Educating Children: My Belize Experience

Coming to Belize was one of the best decisions I have made in college, because it has allowed me to have a unique opportunity to see another culture and country first hand. My class was set on teaching children in Belize some basic health education like nutrition, hygiene, communicable diseases, and puberty. Many of us did not know what to expect, but we were all excited and ready for anything that was going to happen when teaching children. At the end the trip, I learned all about Belize’s education system and the role their community has in it.

There were two cities that our group traveled to which was San Ignacio and Hopkins Village. In San Ignacio, we traveled to different schools and did a health fair with them so they would walk around to our different booths. This was an interesting experience, because there were a lot of differences in the children like age group and language. I do not know any Spanish, so when one group came to our booth and only spoke Spanish it was interesting. We had to use other means of explaining our message such as hand signals or trying to use words we did know in Spanish. Also, I found that the picture that we printed out before helped a lot too! This was a great experience that I learned from, because when educating other people, you need to be able to communicate with them.

The next city we traveled to was Hopkins Village. In this town, we went to a school and taught the children in their classrooms. This helped me really understand how Belize’s education system worked and how the community influences it. While we were presenting I was able to look around the rooms to see all the posters hanging up. One thing I thought was interesting is that there were a lot of similar posters and subject that I remembered from elementary school. They had social studies, science, language, and math like any other school. However, many of the posters had animals or other things found in Belize, so that the children could understand their country more. I really liked how every classroom had the national symbols of Belize, because this helps develop national pride in one’s country.