“Grave Dirt” begins when a lay brother (Brother Frankie) discovers a Spanish doubloon in the garden behind the Cathedral in Belize City. He unwittingly helps an Obeah Man (Ras Jonny) put a fix on the garden and finds more coins. Ras Jonny proceeds to poison a priest, sell the coins, and force Frankie to go to the Maya Mountains to work in an unsavory camp where medicinal plants are harvested for the pharmaceutical industry. Frankie’s cousin (Brian Banister and wife Mondie Marlow) find out he’s missing and travel to Belize to find him.
Brian and Mondie track Brother Frankie to Camp Harpy Eagle in southern Belize and help him escape to a local village church. They accidently meet a long-time friend (Professor Shelly Kelly) and her Creole student (Chantal Morgan) working at Camp Balam—an ecologically-conscious alternative to Camp Harpy Eagle. As the story unfolds Ras Jonny is executed for something he didn’t do; an Obeah Man (Jarret) kills a rival a (Fitzroy) with scrapings from a Poison Dart Frog; and the supervisor at Camp Harpy Eagle is dispatched with cyanide capsules by an unknown assailant.
After Shelly and her friends attend an occult ceremony in the village of Cave Creek they realize the interconnectedness of the seemingly unrelated events. Shelly develops a plan to end Obeahism; stop the destruction of the forests by outsiders; and help preserve native traditions throughout the region. As they prepare to execute the plan Shelly begins to wrestle with her conscience over the ethics of what they’re doing. She wonders how she can justify interfering with the lives of the villagers in a way that is totally unprecedented. Should she go forward? She knows if her plan fails it will almost certainly harm the very people she’s trying to help.
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