Chapter 5: Brinka

Brinka is the name of a Belizean with skin the color of Columbian coffee beans, an
Australian Aboriginal face, and a Caribbean Creole accent that only allows me
to understand a forth of what the man says on a good day. He lives
in a one-room shack on 4' stilts which consists of bare plywood, a tin roof,
and his most prized possession, a mosquito net. His toilet is a few scrap
boards thrown together for privacy and a plank serving as a catwalk leading to
his thrown 10 feet over the water where he helps to feed the fish. He
lives halfway between nowhere and somewhere, (Bacalar Chico and San Pedro Town)
his house is the only one for miles along a barren stretch of water of
crystalline blues and greens, coconut palms, and white sand beaches that would
be considered paradise by most if it weren't for the constant barage of biting
insects of all varieties and sizes. His livelihood is placed up
& down the island and are known as beach traps. These are ingenious
contraptions that appear very basic yet work like an efficient machine in
capturing wayward fish. They extend perpendicular to the shore and are
made out of sticks/lengths of wood about 5' tall stuck into the sediment close
together to form a fence about 1000 feet long out into the deeper water, ending
in a circular spiral area which then leads into a holding pen with chickenwire
used as reinforcement for the sticks. The fish travel happily along the
shoreline in the seagrass and the mangroves, bump into this "fence"
and have no choice but to follow along it in hopes of eventually rounding
it. However, when they reach the end they become trapped in a vortex that
leads to the holding pen. It is at this beach trap where Brinka climbs
over the fence, puts on his mask (or glass as he calls it), grabs his
handmade net basket, and as if he were a cowboy twirling his lasso and rounding
up cattle, he swims with his net at ready, corrals the fish into a corner and
comes up with it chock full of a frantically flipping frenzy called mangrove snappers.
This is where we get our dinner most nites up in Bacalar Chico. Course
Belizeans like to suck on bones and when a whole fish--tail, eyes, skin, and
all begin on the dinner plate, after much giant sucking sounds
throughout the meal there is nothing left but a perfect fish skeleton, so the
dog prefers to eat my leftovers rather than the Belizeans.
In San Pedro you can pay upwards of $10 for a filet of fish, but out here
if you know the right people, you can get a cooler full for a liter of Caribbean
Rum! Brinka likes his rum! One afternoon the rangers and Brinka
took off and didn't come back until dusk, (turns out they went to Xcalac, Mexico
just up the way where the nearest watering hole is). Brinka came into the
kitchen where I was eating my Campbells vegetable soup by hurricane
lamp and said in his booming slurred Creole accent (shaking his index
finger at me all the while)--Tom! Tommy! U vexed a me?!
I smiled wide and said "No Brinka, why would I be mad at you?"
(because they had left me all day by myself in the middle of nowhere without
telling me where they were going, while they went and got drunk, maybe?)
He laughed and thanked me for the rum I had brought him and I thanked him for
all the fish he brings us. He told me he had a lobster in his trap
that day and he had brought it especially for me. I said I was already
full from the soup and bread and wanted to let the lobster go free. I
thought at first he didn't understand my English but turned out his
mystified look was for the fact that he thought I was insane for wanting to
let a lobster go free! Well, that poor lobster spent the night on
the boat and was finally released in the morning looking a bit
sluggish. About 2 hours later I walked out to the dock to see Dan,
the Belizean Bacalar Chico caretaker, holding a rather large
floral print bowl with a sharpened kitchen knife balanced on it with one
hand and hiking up his shorts with the other as he waded thru the shallows
scanning the water for something. Well, this looked mighty suspicious so
I innocently asked--"Dan, are you looking for my lobster, 'Herman'?
Dan sheepishly glanced up like he had been caught with his hand in the seagrass
and said "Tommy--you name da lobsta? Shame, coz I gwanna eat
em!" (I'm called Tommy here because Belizeans have a hard time
pronouncing "A's") He never did find Herman while I was
still up there but he was threatening doning a mask and snorkel rather than a
bowl and knife when I left. This is the same man that ate breakfast with
me that morning when an old "Cranberries" song came on the radio and
this sweet Belizean began singin along to "Zombie" (with his Creole
accent instead of an Irish one) "Its in your head, in your
head!" It just seemed ironic and funny to me at the time, guess you
had to be there... Anyways, Brinka has a dog and a cat whose names are
just that because most Belizeans don't treat their pets as family members like
we do in the states. They strickly serve a purpose--in the case of the
dogs to guard and protect possessions and cats to kill rodents. One day
while we were waiting on Brinka to wrangle us up some rawfish--his dog came
swimming up to our boat and with the water being kinda deep, I thought we
were gonna have to save him. How silly of me! The dog calmly
paddled over to where he knew a
shallower spot was, stood up on his two back feet, his tail splayed out behind
him in the water for balance and his front paws held up to his chest as if he
were a kangaroo! He stood there in 2 feet of water watching and waiting
for Brinka for quite a while (longer than I can hold a yoga pose) swam over to
the dory (a small canoe-like boat) and rested his paws and chin on that for a
moment, then swam back to his seagrass patch and made like a Aussie
again. I laughed and laughed and he looked up at me with his ears
cocked as if I was the funny looking one! Little does Brinka know
that he could be famous in the states if he brought this dog
onto David Lettermen. Brinka must get really lonely living in that
shack cause when he gets to come stay with us in Bacalar he
talks and talks into the nite. Its always so quite there, just the sound
of the breeze and the water lapping on the lagoon shore as I read my book
by headlamp, but when Brinkas there you can hear him over the raucous
generator yelling about how someone stole his fish from his traps again
and every other word starts with a Fok! You gotta love him though,
he's one of the few Belizeans I've bonded with thus far which means alot cause
after all, that's part of the Peace Corps mission: To help
promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of
the peoples served; & to help promote a better understanding of
other people on the part of the American people. In other words, Brinka
now thinks that all Americans laugh alot and would rather eat canned soup
than fresh lobster and Americans will now think that all Belizeans drink,
swear, and suck fish bones.