06 BZ Trip - how the trip begin?

Before beginning :

Although the story is about 2006, the reason why I still try to write the story is to memorize my memories and share my feeling with the kindly people I ever met in Belize.


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"Do you want to participate this project ?"

In the autumn of 2005, I was asked to join the project which is hold by TaiwanICDF.

The full name of ICDF is the International Cooperation and Development Fund. The background about TaiwanICDF can be referenced by http://www.icdf.org.tw/english/e_about_bg.asp.


TaiwanICDF had a technical assistance project to help BDF(Belize Defense Force) and MOE (Ministry of Education)to build their personnel information system. I was asked to write the systems. In considering the good for a while, I promised and wrote the following sentence:


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I sign my name.

I keep my promise.

There is no fear.

Just on the way!

(photo by my friend San, on the way to Mt.Himalayas)

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It was REALLY a tough challange to me. As more I know about the system needs, more I struggled with myself : English is not my mother tounge. It's really hard to figure out all the meaning of the terms and the relationship between the terms; Since the system will be transferred to the others, I have to be very logical to write the programming code... The loading was much more than that I could stand.


"Should I give up?" I thought about the idea for thousand times.


San reminded me to ask our friend , Fred , to help programming for me and then I could put my focus on all the documentation and the communications. Fred did share a greate part of coding and I finally had a good big breathe.


Some day, I am asked to have a oral exam to test if my English is good enough to be the speaker of the System Education. I went to my friend's home and had the exam with the project team members, such as Clara. After the exam, everyone was laughing. Not because my poor English, but because the parents of my friend raised some chickens and the call of the chickens was so loudly that they all heard the sound through skype. XD

There is another thing interesting. When I started to talk about Belize, I found saversal people who known or have been to Belize. It quite surprised me. Belize seems to be not so far in this way.


It's also quite amazing that some friend of mine (but not so familiar) went to Belize as a voluntee for the same project. I tried to reach her. Through her blog, I know much more about Belize, Belmopan...


2006/7/26. It's my 29th birthday.

2006/7/27. I took the plane to Belize.