Department of Youth Services Hosts Summer Camps to Teach Trades in Belmopan

The Department of Youth Services hosted its annual series of summer camps directed at teaching various trades in Belmopan this week. This initiative enhances the probability of participants becoming employed post-camp. Classes offered were bartending, cake baking, barbering, and hairdressing. Kelsie Ciego, the Youth Coordinator spoke to Love News about the venture.

Kelsie Ciego, Youth Coordinator: “The skills that we are giving these kids, you notice the labour market is expanding, right? So we need to teach skills for the young people so that they can adapt to the new labour market so one day they can become entrepreneurs and help themselves. So we have bartending this afternoon. We currently have the cake baking that has already passed. We have the barbering and after the barbering session the trainees went to King’s Children’s Home to return a community service from what they learned. So after the kids learn from us, we send them to the community to return it back into community service. So that’s what we’re doing here at the Department of Youth Services. We are building skills for the young people so that they can go out back, be entrepreneurial for themselves, and by hope they can expand their knowledge and teach people what they learned from here at the Department of Youth Services. Currently through the entire summer each program has about 20 kids. So for the month of July so far we impacted about 120 kids here at the Department of Youth Services and that’s only in Belmopan. We have districts, other districts that is currently doing summer program also. So here at the Department of Youth Services we have 70% of the population of Belize that we need to impact on a daily basis and that’s what we are doing here at the Department of Youth Services. We have international youth day coming up in August, it’s August 12th International Youth Day we’ll be having with various districts bringing sports teams together. And we also have, like I said, every other district we have evening programs, youth group programs, mingling with other youths on a daily basis.”