And while pantry recipients wait patiently on the program to be brought back up to speed, the ranchers of Maypen have been moving at high speed to get their dying cattle to higher ground.
Their cattle are in danger of being lost., either to drowning or to exhaustion. Ranchers from other communities have come together to assist in rescuing the animals from certain death. The process is not an easy one, but their teamwork ensures that the villagers can keep their livelihoods. Courtney Menzies got a firsthand look at how they transport the cattle to dry land.
In Maypen, a small village in the Belize District of about ten families, the floodwater is over five feet deep in some areas. This poses a danger, not just to the residents, but to their livestock as well. Cattle that don't have dry land to rest will eventually cramp up and die.
Already, approximately ten cows have been lost, which represents thousands of dollars in losses to farmers.
Last week, the villagers teamed up with Mennonite ranchers from Blue Creek and Shipyard as well as ranchers from Banana Bank to transport the cattle to dry land. It is a grueling and lengthy process and one young Banana Bank rancher said that he has been at it since Thursday.
Reydi Cruz, Rancher
"We've been here for about 3 days now with today. We came from Thursday from last week and we spent Thursday and Friday here then we went back to the ranch for catching up with work and stuff then we came back today and we've been pulling out cattle from two corrals at the back with rope and drag them on to the boat where they would tie them up and bring them down here and here they load them on to the trailer and take them out. But the first 2 days the trailer wouldn't come all the way here would be before the bridge. So now, it would be so much easier because we get more cattle out. The first day we only got about 40-45 heads of cattle out from the first corral, then on Friday we got a bit less because there were only 2 boats, but today we'll be a bit more busy since there are a lot more boats and horses."
The process was a lot longer in the previous days since there were limited skiffs, but the Mennonites provided a tractor-type vehicle high enough to pass through the deeper waters while pulling a trailer filled with cattle. Getting the cows onto the trailer is not so easy, since they are already tired. The ranchers have to pull them by ropes and horses to lead them into the cage, where all they can do is collapse from exhaustion.
Cruz said that the experience has been an emotional one for him because felt sympathy for the animals who were stranded in the floodwaters and in danger of drowning.
Reydi Cruz, Rancher
"Cattle cant last two long in the water because they need to rest just like us and like my experience has been like in a way emotional, because you wouldn't expect to see animals suffering like that and the first two days we were going in we would see cattle in water they don't have anywhere to stand on to rest their feet and they catch cramps and eventually they would just lie down there and just die."
Another difficult part of the process was working alongside the villagers since at first there were disagreements between them and the ranchers.
Reydi Cruz, Rancher
"There wasn't a mutual understanding between the villagers. So like from Banana Bank its 3 of us and we work better with the Mennonites, because they are more understanding and they use to working as a team and like we work as a team everyday, so we are use to that. But the guys down there they had a rough time, like learning to cooperate with us and stuff like that and their mentality about working with cattle was far different from our one. So in the beginning it was kinda hard, but now somebody else is in charge of assigning everybody to their places. SO everything is pulling much more easier now."
Up until this afternoon, there were somewhere almost 200 cows left to transport from out of the villagers. These cows would then be taken either to Shipyard, Central Farm, or Banana Bank. Most of them are tagged or branded so that the owners can differentiate them.
The rest of the cattle are expected to be transported within the next couple days. Later on, we'll show you how flooding is affecting the resigns of the Belize river Valley.
