Hey friends! Deidra here 👋. This summer, while I was filling in at our Belmopan store for one of our youths, I took the opportunity to do some deep cleaning. It’s a good thing I did because the Prime Minister stopped by during his MSME tour.

That morning we were deep in our cleaning and had pulled all our camp supplies from our storage. We had it all stacked by the entrance of the store. My husband joined me to help with some of the fixer upper type work and capture some footage for us.

Early afternoon, two men stopped by and made conversation as they browsed. I apologized for all the boxes by the door, explaining that we had summer camp coming up soon. Then they said, the Prime Minister is about to stop by. In my mind, I was like “yeah right.” But they asked for our number and said they would be back in a few hours.

They left, and we moved all the camp stuff back into storage 🙃. Thankfully, I had just given the store a good cleaning earlier that day. 😮‍💨

The crew retuned and as promised, the Prime Minister was with them. He asked some questions to learn more about what we do. He was surprised all our profit is invested in the youths of Belize so we got to share how the money is spent. He then worked on the footage for the feature and purchased some items from us. Some of his staff also made purchases, one who was about to travel internationally bought gifts for family members. The entire crew were very supportive and one we even found out is a frequent supporter of ours.

After the team got their content, and all the cameras were gone, we got to visit with the Prime Minister for a brief moment. He shared his vision for promoting small businesses, saying it was just an idea he had one day and it was not meant to be fancy, but he hoped it would be genuine.

During campaign visits, I have always asked local Belmopan politicians about small business initiatives and while many have made promises… well you know how that goes. I really appreciated this small step and promotion by the Prime Minister and his team. Plus, it was cool to simply meet him; I have never met one of Belize’s Prime Ministers before and despite how we may agree/disagree on topics and choices, I was happy for the experience and the promotion it gave ID SEVEN. Plus, it inspired quite a number of young people when we shared the video at camp and it made my mom proud. 🥰

We hope to see more interest from our government in the form of promotion, investment and educational opportunities for local small businesses. So please, share the video and celebrate this little feature with us!

Deidra

xoxo

PS – ID SEVEN is not affiliated with any political parties.