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Restore Belize Mediates With State Dept.
posted (June 28, 2012)
Several facilitators from the US State Department are in Belize to help Restore Belize with mediation efforts. Now, mediation is a big part of the gang truce, and de-escalating situations that could lead to explosions of gang warfare is the major premise of the truce.

Now, the Restore Belize representatives freely admit that the truce is not anywhere near to perfect, but they say it has been effective at curbing some urban violence.

We spoke to one of the facilitators today, and we asked him how mediation can help the truce. Here's what he told us:

Alvin Wilson, Facilitator - US Department of State
"It was taking place training the trainers - training the trainer program. What they are doing is actually gain the training so that they can go back out in the community and train other people to do mediation."

Daniel Ortiz
"Can you tell us a little bit about what this training actually entails?"

Alvin Wilson, Facilitator - US Department of State
"We were sent here to work and partner with RESTORE Belize to do conflict mediation. In other words to train folks in conflict mediation so that they can go back to the community and work with allied government agencies in Belize to go out to community and mediate."

Tina Cuellar Augustus, Human Dev. Prog. Officer - RESTORE Belize
"I am presently one of the persons that have been trained for mediation process and what happens is that we have two cohorts completed so far and out of the two cohorts which is roughly about 30 people - about 10-12 people were chosen to come back to actually be trainers for future trainings. I am actually was one of the persons that was involve in the training that was selected."

Daniel Ortiz
"Can you tell us what exactly type of topics were discussed?"

Tina Cuellar Augustus
"We went through the full mediation process and what I like about what the people from the state department has come to share with us - it's a lot of interactive, it's not just sitting and getting all this content. They really put us into role plays, in scenarios to figure out this is the situation and how can you mediate it? How can you brainstorm? How can you use whatever skillset you have to probe and get to the right questions to see how both parties can walk away feeling that there has been some resolution."

This entire initiative is being funded and facilitated by the US Embassy.

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