B.T.B. Awards Winners in Poster Competition
A total of twelve countries participated this year in the Florida Carnival Cruise Association’s annual poster competition. This year, an EP Yorke High School student and a Saint Joseph Primary School student took second and third place overall in the senior and junior categories of the regional competition. Today at the B.T.B. Office on Regent Street, the winners were handed some handsome cheques for their excellent art pieces, just in time for the start of the new school year. Duane Moody was there and has this story.
Duane Moody, Reporting
Annually, the Florida Carnival Cruise Association holds a regional environmental poster awareness competition and this year, several Belizean students competed in both the junior and the senior categories. The theme is primarily about the preservation of the environment, which goes hand in hand with the tourism experience in Belize. This year, two Belize City youths were successful and placed in the competition.
Manuel Heredia Jr.
Manuel Heredia Jr., Minister of Tourism
“We are very fortunate this year that Belize was first in the junior and second in the senior division. And I think you heard in the essay competition; Miss Quinto was the most outstanding throughout the Caribbean in that one. So it means to say that Belize is really getting there when we can compete among our Caribbean brothers and make sure that we excel that far. It means to say that we are really doing our job. But again the Belize Tourism Board along with the schools also try to do our part and now that we are gathering that awareness, I believe that you will see more students putting a lot more emphasis on putting their talents to work.”
The winning selections were from among several entries that were submitted to the Belize Tourism Board. This year, the theme of the poster competition was “My Caribbean, Your Caribbean to Protect and Preserve.”
Valdemar Andrade
Valdemar Andrade, Director of Destination Planning & Cruise, B.T.B.
“Each poster must depict at least three ways in which his or her destination, in this case Belize, can make a difference in preserving the environment and must be in English. To be eligible, each poster must be accompanied by a summary description. The posters were submitted, the entries to represent Belize were selected by a judging panel within the B.T.B. and I can tell you that there are people from our marketing department, who are very critical of stuff. They criticize our stuff vehemently, let me out it that way, but at the end, we have a good product. So for your poster to be sent up, you did really well.”
Taking third in the junior division was eleven year old Homayra Sarah, a standard five student of St. Joseph Primary School in Belize City. Sarah’s artwork was titled, “Save Me – I Want to Breathe,” won her a cheque of one thousand U.S. dollars and her school also received the same amount.
Homayra Sarah
Homayra Sarah, 3rd Place Winner, Junior Division, FCCA Poster Competition
“My poster is comparing the good and the bad polluted world. As you can see, the polluted world is showing how the sun, the heat; the building are jammed together so it gets extreme heat and then factories making the chemicals and it is going into the river and all the fishes are dying. And you can see that the people throwing plastic bags and bottles in the sea and they are digging the oil from the sea and all the fishes are also dying here. In the good world you can see it, but in the polluted world you can’t see any plants—all the plants are dying because there is a drought and the head.”
A cheque of one thousand five hundred U.S. dollars was also handed over to EP Yorke High School student, sixteen year old Nisa Sanchez. She took second place in the senior division with her piece entitled, “Be Part of the Solution to the Problem.”
Nisa Sanchez
Nisa Sanchez, 2nd Place Winner, Senior Division, FCCA Poster Competition
“I can represent my country as a Belizean, I can go into international stuff…so I am really into regional interaction, we could say that. What I was thinking about when I thought about the poster concept…when you really think about the environment…how it was originally to how it was today, there is a lot of human contribution to what we have today. Basically we are building up factories, new technology, chemicals and all types of things. That really affects the environment on a whole as we know it. So what I was thinking is that we are basically the problem in most cases. So at the same time, conversely, we can be the solution because we know what we caused and we know how we can solve it. So that was the basic concept about the whole poster.”
Duane Moody for News Five.
