Senior Minister recall early days of Belmopan

On yesterday’s newscast, Belmopan Mayor Anthony Chanona talked about the future of the capital city. Today, courtesy of the Government Press Office, we’ll hear from the man who is well qualified to recount its past. At tree ceremonies Senior Minister George Price recalled the days in 1970, when he was Premier…and Belmopan became home.

George Price, Senior Minister

“It was on a Saturday, the Sunday we worshipped at the new church at the Ecumenical Centre, then Friday we went to work. Everything was in a raw state. The ground was a construction site, turned up, just raw earth and it was then we saw the need to plant trees, to plant the right kind of grass. And we’ve been doing that, and we have made, with your help, Belmopan a garden city and we would like to keep it a garden city.

What can we do as citizens of Belmopan? Keep Belmopan clean. Clean up litter, clean up garbage. You have to bag or prepare your garbage and mayor, the City Council has to remove it. And I hope you have a place where you can deposit it, that in time can become good ground, you call it landfill, I think. So that is one thing that we can do.”

Following the ceremony Mayor Chanona read a proclamation reserving selected green areas of the city in perpetuity. Later in the day one hundred hybrid Maypan coconut trees were planted in various parts of the city. The trees are resistant to the disease called lethal yellowing, which is killing most coconut trees over virtually the entire country.