Stamps to honor centenarians are coming

A proposal will be submitted to the office of the Attorney General and also to the Cabinet to create stamps to honor centenarians in Antigua and Barbuda

Social Transformation Minister Samantha Marshal made that disclosure on the sidelines of a ceremony on Wednesday to celebrate the 100th birthday of Mary Elizabeth Ellen Meade; the country’s newest centenarian.

“We will be producing memorabilia stamps for our centenarians so that people can look back and you can always have that memory. We recognize that these are opportunities not to commemorate a specific category of persons but also a way of highlighting Antigua and Barbuda but also to bring in some revenue. So, want to be able to produce these stamps. We are having initial discussions”

“We have had several discussions and we are hoping that we can push forward by the end of the year where we can have our first production of stamps,” she said

Renaming streets, roads, and avenues after centenarians are also moving with haste.

“We recently had a meeting with the team that deals with that. We are getting them organized with the stakeholders so they can go back next month. Some of the issues are to make corrections in terms of suffixes because in some areas we may have said streets when it was an avenue, avenue when it’s a lane,” she said

Consistency and regulations where the signs are concern have also been outlined by Marshall as an area that needs attention.

“We are looking to make sure there is more harmonization in the quality of signage that we put up and having regulations because we have instances where signs have been removed or damaged as a result of accidents. We have had to reinstall those signs and, in some cases, they have not been”

“We are also looking at house numbering because some of the concerns we are receiving from the Postal office are that they have not been able to deliver mail accurately to homes because they don’t have the accurate address. We know that some institutions that deliver bills have already done their system of numbering but we want a harmonization,” she added.