Destination Belize
Easthampton couple creates a modest resort and new career.

By Judson Brown
Staff Writer,
Daily Hampshire Gazette
Monday, July 3, 2000

EASTHAMPTON - If the Zoning Board of Appeals had been a little more flexible in 1990 and allowed Francis and Mary Chicoine to establish a store for their hand-crafted jewelry in a room above their garage at 84 Torrey St., they say they would not have looked elsewhere to set up shop.

Elsewhere turned out to be 12 lush and slightly overgrown acres of hills and ancient untouched Mayan burial mounds just outside a village called Bullet Tree in the western part of Belize, formerly British Honduras, in Central America.

Having fallen in love with the country after traveling there on vacations, the couple bought the land for $17,000 in 1997. They have been hard at work since, developing the property into a modest resort. They prefer the word "retreat" because it connotes a low-key operation, nothing tony or upscale. They have just started to market the place they call Humming Bird Hills.

As the couple describes it, their far-flung project is partly pure adventure, partly spiritual quest, partly educational outreach and partly a business venture in the burgeoning arena of eco-tourism.

Diversified business

As a business, it is diversified and includes, in addition to renting cabanas and camp sites, running a small restaurant and arranging for and provisioning guided day hikes to nearby ruins in the region - and making and selling their jewelry.

But now, the kind of jewelry they make has changed with the change in their surroundings. They used to make jewelry mostly out of recycled copper flashing or gutters or teapots they would beat and cut and puncture using workman's tools such as tin snips or Phillips screwdrivers. Fran Chicoine is a carpenter and housebuilder by trade.

Now they make necklaces and bracelets and pendants and rings, mostly using seeds of all different shapes and sizes and colors and textures that they collect from the tropical and semi-tropical trees and bushes that grow on or near their jungle property or that they scoop up as they float by or wash up on the shores of the Mopan or Macal rivers.

Seeds from the Cohun, Flamboyant and Haleconia trees or from St. John bush, to name just a few sources, are cut, sanded, polished, and punctured using some of Fran Chicoine's shop equipment which he has relocated to Belize. They sell some of the jewelry at a cultural center in Bullet Tree Falls that features native crafts.

Split their time

The Chicoines are still dividing their time between Easthampton - where Fran Chicoine, 50, continues to build houses one at a time - and Bullet Tree. Through much of the 90s, he and his brother William were busy building a major 33-lot subdivision called Pine Hill Road, on 40 acres of a former family woodlot off Torrey Street. The Chicoines operated a farm in Easthampton for years. With only a few lots left, they hope be working full-time on Humming Bird Hills within two or three years.

"Our children think it's a little bit strange," said Mary Chicoine, 47, who is the bookkeeper for the contracting business. "They'd prefer we go to Florida."

Fran Chicoine has been increasingly focusing his developer's skills and energies on the property in Belize. With the help of two full-time native-born employees, Rene and Alfonso Tesecum, who make a daily a short commute by foot from their nearby "melpas" (landholdings), some of the land has been cleared and some is being re-planted as a tree farm or "forest garden."

They have sought out the advice of a local "bush master" and some professional botanists in the area in selecting a variety of indigenous trees valuable either for their fruit, their medicinal properties or their timber. They mention cahun, cocoanut, mahogany, teak, neem, lime, orange, grapefruit, avocado, among others.

For their own residence and for one guest cottage, they bought two small houses pre-fabricated at a plant operated by a neighboring community of Mennonites. These dwellings are serviced by septic systems based on a special design created for developing countries by the Peace Corps. For a second guest house they built a cabana with bamboo walls, wooden shutters, a roof of palm leaf thatch, and a mahogany door. They plan to put up four more of these.

A mix of quarters

They have built a camping platform for the more adventurous guests. They have created another partially open and partially closed-in thatched roof building for their restaurant.

Other structures on the property include a dock on the Molpan, a bird watching platform high up in the trees, an open-air pavilion and a man-made pond, which Fran Chicoine prefers to call by its Spanish name, a senote, or place of water. Part of the cleared land has been marked off for a soccer field their neighbors are free to use.

Mary Chicoine said she had a very vivid spiritual experience when she first visited the Mayan ruin of Tikal in Guatemala not many miles west of the Belize border, and she had similar experiences when visiting the Mayan archeological site called El Pilar located just seven miles outside of Bullet Tree Village.

"I just had a very strong feeling that I was not alone," she said. "I could sense activity happening all around me. When I stepped back, it was almost as if I could see the (ancient Mayan) people who lived there and worked there going about their daily lives. I just got lost in it. These are sacred places."

Mayan ruins

The El Pilar site, one of two major ones within just a few miles of Humming Bird Hills, is the focal point of a major ongoing archeological project called the Belize River Archeological Settlement Survey, begun in 1983 with the aim of "examining the cultural, or human ecology, of the Belize River area," as stated in a project Web site.

The director of the project, Anabel Ford, an archeologist from the University of California at Santa Barbara, has stayed at Humming Bird Hills, which also has proven a good place for her and her staff to meet and share information and do workshops with some of the native Creole people of Maya extraction.

The Chicoines anticipate having a continued close association with the project, an important part of whose mission is to educate the general public about – and also to encourage the revival of - traditional Mayan culture.

Both of them grandchildren of immigrants from Quebec who ventured south seeking gainful work in the Easthampton mills, Fran and Mary (Laurin) Chicoine are now writing the next chapter in their people's Diaspora. They say they slowly but surely have begun to feel more at home in Belize than in Easthampton.

The simplicity and the unhurried pace of life there is to their liking, they say.