any conversation was pikney (child/children). Everything else had to be translated to me in the English I could understand.

Food was something else. Belizean seafood was exquisite.

Salted pigtail was better than I expected.

And chicken feet soup was our frequent dinner.

I knew the guy was deep in love when for our first Valentine day’s dinner I came home to a pot of steaming chicken feet soup!

Watching kids climb the coconut trees in the yard and cracking those big boys open to some sweet coconut water was an everyday sight (the one I miss very much today).

Come dinnertime local women with baskets of freshly baked bread and buns would start walking down the street. And so I lived my life enjoying truly good and delicious food.

Nobody gave me hard time being a foreigner in the country. I had to go to the hospital a couple of times and just showing my passport was enough to have a consultation, get some tests done and some free medicine.

Of course, there was lots I had to get used to. Besides cooking for 6 instead of 2 and finding all the food gone come morning no matter the amount I cooked, not much got in my way. Some things made me curious and somewhat amused, I’d say.

Just as I saw glimpses of different way of life while travelling in Latin America year earlier, I witnessed different life first hand in PG. Very different from what I grew up with or found familiar. When I talked to Beno about it, he said I wouldn’t understand and would be quick to judge. Perhaps. We came from such different worlds. At the end of the day I was grateful he let me be part of his world.

He was always calm, I was always dramatic. He didn’t have much to show for himself (I’m just a broke nigger, he’d say). To me, he had the world (kindness, wisdom and acceptance).

To this day, I wish I could live by his philosophy: ‘I accept everything that comes my way’.