Ariel Rosado’s Friends and Family Take a Ride for the Cause

This past Saturday, the annual event for the Ariel Rosado Education Foundation took place on the George Price Highway. Riders rode from Galen University Campus in Central Farm to Belmopan City, then travelled on to Belize City, ending at the Hour Bar Field. The Ariel Rosado Foundation was established to commemorate the life of Rosado, an outstanding Belizean youth who lost his life in a traffic crash three weeks after completing his twenty eighth birthday. Ariel was a sterling role model for Belizeans of all ages inspiring many by example through his accomplishments in cycling and in education. His family and friends decided to raise funds to assist deserving Belizean youths to accomplish their educational goals while developing healthy minds and healthy bodies. This year’s ride also coincides with the UN Global Road Safety Week, which will focus on speed, scheduled from May eighth to fourteenth, 2017. Participants Andre Carillo, executive director of Belize Emergency Response Team, and Anthony Adey of Memorial University spoke to News Five following the event.

Andre Carillo

Andre Carillo, Executive Director, B.E.R.T.

“On behalf of the Road Safety Project team and Belize Emergency Response Team, we would like to thank Dr. Rosado for allowing us to be part of this initiative. Today was another successful initiative and there were no incidents, so we are happy to hear that. We take this opportunity to highlight the need for driving best practices and road safety on the roads. [To] drivers, to the Belizean public, slow down. BERT saw a total of one hundred and thirty-two accidents in 2016; one is too many, and so we can make a difference if we starting employing driving best practices on the roads. The Road Safety Project initiative donated an ambulance to Belize Emergency Response Team, which is the one that we used today to support the Ariel Rosado Foundation Ride 2017, and we are proud to be a part of that initiative.”

Anthony Adey

Anthony Adey, International Student Recruitment Officer, Memorial University

“Memorial University has been coming to Belize for fifteen years; we have had many students every year coming to the Memorial University and we are really proud of our connections with Belize. And so, about five years ago, we were really proud to partner with the Rosado Foundation so that we can give back to the Belizean community. And for one of the things at Memorial is health and wellness and diversity, so we think being engaged with this program is really important for us, because it contributes to health; it contributes to teaching about safety, when it comes to rider safety, those types of things; so this year we were really pleased to make a donation worth about five hundred U.S. dollars for safety reflectors for all of the riders. So the riders can use these today, or throughout the week or in the evenings when the sun sets. These are flashing lights that go on their bikes and so these can be used throughout the year. It’s a really good contribution to help people be safe on the road, which is what the Rosado Foundation is all about; it’s about safety but it’s also about raising funds for students to attend high school, and elementary school. And in the end of the day we hope that these students are successful in Belize, and then they can apply for scholarships and funding to come and attend Memorial University in Canada.”