September Celebrations Commission Meets to Plan Upcoming Activities

September Celebrations are set to commence in the next ten weeks, but extensive preparations are already underway to ensure that activities during the national month go off without a hitch.  This afternoon at the Marion Jones Sporting Complex, various stakeholders, including representatives of the Ministry of Tourism, Foreign Affairs and the Belize Police Department were on hand for the planning session.  It is the first of several meetings to be held leading up to the start of the festive season.  News Five spoke with Chairman of the September Celebrations Commission, Minister Patrick Faber.

Patrick Faber

Patrick Faber, Chairman, September Celebrations Commission

“This is the September Celebrations Commission and, as you know, the National Institute of Culture and History is the main body that is responsible for these September Celebrations but it is couched under the National September Celebrations Commission.  So this is the first meeting.  People might be thinking, September already?  Yes, it takes a lot of planning and so we’ve brought together the major players for the celebrations from across the country.  So we have all the municipalities, we have the police, we have the protocol people from Foreign Affairs, we have the tourism people.  Everybody comes together in an effort to try to work on ensuring that the celebrations this year will be smooth sailing and will be happy ones for the Belizean citizenry and for those who are visiting as well.”

Reporter

“This is the first of how many meetings?”

Patrick Faber

“Well, the meetings, how many meetings depend on how much work they take on, I suppose.  But there is, of course, a normal schedule of work and there are some events that we’ve now become very accustomed to planning the Tenth celebrations and the parade and the Twenty-first celebrations, the carnival, all of these things and they themselves might not be responsible for all of that planning, they are to oversee it.  There are smaller bodies or committees that take on the work, for instance, of the carnival.  So it’s just a matter of pulling it all together and ensuring that all the players who are important to this process understand that they come under this one umbrella and they execute accordingly.”