For the past 24 years Godfrey's Store on 6th street has been serving the Belizean public but when proprietor Alvin Godfrey was shot by a robber last year and eventually died everything changed. Now exactly a year after Godfrey died his store is closing it's doors for the last time tonight. Mrs. Godfrey who's been keeping it open since his death, today told us she wants no attention just to close down peacefully.
Surely, it marks the end of a legacy of service to a grateful community and as goes Godfrey so too, it seems, goes a way of life, which is shopping at the familiar neighborhood grocer, without burglar bars or hard words. In the 21st. century shopping can often seem like a sort of gladiatorial event, buying through bars, and even through shutters. Last year in November, Alfonso Noble went for a late night out in the city, to find out what it's like shopping late at night.
Alfonso Noble Reporting,
It's 9 o'clock in Belize City and unfortunately crime in the old capital has forced Chinese businessmen to close down early but as we all know commerce here almost never stops.
[Alfonso peering though store shutter and asking soda]
Alfonso Noble,
"Chiney let me get a red busta."
[Passerby hollering police]
Seconds later the red buster is squeezed through a small crack on the iron curtain and it is issued out. But while my choice and necessity at 9 is a red buster, there are other needs to be served and the neighborhood Chinese grocer accommodates even for ‘ride-throughs.'
[Customers requesting a ‘fonto,' cheese, buster,]
He has got his cheese at $4.50 but the Chinese's cheese comes at a greater expense; that of customer: we are reduced to kneeling, stooping, and stretching into unbefitting service windows as if purchasing commodities was a crime. But while we know what it is like to be on the outside, it is the same on the inside; the grocer is locked inside carefully scrutinizing every buyer, gauging eyeballs through cracks and barely exposing fingers when service is done - no doubt about it, this is Belize City October 2003.
Since that story aired, the city council and police have cracked down heavily on grocers who sell after 9:00 p.m. but Alfonso assures us in his hood, the practice endures.