U.S Embassy presents funds to fight AIDS
As donations go, the total amount of cash is not huge, but for the half dozen organisations and hundreds of Belizeans that will share the largesse, it can be crucial. News Five’s Janelle Chanona reports.
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
Today the six recipients of the United States Ambassador’s Fund HIV Prevention Program Grants were officially announced during brief ceremonies at the Y.W.C.A. conference room. According to Ambassador Robert Dieter, this year’s projects are designed to eliminate the disease’s two most painful side effects.
Robert Dieter, U.S. Ambassador to Belize
“Stigma and discrimination is based largely on fear. It is important that we get the message out that AIDS and HIV is not spread through casual contact, such as sitting next to someone on a bus or sharing utensils or speaking with someone. The AIDS virus does not exist easily outside of the human body and so it can’t be transmitted in these forms. People diagnosed with HIV who are diagnosed early can live a healthy and productive life.”
This year’s grants total fifty thousand Belize dollars. After they endorsed their cheques, representatives of the respective organizations shared how they will be using the funds.
Kirsty McKay, Together We Can, Belize Red Cross
“With the funds we have received, we will be continuing to educate our young people in Belize about the importance of preventing further infection of HIV, the importance of reducing stigma and discrimination and the importance of going for testing, to know your status. We are producing informational brochures that will be distributed through all social mobilization activities and will also be distributed through our trainings as well.”
Evan Cowo, Executive Director, CARE Belize
“I would like to thank the Ambassador’s HIV Prevention Program for giving us this opportunity to create materials in Braille as well as in sign language that we will be able to use to create this awareness and these prevention programs on HIV for the population that have disabilities. We have been carefully reviewing the initiatives, the national initiatives on HIV/AIDS and we don’t see that this population is included.”
Nurse Judith Cuellar-Krieg, Equity House, Hopkins Village
“And in Belize terms, it’s sending the gossip tree in a positive manner so all that means is that you know gossip can ruin a community in a very negative way and so we are going to send the gossip tree in a very positive way by targeting key people that can pass the gossip around with the true disseminated information about HIV and AIDS.”
Michelle Irving, Productive Organization for Women in Action
“Our focus have been in Dangriga to use creative methods to attract the population or to let the population think about what is happening. Stigma and discrimination, care and support is some of the key issues and we will use this grant to continue to do that, to bring a creative approach that would especially attract the young people.”
Sonia Linares, Executive Director, Y.W.C.A.
“We have been working with rural women and we felt it is also important to work with the young women and the other young people in high schools and so we will be going out to the three villages in the Belize District where we will be conducting workshops in the whole area of HIV/AIDS prevention. We will also train our youth here in Belize City, we have a program called Helping Early Leavers Program where we work with out of school at risk young women and we will be having them involved in the training as peer educators.”
Greta Jenkins, Youth Enhancement Services
“What we’ll be doing with this money that we received, we are going to mass reproduce our movie that we did, “Precious”, and we are going to put a teaching guide with it and take it into the schools and…so the schools can use it as a teaching manual.”
And according to Embassy Public Relations Officer Thomas Wise, it’s easy for local groups to take advantage of the Ambassador’s Fund.
Thomas Wise, Public Relations Officer, U.S. Embassy
“The nice thing about the program is there’s no real requirement for it; you don’t have to be an expert in HIV/AIDS, you just have to have an idea and have the capacity to be able to follow through with it.”
Since the HIV Prevention Program was established in 2002, thirty-five projects have been awarded two hundred and seventeen thousand dollars to increase awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Reporting for News Five, I am Janelle Chanona.
In addition to the grant money disbursed today, the U.S. Embassy in Belize will also be producing 2008 calendars with HIV-related information and services using submissions from the 2007 poster competition.”
