18 youths from Belize inner city’s concrete jungle are tonight
spending the first of their 5 nights in a real jungle. The youths are in the
Caracol area in Cayo – participating in the Conscious Youth Development
Program’s “Youth Free Up Trek.” Most of the youths are from
rival factions but for this week it will be them as one group - against the
elements for 5 days and 4 nights. The trek will include a 24 mile walk from
Caracol to the Rio Frio Cave. CYDP’s military liaison officer Lt. Shawn
Young is leading the trek- and he told us what the youths will be facing.
Lt. Shawn Young, CYDP
“It is basically to get the youths 18 in all, to get them out of the
city life for four days to a week and give them a challenge to walk from Caracol,
which is near the Guatemalan border, to what we know as the Rio Frio Cave. We
will do a basic tour of Caracol today and basically camp there; teach the youths
about camping, how to set up a camp, how to cook outdoors, basic camping drills. 
And we will start to walk tomorrow from Caracol and rest one day at the Las
Cuevas junction and then get up the following day and walk to Rio Frio Cave.
It should be a total of 24 miles.
It will be interesting to see how they react in surviving outdoors and
also the challenge of not having the daily things that they are used to in Belize
City, the daily life they are used to and the easy stuff. They will get it the
hard way out there.
By the end of this trek, we will be able to in still a lot of discipline
in them, as you see they are very helpful; they loaded all their stuff and we
did not have to tell them twice. And what we’ve done over the last week
is give them briefings and at the end of this week coming up, we will make sure
that they have teamwork, leadership, and disciplinary skills under belts.”
Keith Swift,
As you mentioned team work, are any of these youths from rival factions?
Lt. Shawn Young,
“Most of them are from rival factions. We have about four of them
from different areas, different parts of Belize City, I don’t want to
call the names of the factions, but we have a cross section of about 4 different
factions out of Belize City that are taking part.”
Supt. Edward Broaster, Director - CYDP
“This group is the group that is being targeted by gang members to
influence them in going to commit robbery, shootings, and so forth. So we feel
that having young people from different groups going on this trek, in an environment
where we can have some positive influence on them will help us significantly
to make the community much more safer. Going out on this trek now, they will
have to depend on each other to literally survive through this trek so we are
comfortable we won’t have any incidents on this trek.”
The youths return to the concrete jungle on Friday.
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