U.S. Embassy donates to variety of local causes
This morning the United States Embassy in Belize delivered cheques to thirteen deserving organisations currently working in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention, cultural preservation and environmental protection. During ceremonies at the his Belize City residence this morning, newly appointed Ambassador Robert Dieter presented funds to Friends of Nature for whale shark research and institutional strengthening; the Toledo Association for Sustainable Tourism and Empowerment for sewage disposal on Hunting Caye; the Toledo Institute for Development and Environment towards management of the Payne’s Creek National Park; and the Alliance Against AIDS, the National AIDS Commission, the Belize Community Service Alliance, PASMO, HECOPAB, the YMCA, the YWCA, Cornerstone Foundation and Hand in Hand Ministries for work in the fight against HIV and AIDS. But today’s largest donation was made to the Institute of Archaeology for work at the Maya site of Cerros in the Corozal District. This morning, Director Jaime Awe told us that the institute plans on using the more than one hundred and eighty thousand Belize dollars to restore four ancient masks.
Dr. Jaime Awe, Director, Institute of Archaeology
“The masks at Cerros are unique. I mean they are also very early; they are Pre-classic, unlike the ones from Caracol. They have been buried since 1979 and this money will allow us to go in, expose them once again and then to produce a replica out of fibreglass that we will then mount over these masks, and there are four masks, two on either side of the stairway, so it will make this structure look wonderful again. It will make it look like it used to around the birth of Christ. When people go to visit Cerros now they will have something to see rather than just this small thing that looks like a hill.”
“We have a couple people that we have trained, we brought people in from Guatemala to train them and then he eventually went to Taiwan to receive extra training. And this is just another local Belizean boy from San Jose Succotz, two of them in fact that will be doing that kind of work and also some of them from San Antonio in Cayo and also Chunox and Copperbank in Corozal. So it’s great because we are training young Belizeans to start to preserve our cultural heritage and you can’t go wrong when you do that.”
According to Awe, similar restoration work has already taken place at Xunantunich and Caracol. The archaeological project was chosen from hundreds of proposals made to the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation. Administered through the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, this year the fund has awarded grants totalling two point five million U.S. dollars in seventy-six countries. Today’s contribution to the Belizean organisations amounted to approximately four hundred and twenty thousand Belize dollars.
