The Association Of Professional Engineers of Belize recently organized a toy drive to donate children's toys to the students of Queens Street Baptist primary school. Today the president of the association Ramy Chia, handed over 54 gift wrapped toys to the infant 1, 2 and standard 1 classes. Chia shared a bit more about the initiative at the handing over today.
Ramy Chia, President, Association of Professional Engineers of Belize
"We are here today to give the kids, give back to the community first of all. What we want to do with this is to inspire and encourage the kids it's all about the kids not everybody gets the opportunity to have a bright Christmas so APEB decided that we want to put a little grain of sand back by giving back to some kids and we chose this school since it's a small little school that sometimes gets ignored. So what we want is to get the kids familiar with what engineers are. We are here today and we spoke with some of them a little bit and asked how many of them want to be engineers. I think we have about 5 engineers in the group, and a police officer, he will be taking care of the engineers so it's about having the kids know that they are cared for. Letting them know that somebody is out there looking after them, looking out for them and that they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up."
Patricia Wade, Principal, Queen street Baptist primary school
"They are bouncing off the wall, the kids, any kid and every kid loves a present and they love it."
"We just got a phone call and the lady said that she wanted to donate to our school and I said sure we would love that and the kids definitely would appreciate it because the background of this school we have a lot of children who are from low income homes so they are not 100% sure that they will receive a gift so this is just a blessing for them."
Chromebooks For The Visually Impaired
With a view to improve educational resources for students with diverse disabilities, the Office of the Special Envoy for the Development of Families and Children today handed over 10 Chromebooks to 10 visually impaired secondary school students. The devices have been modified to suit their needs with a ChromeVox speech manual. Here's some of the keynote remarks from today's handing over.
No Bonus For Cops
For the past few days, unconfirmed reports have been circulating about an upcoming Christmas bonus for cops.
One online news site posted that each officer would receive an added $64 to their salary this month, which sparked an outrage within the force, where some believed that the bonus is far too little given all that they endure on on a daily basis. We asked the commissioner of police about it today - and he said there will be no bonus at all:
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"I saw that information on hot off the press. I am not aware of that I have not had any discussions with my minister, the prime minister the Fins sec or the minister of state in the ministry of finance. In respect to any proposed bonus for police. It is not something that is done in the history of police where police officers are given a bonus at the end of the year. So I am thinking that maybe perhaps hot off the press is going to be the one to issue this bonus so I will be proceeding there to get my bonus from them."
"It is not something we normally do Jules. The amount of police officers we have it is going to be difficult. What we try to do is to see how we can sometime in the new year to facilitate for officers to have a get together. We normally call it a Christmas in June party because the truth be told we can't have Christmas party around this time. While everybody is celebrating we have to be working."
