Patricio Balona
Patricio Balona was born in the small Yukatek village of San Antonio in the Cayo District, Belize Central America. Balona was raised doing subsistence farming with his father. Part of the farming culture entailed observing the movement of stars, moon, and winds and changes in weather to plan a year ahead of planting and harvesting. After high school, Patricio attended a Jesuit college, St. John’s Junior College.
After junior college, Balona returned to his alma mater high school to teach Belizean History, English and Caribbean Social Studies. In October, 1988, he got an opportunity to get into radio and became a broadcaster; a career that lasted almost ten years.
Balona arrived in the United States on Halloween Day, 1996. He did all kinds of odd jobs before being accepted into Temple University in Philadelphia. Balona graduated with a bachelor's degree in Journalism and soon afterward started his journalism career with The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. When his daughter -- Josee Kich'pan Pepem -- was born in 2001, he moved to Florida. There, he landed a reporting job with the Daytona Beach News-Journal, which is where he is today covering crime and courts.
This past June, he traveled throughout the Maya Heartland in Mexico -- Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco and Chiapas, tracing the steps of his ancestors and getting familiar with the land they left behind. His great grandparents had left the area before they settled in Cayo, Belize. That's where they found peace from the War of the Races of 1847, which had ravaged Yucatan.
