Dorothy Menzies Childcare Center gets upgraded

The Dorothy Menzies Child Care Center in Belize’s mission is to ‘provide a temporary safe and caring environment where children can seek refuge during a difficult period in their lives.’ In 1975, the Child Care Center was opened for twelve children and that the current number of children now hosted by the facility is up to sixty youths. Today the child care center in Kings Park has been upgraded and the facilitators officially opened the new building that will be used for administrative purposes and for counseling.

Virginia Echols, Member, Board of Governors, Dorothy Menzies Childcare Center

“The blessing today is the fact that we do finally have a concert specific for the child care center…not only for the children, but for the staff also. And so with this building here, our administrative building, it will house a conference room, it has spaces for private sessions for counsel so that the children are getting a holistic rehabilitation after the different things that they go through.”

Maria Coye

Maria Coye, President, Rotary Club of Belize

“As you know Rotary is a humanitarian organization and we raise funds on a daily basis and the monies that we use goes into projects. One of our projects of course is the Dorothy Menzies home for the children. This year we continued work that we had started before because over the years we have been doing little bits of renovation here and donating to the home so this time we are in the third phase of the refurbishing of the home. The first phase was moving the kitchen out of the building into the downstairs of where the activity center is. The second phase was separating the boys from the girls and we built bathrooms and we refurbished the bedrooms that they now sleep in. and now we are in third phase where we are renovating the top floor for the girls…putting in bathrooms and making the space more pleasing to them so that the girls have their own space.”

Virginia Echols

Virginia Echols

“This is a vision that has become a reality. Dorothy Menzies, the president of the organization—I’m sorry that she was not able to be here today—but it has been her vision and collectively the board, to ensure that the children get some kind of counseling. The building started out as a resident for twenty-five and right now we have sixty children in the center. And now we have a washroom, we’ve changed the downstairs into a boy’s dorm and the upstairs into a girl’s dorm. They have an area where they can sit and watch television; the entire outside is for recreation. The building to my right in the back is their learning center where they go and study and do homework. So downstairs has been turned into a kitchen.”

Coye says that the Rotary Club is already looking towards funding for washing machines for the childcare center.