by Evan X Hyde

   Between 1978/79 and 1987, I lived at my Aunt Chrystel’s house on First Street in King’s Park, Belize City. One of my neighbors there was Mr. Michael Usher, who had been one of my SJC basketball idols in the late 1950s when I was still at Holy Redeemer Boys School. 

    Mr. Mike was a People’s United Party (PUP) stalwart, a Belize City Councillor five decades ago. One of the things he used to say over and over was, all we need is sand lots: the children and young people will make use of them for sports and healthy recreation. 

    Belize City had begun to lose its open spaces, especially on the Northside and just outside of Belize City, because a demand for housing and commercial real estate was beginning to overwhelm the old capital. Southside would lose Yabra Field and Hostel Field: only Rogers Stadium, formerly Edwards Park, would remain.

    In the middle 1980s, under the first United Democratic Party (UDP) government, Belize City, incredibly to me, would lose the precious open spaces many generations of our people had known as the Newtown Barracks. The politicians began the attack on the Barracks by building a large, modern hotel.

    Unbeknownst to us natives, someone somewhere had decided that the country was going to become tourism-focused. (This had not been Mr. Price’s vision.) Passports were being sold by the bucketful. Massive tracts of land were being alienated to foreigners, both by government and private interests.

    Then one day it began to become clear to us Garden people that the Barracks hotel, which opened a gambling casino just across the street from the MCC in the latter part of the 1990s, if I remember correctly, had its sights on the MCC Garden, a religious space for football and cricket since 1960 for us natives.

    Kremandala fought tooth and nail for years and years to protect the Garden. A UDP City Council under Zenaida began to abuse and violate the playing surface of the Garden with mass concerts, which required the use of large trucks and tractors. 

    Kremandala continued to fight. The power brokers just refused to understand. We needed the Garden: our youth need the space.

    Our fight was, I would say, in vain. The Barrow government actually sold a piece of the Garden’s space to the hotel/casino for their parking. Over the past weekend, a 23-year-old youth who was trying to claim his vehicle from the hotel/casino parking lot inside the Garden, was shot and killed in the early morning hours when it was still dark.

     The reason I had to say something now is because just a couple days later, a Cayo teenager who was practising football in San Ignacio’s beautiful, venerable Norman Broaster Stadium, was stabbed and killed, apparently by the stadium’s caretaker, who had been tasked to collect a new National Sports Council fee for the use of the grounds. This was absolute tragedy on top of the MCC Garden parking lot tragedy.

    Tired as I am, I still had to say something now. There is a philosophical connection between these two incidents of young death by violence. The philosophical connection is that the people who run things in The Jewel have laughed off Kremandala’s arguments for space and sports for more than five decades. They will continue to laugh us off, and our Belizean youth will continue to die.

    Can’t you see this is madness?