And while those children were marching - youth For The Future was having a stakeholders meeting at the Biltmore. To be honest, from a new perspective, the event was kind of a non-event, dense, and, mostly devoid of actual youths! But we did tune in to the electrifying presentation made by Courtney Gillett. She is a past winner of the Belize open scholarship and more recently a commonwealth scholarship to the University College London. That's where she connected with the Nkabom 2010 project which took 35 young people from Commonwealth countries to Rwanda in September.
They focused on peace-building and leadership skills training - and were tasked to bring that message home to their own countries to start the process of injecting youths into the national dialogue. She explained that today:…
Courtney Gillett
"What I think is lacking in Belize, not so much about policy; we have policies and we have people who are saying 'we can do this and we can do that' but what's missing is people seeing themselves as a part of creating this change and the government can do it by themselves. So what they encourage is people to come together and discuss where do I see myself in this country? How can I build this country? Must we wait for all the young men in the Southside or in the other parts of this country to shoot themselves for us to actually want to do something? So they also encourage us to stop de-moaning the past and get moving, so things didn't work in the past 'ya ya yaa' we can do it now. So start moving. The government; I hear the minister say is committed to youth development so that's one key step; you must identify the root causes, not just put band aids. So what about the homes where these people come from? The family structure? I know Father Flowers always talks about this; he is a very keep advocate for this. The family structure has actually been broken down. So how can we get this back together? We must consider peace building on mass, if you don't get the people who are affected involve in this thing then chances are you won't get very far."
Dr. Leopold Perriot also presented a report on the current situation on adolescents and youth in Belize.
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