US donates over $200,000 to Belize
In other news, the US States Chargé D’Affaires J.A. Diffily, handed over a donation to Belize today at the House of Culture. These funds will be used for cultural preservation and under the Ambassador’s Fund program, the House of Culture and the Institute of Archaeology, received grants totaling over two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. News Five was present when the grant agreements were penned and we found out what the funds will be used for.
J.A. Diffily, US Chargé D’Affaires
“The Ambassador’s Program for Cultural Preservation is a program that is administered through the State Department in Washington. What it does is it gives grants to different government entities to do special specific conservation projects of cultural heritage sites.”
Lita Krohn, Director, Museum of Belize/Houses of Culture, NICH
“We’re standing at Government House/House of Culture, built way back in 1814 and I was mentioning to people it only cost three thousand pounds sterling. The grant that we’ve just received to keep up the refurbishment is a hundred and six thousand Belize dollars. We get it in three installments and it will be used to strengthen this place, put up shutters or fix the shutters that are here. Previously in 2003, we had a complete renovation but these buildings by the sea, with the salt air, with the rain, with all these things, constantly need fixing.”
Dr. Jaime Awe, Director, Institute of Archaeology
“It amounts to just under a hundred and twenty-two thousand Belize dollars and we requested this assistance from the US government to try to protect and preserve the mask at the mask temple at the site of Lamanai in the Orange Walk District. We’re going there, preserve the mask, then we’ll cover it and we will put over it a fiber glass replica so that if you go to visit the site when we’re finished, you will see the mask and the building would look like it used to—or to some degree like it used to many hundreds of years ago, but we will also preserve the structure.”
J.A. Diffily
“These are the fourth and fifth grants that Belize has gotten over the last four years. So our Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation has actually now granted over half a million Belizean dollars to cultural preservation projects in Belize.”
The two projects in Belize were selected out of applications from developing countries worldwide.
