The winning theme of the National Celebrations

One of the events by which you can tell that the national celebrations are upon us, is the selection of the theme that guides the festivities. This year to mark the two hundred and sixteenth anniversary of the Battle of St. George’s Caye and the thirty-third anniversary of Belize’s Independence, a young mother came up with the message that the National Celebrations Commission found the most appropriate. It is “Industrious Hands, Intelligent Minds, Together for Belize.”  Denise Bowman is an employee of ITVET and a resident of Mile eight on the George Price Highway; she crafted the theme to encourage love for country and for its development. Bowman is also a part time student at the University of Belize and was not available for comment so Shari Williams from NICH filled us in.

Shari Williams, Communications Officer, NICH

Shari Williams

“Each year the National Celebrations Commission sends out a call for themes for the annual celebrations and we try to do that early in the year so as to give enough people  an opportunity to sit down and come up with their theme and submit it. We ask people to send it via email or they could have written it and dropped it off or they could have sent it to their local town council to send it to us. This year we accepted more than eighty themes from throughout the country. We had to form a subcommittee that looked at each one individually after which we shortlisted, we picked the top twelve that we took the entire commission. And after taking all those submissions into consideration we decided to go with a team which we think is unique and different. Each year we hear about how strong, how free, how diverse we are, well this year the commission decided to go along with a theme that speaks about what kind of talent you have as a Belizean and how to use that talent to work together and so our theme this year is Industrious Hands, Intelligent Minds, Together for Belize.  The theme was submitted by Miss Denise Bowman and she is an employee over at ITVET Belize City, she the mother of a high school student and she is simply elated that her theme was chosen.   Miss Denise Bowman will be receiving a thousand dollars; she will be receiving this award at our annual opening ceremony which will be held on the thirty-first of August at St. George’s Caye. Again congratulations to her and thanks to everyone who submitted a theme this year and there is always next year.”