This morning I composed an e-mail to the manager of the Holy Cross Angelican School about the grand land raffle:

Good Morning Francis!

Back in June 2009, I bought some raffle tickets for a lot of land on Belize. The money was to be donated to the Holy Cross Angelican School. The raffle was to be pulled in December 2009. I’m not sure if you know or can find out, but has the raffle ticket for the lot of land been pulled yet? I’m concerned as to whether this was a legitimate raffle, as I have not seen any updates on your school website and the website that promoted the raffle before has a new interface and does not mention the raffle.

Here are my raffle tickets.

Any information you can give me on the status of this raffle would be great. I’m really hoping I did not fall into a scam here. I hope the money I paid for the raffle tickets made it to your school.

Thanks!

The response was  disappointing to say the least:

Hi Elizabeth,  Much to our dismay the raffle was canceled. We have been trying to get the money back from the organizer for the tickets sold through Holy Cross.  It is a real mess and I’d like to strangle Alex Canalas.  When school reopens on the 11th we’ll be back to the task at hand.  Hopefully we’ll have an answer for you later that week.  Many thanks for your understanding.  Blessings, francis

Support Holy Cross Anglican School in San Pedro www.holycrossbelize.org

This is very upsetting to hear. We are sorry for any of you readers who purchased raffle tickets. We hope this gets worked out ASAP and that Alex has a better heart than to run off with the money for the school and school children. What selfishness. I am so so sorry.

I just remembered the raffle I entered for the lot of land on San Pedro.  I got four raffle tickets in the mail. I just did some researching and cannot find whether or not they have pulled the winning ticket yet. However, they said the raffle is to be held in December, so I guess that means only a few more days left! Keep your fingers crossed for us!

If you still want to purchase some raffle tickets: click here.

I’ve been hard at work trying to edit the video from our trip. There is just so much, and I am only a novice video editor. Consequently, the wait is becoming much more than I’d imagined. That is unfortunate. I wanted to share the HD underwater video with everyone. It’ll happen. I just don’t know when.

In the meantime, I’ll share this: I’ve learned a few things about making movies and shooting video. It seems as though 90% of what you shoot is rubbish. It then becomes increasingly necessary to carefully cull through all of that rubbish in order to find the few fragments of entertaining content, piece those together in an interesting way and publish the end product with a few nifty bits and pieces of post production.

So far, I have managed to extract dozens of clips from the day and night dives. But I wasted so many good shots trying to use the zoom on the camera. Great shots like the crab and eel combo (a sushi delight) are almost completely ruined because of my poor video skills.

My friend Garrett, who lent me the camera suggested that I take all the video and scale it down to one minute clips. This, I thought, would be imjpossible given the volume of video I had. But now that I look back on it, two or three one-minute clips may be all I have once it is all said and done. Hopefully, the first will be ready for release at the end of this weekend.