41 women form 16 villages are benefiting from skills training at the YWCA. It's an eight week project teaching them skills that will earn them money. But those skills aren't high tech, we found out why old school home-making skills have come back again.
Jules Vasquez,
A critic would say we are in the 21st century, it is computers these people should be learning instead of learning to sew and make cake. What kind of thing is that?
Sonia Linares, Executive Director - YWCA
"Well it is true but what has happened is that it is something that these women want to do. We have to look at things that will make them able to help themselves. We are working now with 41 women from 15 villages in the Belize Rural and we met with them and found out what are their interests and they expressed the desire to learn how to sew because they say if they learn to sew, they will be able to sew clothes for their families, sew clothes for other people and generate some income from it and the same thing with the food preparation. They live in the village, there are so many fruits, there are so many things that they can use and that is one of the reasons why they say if they learn to how to cook, they will be able to make things, sell, and generate income. Many of them are single mothers and that will really be of benefit to them, the money that they receive from the job that they will be doing in the future."
Olivia Rhaburn, Scotland Halfmoon Village
"From what I have learnt here, it is a very good income generating thing
and I find this program very very helpful because right now I am the leader of my community and to empower some women there, I find this program very very interesting because then you can teach them how to use things that they would normally maybe they have too many mammies, because mammy would ripe in bulk and when they are ripe, you can only eat one or two. What do you do with the rest? You will just leave them or throw them away but you can make mammy jam. You can grow pineapple. The things that you didn't want to grow, you will want to grow now because you know how to preserve them, how to help your family, in income generating."
Brenda Herrera, Maskall Village
"In my community these things will be very very useful because at this time I think that women need to learn to be more independent, that they need to stand up for themselves. A lot of women are single mothers and they don't know what to do, sometimes they just sit at home looking at the television or just relaxing when in fact they can do something of their own and earn some money."
Adlene Smith, Learning Sewing
"As we all know, we have students that are able to change uniform maybe every two years, not every year, so September I know that when school is open, they have students that have gotten new uniforms to sew so we can be able to do it."
The project is funded by the European Union which also provided toolkits to take their lessons back home with them.
