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Melissa Tucker, School Health Coordinator
"It's a fun way for students to learn. We really want to encourage a healthy lifestyle and ways to look at our nutrition; what we eat and our physical activity. We want healthy students because like our theme says they are our future of Belize."

"The competition has 3 phases, what you are seeing here is the second phase the national competition but before this we had our district competitions, all high schools in the country were invited to participate and base on the competitions we did in the districts we had first place winners - they come to the nationals."

"We have 7 schools here today because by share number of schools who participated we had to do two competitions, so we have two schools from the Belize District representing. What we do in October and November every year is we send out packages to schools; we send them study materials, we don't send them questions; we send them reference materials that they need to review with the topics that they need to go over."

"The committee with support from partners, teachers and principals we develop questions. We sit and go through questions and we decide which questions we are keeping, which are good enough and we develop a question bank. When the schools come here it's not that questions that they knew about. They pick numbers from a container and the number associated with the questions - that's what they are given."

First Place winner
"It's tremendous, it's amazing, it's just like a feeling of joy. I can't be any happier at the moment, everything paid off - all the hard work and sleepless nights - it was worth it."

Participant
"I can't feel my feet; it's numb because of all the excitement."

Participant
"I feel like I am dreaming, I can't even believe it but I know that everything paid off and I am just glad. I am happy."

Participant
"The topic is nutrition; I think went in, we accepted the challenge thinking that basic nutrition; vitamins, minerals but it's not. You need to know all types of cooking terms and all about the kitchen, hygiene and it strayed away from the topic but everything is link together to nutrition, education and a healthy lifestyle."

Monica Bodden
"How did you get prepared for the competition?"

Participant
"They provided us with a list of the topics we should know and we didn't miss a single topic, we went through all the topics because we didn't know what to expect, so we came well prepare for it and split the work equally - the basics, everyone learns it but then for special things we share in parts."

Monica Bodden
"What was the strategy for you guys?"

Participant
"We studied from since we won the regionals we knew that we were coming for the nationals and we didn't underestimate anybody, we studied hard and we studied every night and we had a really good coach; Ms. Shakira, our family supported us. This hard work - you know you won; it was fair because you really did the work to win it so it feels this good."

Monica Bodden
"What was preparation like for you - a lot of hard work?"

Participant
"Yes a lot of sleepless nights. We studied together as a group and individually. I am all excited right now."

Melissa Tucker, School Health Coordinator
"The prizes as you notice we didn't give cash prizes. We give things that we thought students could really use and they are all electronic devices - our young people are well into electronics. First place got the mini laptop, the second place got the Kindle Fire and third place got an AOC touch screen tablet."

"All the other teams got some prize; some got gift certificates, everybody got certificate of participation. We gave a gift basket from San Cas, so everybody walked away with something in their hand and like I said this year we had the individual championship award too."

The theme for this year's competition is… "The Health of our Youth is the Strength of our Nation."