When it comes down to understanding the people that know their businesses in the countryside of Belize, few Belizeans that I know compare to Egbert Jacobs. For not only is Mr. Jacobs the most capable electrician a home builder can find in the Toledo District, he is also the absolutely honesties politician I have ever befriended.

Known to his local constituents as Jake of Jake’s Tire Repair, the business he manages along with his father is located just off Mile Seven on the Southern Highway north of Punta Gorda Town. There he not only repairs flats but also electrifies houses and other structures like the new school in San Marcos. Jake is a husband to his loving wife Carolyn and father to Tracy, Trevor and Trina, and if that was not enough to fill his day, as of the most recent elections he is also the council chairman for the villagers of Jacintoville.

My family and I first came upon Jake and his family when my dear wife went looking for someone to wire our house that straddles the boundary line between the village of Jacintoville and the Belize Maya community of San Felipe. In fact it was Jake that not only gave us the power to survive in the bush, but it was him who first claimed us as fellow villagers, saying that with little doubt that the village of Jacintoville stretched as far as the sharp right hand turn towards the village of San Felipe. Jake’s insight into the geographical perimeters that now define the village of Jacintoville not only allowed the village to be larger, it also gave my struggling family and me a home community in Belize.

Belize First Magazine

I can still remember the very first day Jake came to our future homestead to give us a bid as to what it would cost as well as what it would require to bring our place into the 21st century. At the time we were a family of three living about a quarter of mile up into the jungle off a lonely dirt road that links the paved tarmac of the southern highway to the seaside Garifuna village of Barranco.

Although Jake the electrician eventually us the power we needed to turn on the lights, in the same move he gave us enough electricity to bring water from one hundred and fifty feet from below the surface to fill the basin in the back of our toilet. Indeed, to this day though Jake has never seen the reasoning as to why we lived so far away from the road in the first place, he realizes crystal clear that we were just like him and his family, a small unit determined to make a difference in the lives of our fellow Belizeans.