The Better In Belize team has been working hard the past few months hiking through the land, assessing, and organizing the paperwork to get the ecovillage property subdivided into sellable lots.

We have made great progress thus far, and will very soon be releasing the final PLATT map of lots. This means you will soon be able to choose and reserve your lots. Get ready, because when we post those lots online, people will be rushing to reserve their favorite lots.

As the Benque Guesthouse is finalizing completion (http://BenqueHouse.com), we will soon be sending construction workers out to the ecovillage property to start construction of the first homes. Our patience and persistence in this whole process is starting to show some fruits.

We have also recently acquired a 4 bedroom home across the street from BenqueHouse in Benque Viejo Del Carmen, that will be a basecamp for our new voluntourism program that we’ve setup.

This voluntourism program will help get more people out working in the rainforest at Better In Belize. Volunteers that join the program will be put to work in the areas of permaculture creation/organic gardening, eco-school development, and archeology.

We need volunteers to manage, setup, and maintain our organic gardens and fruit tree orchards. We also intend to get more fruit trees planted around the site and on the private lots as well. Sustainable irrigation and composting setups need to be implemented, and all maintenance tasks related to farming need to be taken care of.

The eco-school project is going to need some professional management when it’s finally up and running, but until then, there are many tasks for volunteers to participate in. We want to make training media with video, audio, and written materials documenting the process of building the ecovillage. We also need volunteers who can do research on options for improving the communities sustainability and permaculture efficiency. Getting teams to build simple working proto-types of wind generators, hydro generators, and solar setups for use as examples for teaching and learning.

Volunteers who want to get involved in archeology will be needed to help excavate the Mayan mound and Mayan walls that are located on the property. This Mayan archeological site is not significant in comparison to many temples around Belize, but it is significant enough for our ecovillagers to excavate and preserve.

The voluntourism program is ready to start accepting volunteers beginning Aug. 1st, 2008. The program costs $97 a week or $250 a month to start, which includes accommodations in our volunteer basecamp, as well as any necessary training.

Anyone interested in joining the Voluntourism program can request participation by emailing admin at:
admin(at)betterinbelize(dot)com