Season of stress Posted: 30/08/2010 - 10:38 PM The thing about a major hurricane is that in a matter of three or four days, after the first serious warning, you may have to pick up everything you can and run for your life, and when you reach your place of refuge, sometimes less than a day after that you may be given the “all clear.” Go back home, and resume life as usual. Hurricanes, beloved, are humbling experiences. They put things in perspective. There are no guarantees in life. Belizean nationalism Posted: 26/08/2010 - 09:14 PM There is a story in Mexico which says that the Mariscal-Spenser Treaty of 1893, which regularized the border between Mexico and British Honduras while transferring San Pedro Ambergris Caye from Mexican sovereignty to British, was signed because Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom was visiting Mexico at the time, and she and their Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, “hit it off.” The story is what scholars call “apocryphal.” Men to “boyz” Posted: 24/08/2010 - 10:34 AM Forty years ago in Belize, little boys quaked in the presence of grown men. The little boys understood that they could only be seen, not heard. Today, it is the grown men who have to be scared of the little boys. The grown men are being told by the internationally-funded Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) that they must listen to the opinions of the little boys. If the grown men stay out too late at night in Belize, they run the risk of being murdered by the little boys. Things have been turned completely topsy-turvy. The men have become boys. Let the sun shine in Posted: 20/08/2010 - 10:23 AM It’s time to cut the bulls—t. Everybody knows the face of greed between 1998 and 2004 was the face of Ralph. The Beatles once sang that “ … money can’t buy me love,” but Ralph spent many years trying to prove otherwise. Every time the money threatened to run out, Ralph floated more bonds. There were some PUP Cabinet Ministers who decided, in August of 2004, that they couldn’t wait for the “dolly house to come tumbling down,” as surely it would. They decided to take the proverbial bull by the horns. Prophet of the Diaspora Posted: 17/08/2010 - 10:26 AM “By 1921 Garvey was unquestionably the leader of the largest organization of its type in the history of the race. Garvey’s unparalleled success had the effect of arraying against him a powerful conglomeration of hostile forces. The United States government was against him because they considered all black radicals subversive; European governments were against him because he was a threat to the stability of their colonies; the communists were against him because he successfully kept black workers out of their grasp; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other integrationist organizations were against him because he argued that white segregationists were the true spokesmen for white America and because he in turn advocated black separatism. His organization also had to contend with unscrupulous opportunists who were not above sabotaging its workings for personal gain.” Knowledge and faith Posted: 13/08/2010 - 10:55 AM Listen, we know what’s going on in this country and we have seen the games that are being played. The problem is that there are many Belizeans who are driven by faith, which is to say, they cannot reason when those religious institutions in which they believe are being challenged. You can’t feed a baby with meat. In the words of the modern Kriol proverb, “No everything weh good fu eat, good fu talk.” The claim Posted: 10/08/2010 - 11:03 AM A Guatemalan young lady won the Costa Maya Festival contest last week on San Pedro Ambergris Caye. A Guatemalan gentleman won our prestigious Holy Saturday Crosscountry Classic a few months ago. Last September Guatemalans won the top prizes in the Lionman Triathlon. It got so bad a few years ago that a Guatemalan football selection beat a Belize football selection on Belize’s Independence Day at the MCC Grounds. So. The political history of Amandala Posted: 06/08/2010 - 10:49 AM Next Friday marks the 41st anniversary of the establishment of Amandala, which began as the newspaper organ of a cultural organization called the United Black Association for Development (UBAD). When UBAD entered an alliance with the People’s Action Committee (PAC) in October of 1969, then this new organization (known as the Revolitical Action Movement - RAM) published a single newspaper called Amandala with Fire, Fire having been the newspaper organ of PAC. God and Man Posted: 03/08/2010 - 03:26 PM There are two things we believe we understand about the process which established the Roman Catholic Church, within a century after landing in Belize to attend to the spiritual needs of the Catholic Ladino, Mestizo, and Maya refugees from the 1847 Yucatan Caste War, as the dominant force in the colony’s education system. In the first instance, the yeoman’s work of Garifuna teachers, beginning early in the twentieth century, strengthened the Church’s primary school foundation nationwide to the point where it became the best around. Secondly, the American background of the priests and nuns who ran the Catholic school system was important in the cutting edge decisions they took which eventually made the Anglican school system, by comparison, seem old and backward. Even as the United States replaced Britain as the world’s most modern and powerful economy after World War II, so the American Catholic school system in Belize ran down and passed the British Anglican system. Children of 1798 and 1838 Posted: 30/07/2010 - 08:30 PM August 1, they say, is Emancipation Day, and it is celebrated throughout the British Caribbean. This emancipation took place sometime between 1834 and 1838, but it was never celebrated much in the settlement of Belize, except early on.