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Heather Reneau- Senior Administrator, Belize Cancer Society
"When we came Monday morning we actually had a conference rental and we came in early in the morning to get ready for that rental and that's when we discovered that our office had been vandalized. As you see our entrance here as we walk up the ramp we immediately notice that our front window burglar bars were ripped open and the bench we keep at that window was pulled all the way to the front, so we knew that somebody had to be at the building - something was wrong. So immediately we contacted the police and they responded right away to assist us. They broke the lights on the verandah I guess to ensure that the premise was dark. However we have huge lanterns on our building because we don't have any traffic lights around here and they were able to climb up and disconnect these lamps as well, so it seems that the entire building was in darkness."

"We found our office ransacked, all our teaching modules, all our papers, everything was just turned around. Our main entrance for our admin section that was vandalized as well. But ironically they didn't take any of our electronic items which we are really grateful for. We are thankful for that. However, they deprived us of our kids gifts that we had started to get in preparation for Christmas event. Every year we host an event for cancer patients both adults and children. This year we have actually from about 2 months old to apparently 18 for the kids and then for the adults we have from 30-40 up until 70."

"We manage to get an estimate, not for the items that have been missing, but an estimate for the fixture of the building and it's extremely high. We just changed all the locks for the building and that ran us almost $500. And to get it properly secured we are looking at something like $4,000. If you know the cancer society is an NGO organization; we assists people with assistance when they are diagnosed with cancer we assist you with getting through the healthcare system and when we can we assist financially as well and for us to allocate that funds it really hard on us because we don't have it. So we are appealing to the public if you know anybody that can assist us kindly do so."

"This is not the first time unfortunately, this is the 4th time we've been burglarize, so it's really becoming an issue for us and it heightens our security as you know we have a lot of volunteers that assist in the office and sometimes we are here late, sometimes we are here early and they are mostly women, so its raises your indicators we have to secure the place because our cancer patients come here because sometimes they are just stressed out from home, they want somewhere safe to relax and feel safe. We try to create that environment for them and for us being violated like this it's heartless, it's cruel and we are asking the public if you see people around that's not from the area, you see somebody around call the police. Just dial 911 - it's easy. They will know what to do. This area is pretty dark, from the time you enter Mercy Lane you don't have any lights on the streets, so it's relatively dark and we were also informed that apparently a couple vehicles got vandalized over the weekend right on this street in front of the cancer society. They were attending the fair at the Belize Elementary School and they got vandalized, so all of that we are looking into because it's a security risk."

If you would like to make a donation to the Belize Cancer Society, you can call telephone number 2-2-3-0-9-2-2 or email them at belizecancersociety@gmail.com.