We finally arrived in Maya Beach after our 17 day road trip from Victoria. It was going to be the first night we could stay in our little house by the beach and there it was, with its roof peeled back like a half open can of beans, after Hurricane Iris had ripped through the peninsula.
To say that was a disappointment would be an understatement but once we drove into Placencia and realized that most of the houses we recalled being there were nowhere to be seen, we began to count ourselves very lucky. Our house took three weeks to fix and cost about $1,500.00, all of which our insurance covered, which leads me to this story.
Since the dive shop also required a lot of work, I would spent the evenings up at out house doing what I could and the days cleaning the sand out of the dive shop I had inherited along with my staff, a young man named Arthur Westby.
Arthur and his family had completely lost their house. It was gone… period.
At one point about a month after we had arrived, he took me aside and asked me how I had managed to get my roof repaired so quickly and I told him the insurance had covered it.
“Insurance?”, he asked curiously.
After a short conversation, I realized that he had never heard of insurance and in fact, almost no one in the village had.
Yes, Belize was steep learning curve.
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