7 News Belize

Belize City Bad Boys Like"Bush Fire"
posted (June 29, 2016)

A book on Belize's Urban Violence called "Like Bush Fire was launched today at the Image Factory on North Front Street in Belize City. It is based on Dr. Herbert Gayle's 400 page report on male social participation and urban violence in Belize. The report was condensed in a 200 page reader friendly book of sociology and anthropology that attempts to definitively deconstruct the social fabric of urban violence in an attempt to understand some of it's root causes. The report was launched in 2010, but now the authors hope that the published work will make it into schools, and all government institutions. The book was written by Dr. Herbert Gayle from Jamaica and co-authored by Virginia Hampton and Nelma Mortis. They told us more about the creation of the book from it's concept to completion.

Herbert Gayle - Main Author
"We started out in 2008 at the Boys and Education forum that was held there by UNICEF where I met Nelma Mortis who was agitated in the meeting about the state of boys in Belize and I said to her you know start a think tank and come up with ideas as to what can be done. And that's where the work started, I came here, I started training people, a think tank of people that recognize we needed to do research."

"The problem we had is that every time we found something there were gaps which is why the study is so massive, it is actually over 2,000 interviews. And each time we find the gap, the stress for persons like Nelma Mortis and Jamona Vasquez is that they then had to go hustle, let use a Caribbean word, go hustle money again to get that done. So this is a study that is very unique because actually done on absolutely no payment, nobody, none of the researchers got a dollar to do this study; nobody got paid including the principal investigator myself. This is actually done from hard-core love for humanity."

Virgina Hampton - Assitant Prof, UB/Co-Author
"So what I did was actually shape the study that was done down into a book and turn it into something that your average person could read. And so in reading it over and over again one thing I understand is that the systems that we all have work together to support children are in a state of crisis and they have been or while. And of course one of those is poverty and hunger, another one is families that are not quite up to the challenge of raising boys especially and then also a very kind of fragile political authority that ends up imprisoning young men more than educating them."

Emanuel Pech
"How do you hope this book will contribute to that discussion in hoping to find a solution to this urban violence that has been plaguing the streets of Belize City for so long?"

Virgina Hampton - Assitant Prof, UB/Co-Author
"What I'm hoping is that people will read it, that they will tell their friends about it, that we will talk some of the causes without just simply blaming the youth, saying that they are bad people without really understanding how they got that way."

Nelma Mortis - Education Officer/Co-Author
"If you notice some of the things on the wall showing that we need to feed our people, we need to provide for them. When somebody is hungry and doesn't have the basic primal need, that's when trouble will happen. And so that is one of the key thing that is affecting the producers said; we have 44% of our children living in poverty and 50% of youth. That is a massive statistic that we have to undertake and that is 2015 data."

The book was published by Cubola publishers. The book is now available at the image factory, and other book outlets for $35 dollars.

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