HenryGates, you don't know a thing about me or my relationships with my friends and neighbors in Copper Bank, so maybe you ought not comment on things you don't know. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" (Abraham Lincoln, maybe, the attribution is questionable). It's also clear you are neither a musicologist or a veteran of a career in the entertainment business. I trained as an anthropologist at university and spent 40 years as a performer and production technician in the industry. The advice given to the OP here has been realistic, intended to help him avoid trouble. Some of your advice to him was actually good. "Make friends, make friends, make more friends, get to know people in the business, etc.," (paraphrasing) would be fine advice in a realistic context. It's the way every ex-pat ought to approach their lives in Belize regardless of their particular interests. We are, after all, guests in a foreign country. A country that is far more welcoming than the US, for sure. Suggesting that an ex-pat could enter a highly competitive field without first obtaining a work permit in that field is blatantly wrong and it is setting the OP up for real problems.

Excellent Brit and GZ Often times the truth hurts