Thursday, May 21, 2009

Belize imports chocolate and wooden popsicle sticks from nearby Guatemala

Imported wooden popsicle sticks from Guatemala. Not enough market I guess to make them here?
This is BETTY of Betty's store in Hillview. We now have a few more smaller places, but Betty has the biggest and is the main earner in her family. She sells the Choco Banana to Dorita when she has it, to make childrens chocolate covered banana popsicles.

Betty Figueroa is a success story I'm proud of. Honest and hardworking. Came with here parents in the refugee program from the Salvadoranean civil war. She now has a modest sized store. When I first met her she was a very young widow ( about 21 years ) with two kids and no education at all. She paid somebody for private English lessons and learned English. I taught her how to keep a set of accounts for me and she has done my bill paying for eight years. Some times she has had a minimum of $10,000 under her care to pay my bills. I trust her implicity. Her father set her up with a small shack to earn a living and with bank loans she keeps expanding. Supports her parents and her two children and occasionally even some of her siblings. Most of her brothers and sisters had to go into entrepreneurial businesses and are making it, more or less.

Anyway, Betty also sells the wooden sticks used to make banana popsicles and both the wooden sticks and the chocolate come across the frontier as imports, because nobody in Belize sells either the popsicle wood sticks, or the liquid prepared chocolate ready to use.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Why would you want to let the public know this poor woman has some much money at her disposal...so she can be ROB!!!!! please be carefull..

Belizean living in California