Canada helps reading, literacy
He may be on his farewell tour, but Canadian High Commissioner to Belize John Robinson’s last official visit to the country will be remembered in Belize City and Benque Viejo long after his retirement. Today Robinson handed over two cheques for community projects involving reading and literacy programmes. The first cheque, for sixteen thousand, five hundred U.S. dollars goes to the Benque Viejo Library Committee to use for the upgrading of a reading programme. The larger donation of twenty-two thousand, one hundred and fifty U.S. dollars, went to the Anglican Diocese where teachers from all over the country will develop their skills to teach children to read.
Sylvestre Romero Palma, Anglican Bishop
“Well we will have a workshop with our teachers this coming August. We will be using it to train our teachers to be able to teach our children some reading skills. This is one of the things that we have found out that we do not have qualified teachers to really tech children how to read. And the end of it is that we get children graduating from primary schools and going into high school who really do not know how to read, comprehension and really phonics. We have found out also that the teachers, they are not qualified, they do not know how to really teach children how to read. They do not have the skills. And so we want to implement those skills to our teachers.”
John Robinson, Canadian High Commissioner to Belize
“It means that we are able to do something for this country. We don’t have a very large development programme in Belize, and so through the Small Canada Fund we are able to provide assistance to areas which I think are crucial for Belize’s development; that is education of young people. So for us it’s an opportunity to make a contribution to the development of Belize.”
Bishop Romero Palma says that the literacy workshops are mandatory for close to two hundred teachers in the Anglican system, but accommodations will also be made for educators from the other denominations who choose to attend. The donations were made by the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, through the Canada Fund.
