Sure it may pale in comparison to the towering 38-foot, $40,000 monument that the Rotary Club dedicated on Wednesday but yesterday the Rotaract Club opened a new park which makes up for its lack of stature with the height of its importance. After months of work and $3,000 in cash, the Rotaract Club opened a playground at the Pediatric Wing of the KHMH. Club President Luanne Flowers says the playground is to make difficult hospital stays for kids easier.
Luanne Flowers, Rotaract President
"We hope that it will be beneficial to them in the sense that the kids here some of them come and they are not necessarily bed ridden so instead of walking around the hospital they could come to the park and they could their mind off the fact that they are in a hospital sick."
Dr. Victor Rosado, Head of Pediatrics -KHMH
"Physical rehabilitation does help a child. We have to think of hospital not as confined in a room just with needles and drips. We have tried to make our pediatric wards welcoming whereby children have television, whereby they are with their parents, and they are with their mother most of the time. And now we have gone a step further and they can come and actually have fun. Imagine that, having fun in a hospital -previously that's unheard of."
Luanne Flowers,
"It was strictly hands on, apart from the donations that we had with the equipment and the different materials, the Rotaractors and the Rotary Club of Belize, all of us came here. For about the past two to three months we have been here every weekend filling from the sand to painting; everything we have done hands on."
The Rotaract Club is bringing a magician to Belize in March.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited for the internet by Keith Swift
