AUSTRALIA OFFERS DEVELOPMENT AID TO BELIZE !

Australian High Commissioner to Caricom, His Excellency, Philip Kentwell
From Belize to Australia. Thankyou for the offer of AID to Belize from Australia. We have a Belize Development Trust, NGO, recommended project for you to consider.

The Australian High Commissioner to CARICOM, Philip Kentwell was familarizing himself with Belize. Australia and Belize have vague relationships through CARICOM and the British Commonwealth. We also see each other at the World Trade Organization meetings, Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations.

Now we have the chance to get down to the NITTY GRITTY! Often government to government meetings lack focus, or innovative ideas and for the most part are orientated to financing programs through a bureaucracy. As an NGO the Belize Development Trust working to improve Belize for 25 years thereabouts, has a project for Australia. We´ve been considering and trying to figure out how to get this project going for around 18 years. As an NGO we do not deal in money, only in volunteerism.
The Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU is between CARICOM and Australia for $60 million from the development corporation. Some of the area proposed in this bureaucratic language is direct assistance to individual countries of CARICOM like Belize. If you want an experienced person on Belize in Australia, talk to Isabel Auxillou, located in Melbourne, Australia. You will find her details and contact on FACEBOOK. Isabel assisted in the construction of the Falconview Backpackers Adventure HOSTEL, in Hillview, Green Parrot Valley, Belize. She is familiar also with Caye Caulker and related to island families there, in the tourist business. She is expected to be coming back to Belize sometime in 2011. I believe she is waiting for her Australian passport. I also have a neigbor who is Australian married to a Belizean, who makes HARPS for sale here and gives harp playing lessons, and does thereuptic massages. Rod something, don´t know his last name, or remember which part of Australia he is from.
Some of the key areas mentioned in bureaucratic language is development of economic resilience, the strengthening of people to people and institutional links, and providing direct assistance to individual countries within Caricom.
The proposal from Australia is to assist our region in socio-economic development. The government of Australia is providing 110 post graduate scholarships that citizens in Caricom states can access. What the PRIVATE SECTOR such as the Belize Development Trust want is something more concrete, orientated to technical skills and immediately convertible to hard cash in the tourist market place.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard is looking forward to welcoming Prime Minister Barrow at the Commonwealth of Nations Heads of Government Meeting in October of this year.
Here is the Belize Development Trust request. We do not care if you do this on a Government to Government basis. So long as it gets done!
REQUEST EXPLANATION FOR AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT
Belize gets 75% of its revenue from the tourist business. We are looking to provide additional means of earning money from the tourist business, to village people on a direct, person to person basis. It does not take much. What we want is two volunteers, on a two year contract, from either the Solomon Islands, or New Guinea. I forget which place under Australian control had a revolution some decades ago, but I got a CD by mail from an Australian, on a peculiar musical instrument used by the islanders out there during those years of that revolution. The islanders were playing a bamboo homemade musical instrument. They cut bamboo in different lengths and stacked them according to tones. The instrument was played with the soles of rubber chanclas we call them here, but those thong flip flops used as shoes in poor parts of the world. You beat the hollow end of the bamboos in rythm. It was cute, sounded great and fabulously unique. For our tourist business in Belize we need musical bands of uniqueness, to establish our tourist brand and identity in both Central America and the Caribbean.
Beside that we need somebody who can hula and teach same. I remember in my youth seeing some Solomon Islanders at Leeds University, in the U.K. when the wife was on scholarship, doing the hula on the International Day program. It was unbelievable as a skill. Those guys were better than Hawaiins. Hula has to be learned by children, as it requires flexibility. Another technical skill desired is the making of hats, baskets and other things out of coconut leaves. About 40 years ago, early in our tourism revolution, when my children were young, we had a well traveled hippie pass through Belize, who had been to the South Pacific and learned the skills of making things from coconut leaves. I and my daughters who were then young, ( 8 or 10 years old ). My kids and I, and we were poor Caye Caulker, island teachers at the time, ( in the late 1960´s ) learned how to make the hats out of coconut leaves and for several years after that, the making of coconut leaf hats, studded with hibiscus flowers, made a great money addition to both my children and us adults. It was extra cash. We would sit on the street side under a coconut tree on the island of Caye Caulker and make hats and sell them to tourists walking around, for $3 Bz, a lot of money at the time.
What we need is two volunteers for two years, to go around to tourist destinations in Belize and teach the primary school children how to HULA, make and play that BAMBOO musical rythm instrument, to establish a unique item for cultural tourism of overnight visitors at our 600 lodges and guesthouses. and utilize our natural resources to make tourist items for sale, like coconut leaf hats. These are made in about 15 minutes each. I often wore one with fresh hibiscus flowers every day and tourists were always stopping me and asking where they could buy one.
This is a practical request, two years for two volunteers, from either the Solomon islands, or New Guinea, to teach our primary school children in tourist locations, how to do and make stuff for developing the cultural uniqueness of our tourist economy.