Email

Print

The fire department says that if they had not caught it early, things could have turned out much differently. The store was open as usual after the wire was repaired.

Wesley Upper And Belize Primary are Champs

The National Primary School Basketball Championship tournament was held today in Belize City. Winning district Teams converged on Rogers Stadium for the boys, and YWCA for the females.

In the male category, Wesley Upper School won first place with Holy Family RC School from Stann Creek coming in second and St. Nazarene Primary School in Cayo finishing third.

In the female category, Belize Rural Primary School was first. They defeated Louisiana Government School from Orange Walk which placed second. Again, St. Nazarene Primary School placed third.

Shaquille Crawford from Wesley Upper, and Kristy Terry from Belize Rural were chosen as the tournament's most-valuable players.

Belize's Special Olympians Get Special Help

Today at the Lion's Club and the Belize Elementary School Auditorium, Special Olympics Belize carried out its first medical screening for Belize's special athletes.

They were assisted by Special Olympics International, the world governing body for Special Olympics.

The screening was done by persons from Special Olympics Belize who were trained by personnel from the international delegation in areas of vision, physical wellness, and dentistry. In the screening, the athletes had an opportunity to check their health in these 3 areas and then make arrangements to get help.

This afternoon, we stopped in at the Belize Elementary Auditorium and got a chance to speak to the regional and local directors of the Special Olympics bodies.

Here's what they said about yesterday's training and today's proceedings:

Dr. Peter Seidenberg - North American Regional Director, MedFest Special Olympics International
"Special Olympics has come down to perform 3 screening examinations of our Special Olympics athletes. We have also come to train local physicians to be clinical directors for 3 areas: opening eyes, which is for vision screening, special smiles, which is for dentistry, and then for medfest, which is the medical clearance for the sports physical. Today, the athletes came through and they were screened by each of those 3 disciplines, and so - for example - if they were having vision difficulties, opening eyes identified it, and with grants from the Lions Club, a lot of the athletes would actually be able to get glasses for free. And so, that's an excellent service. We've come to train local optometrists and ophthalmologists to do these mass screenings, and help Special Olympics athletes in that way, and the same has been happening for special smiles with the local dentists. They have been trained by our regional trainers to perform these screening exams for Special Olympics."

Elodia Bautista - National Director, Special Olympics Belize
"We started yesterday with the training of persons, whereby international doctors came to Belize and came to train our local doctors in dental, general health and vision disciplines. So, today, they are actually implementing they training from yesterday by doing screenings for Special Olympics athletes. I can roughly say that we have about 100 children that came today countrywide. And out of them, we would say that they did 300 screenings because each one of them went through each discipline. So, in total, we made 300 screenings, but 100 children were here."

This was a joint effort between UNICEF, the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education and Lions Club of Belize.