BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – MEMBERS of Exercise Tradewinds this morning (Jun. 8) joined with local youth group A Ganar in an environmental protection exercise by cleaning-up the beach in Keys Village.
Following the clean-up exercise, the youth group received a donation from the visiting military contingent with whom they were engaged in a friendly football match.
Speaking to members of the media, Commander of the US Coast Guard Christopher Boes stated that the exercise was part of the Tradewinds programmes to get youths to take responsibility for their environment.
“Basically, this is the culmination of a multi-national exercise between the Caribbean and the United States called Tradewinds. Part of Tradewinds is to gather all the partner nations together in order to respond to natural disasters and things like that.
“Also to get the youth involve in a community effort to give them a good idea of their responsibilities for their environment locally and hopefully in the future...the global context of all the member countries. That way we can have the folks from Tradewinds interacting with the children and exchange different stories, and give an opportunity to understand each other’s culture a little better.”
He then spoke of the donation made to A Ganar in conjunction with USAID.
“Basically, USAID, which is an organisation in the United States that targets youth-at-risk and other organisations and has partnered with the US military, we brought soccer balls, some gear for playing soccer as well as all the stuff you need to clean up the beach.”
Social Skills Instructor at National Skills, Elzeva Cuffy indicated that activities such as these would help the members of A Ganar meeting their requirements.
“It is very significant because today the students who are engaged in the A Ganar Programme, we actually see them meeting the requirements, which is service learning, where they have to do some volunteer work where they give back o society in some way. We have the partnership with the persons from Tradewinds with our own trainees.”
She then highlighted what the A Ganar Programme is.
“A Ganar is a work-based programme that uses sports and other activities to teach life and work skills. The programme has been going well This is the fourth year that we have been doing it as a Ministry of Education-instituted programme. Every year we train about 100 students.”
Cuffy also thank Tradewinds for their help and indicated that they would not have been able to achieve this without their contribution.
