A ‘Belizean-ized’ book for Belizean children

The story book The Adventure of Tenuk duplicates as a colouring book. It has an attractive bright-coloured cover with brilliant, accurate, and compelling illustrations, while the inside pages are black and white. This combination is sure to grab and keep the attention of any child between the ages of 6 and 9 years, whether they are avid readers, or whether they prefer the story being read to them by their teacher, parent, aunt or older sibling. Even adults will relish, as I did, in the narrative. And, especially for those children who live in rural areas, the characters in the book are relatable.

Tenuk is a Malaysian word that means Tapir. The book’s author is Lee McLoughlin, who has been working in wildlife conservation in Belize for the last eight years.

He explained that the idea to write about Belize’s national animal came to him about three years ago, while he worked at the Ya’axche Conservation Trust, YCT. During this time, he says tapirs were being hunted and killed, which was threatening their population. Surveys, conducted in southern rural villages revealed that tapirs were being shot because they were raiding farmers’ crops. “And I thought to myself, how can we deal with this; how can we stop this from happening?"

Click here to read the rest of the article and see more about the book in the My Beautiful Belize Blog