Celebrating World Red Cross Day

Lily Bowman

The organizers of the ride intended to make it an annual event. Another annual event celebrated in Belize is World Red Cross Day.  It is celebrated on May eighth on the birthday of its founder, Henry Durant. The day is observed to celebrate the selfless work that the volunteers put in for the vulnerable people they serve and to highlight different activities that the Red Cross carries out throughout the world. And this year—both locally and internationally—the focus of the Red Cross is youths.  Executive Director, Lily Bowman was guest on this morning’s Open Your Eyes and told us about the preparations being made.

Lily Bowman, Executive Director, Belize Red Cross

“This year we are focusing on youth. This is something that we welcome because I think as you know the situation in Belize; it is very important that we focus on our youth. The theme is “together for humanity,” however we are focusing on a slogan, “youth on the move.” We’ll be looking at youth activities and the Belize Red Cross especially has ventured into a fairly new area for us since last year and this is in the area of violence prevention which is very relative to what is happening here in Belize. Las year we had about six months of trainers workshop and activities to train leaders, youth leaders who will then go back into their communities, into their schools, into their organizations and train—it’s like a peer education kind of thing. This year we are hoping to have a continuation of that but concentrating more on actual activities led by counselors, teachers. We’ll be working with the youths from Wagner’s facility, youth hostel. We will be bringing partners together to try and work together as one big team and that is partners who work with youth like CYDP, Youth for the Future, YWCA, YMCA. Actually on Wednesday we are having a meeting to brainstorm, put our ideas and important issues together. So we hope that that’s going to be a success.”