In my opinion we hold on too much to “traditional exports.” We fight for a place on the world market for our bananas when the market seems to want bananas from Costa Rica. We then accept a lower price. Our bauxite industry has all but died a long and painful death. Recycling aluminium is a lot cheaper than mining and producing it from scratch. Good riddance I say to the deep red gouges in our green landscape. Sugar is no longer King. The King is dead, bury him! Jamaica is a small country; if there is a demand for something we produce we would never be able to produce enough of it to satisfy the market, the old “supply and demand” of basic business. Case in point: coffee.  Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is in great demand worldwide. Unlike bananas, we set the price for our coffee and the market pays it. In the middle of a recession, income from coffee has increased by 30%. The same is true of cocoa. There is a limited area where these crops grow so we can’t put thousands of acres more into coffee and cocoa. We therefore need other products. We have hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane. Every year we accept lower prices on this crop which used to be the backbone of our economy. We will need some cane fields for domestic consumption and the production of another star export, rum. Some of our existing fields can be turned to the production of ethanol. This takes retooling and a fairly heavy financial outlay but isn’t that better in the long run than accepting half price for sugar?

Take a drive outside the cities. Wherever you go you are almost guaranteed to pass stands of bamboo on the roadside. In the countryside we use bamboo for fences, for scaffolding, even for homes. On small farms bamboo “pipes” are used for irrigation, small rivers are crossed on bamboo bridges and large ones navigated on bamboo rafts.  Children fish with bamboo poles and, unfortunately, some are disciplined with bamboo switches. In China and Japan, bamboo scaffolding is commonly used in construction.

There are many old wives’ tales about harvesting bamboo. But often those old wives were smart. The sugar content of bamboo rises and falls. The more sugar there is in the bamboo is the more attractive it is to insects. Sugar content is at its highest during the hottest time of the day. Harvesting bamboo at dawn during the full moon is actually the best time as the sugar content is lowest at that time! Bamboo also starts to rot from fungus after five to seven years. Bamboo is therefore best harvested between three to five and five to seven years, depending on the variety.

Bamboo grows at an incredible rate; it is the fastest growing plant on earth and can grow 24 inches (60 cm) per day. Bamboo plants reach maturity in three years. Because of this it is cheap and it is sustainable. Lumber and textiles made from bamboo are no longer niche products but are in incredibly high demand worldwide. In the U. S. one can buy bamboo flooring at any hardware store and bamboo sheets at your nearest department store. The bamboo products industry is anticipated to reach sales of twelve billion U S. dollars within two years. Why can’t Jamaica get a piece of that pie? Certainly with such an unbelievably high demand, the market would absorb as much bamboo lumber as we could produce. I can see it in my mind quite clearly: Acres and acres of former cane fields, already laid out, with irrigation in place, turned to bamboo and the huge sugar mills gutted and refitted to cure and laminate the lumber. Sugar cane and bamboo are both grasses, for all I know they could be planted and reaped using the same equipment. Maybe it’s time King Sugar was deposed in favour of the Big Bamboo!

Bamboo Avenue, St. Elizabeth

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Jamaica’s motto “out of Many, One People” is all too true as, although over 90% of the population is of African heritage, we are indeed one big melting pot. From the first day Columbus set foot on Jamaican soil there have been Jews in the Island as his interpreter, Luis deTorres, was Jewish! Since then members of that faith have been an integral part of our history.

The first shipload of Jewish immigrants arrived from Portugal in 1530. As can be imagined in the heyday of the Inquisition, Jews did not fare very well under Spanish rule, though possibly marginally better than if they had remained at home in Spain and Portugal. Despite this, their enterprises did well.

At the time of the British conquest in 1655, Jews were at last allowed to worship in public and, in 1660, were granted citizenship by Charles II. At this time more immigrants arrived from other countries in the region as well as from Europe. Unfortunately, as has happened countless times in countless places, rights were given to then taken away from them over the next 180 years until finally, in 1831 Jews were granted full equality as Her Majesty’s subjects.

The Jews, who had slowly prospered before, began to thrive. In 1838 the deCordova brothers founded the Gleaner. Belisario produced his now sought after painting. By 1849 almost 20% of the House of Assembly, including the Speaker, were Jewish. Synagogues, markets and banks sprung up across the Island. The current Duke Street Synagogue was built after the 1907 earthquake by the Henriques Brothers, at that time Jamaica’s most prominent firm of architects.

Today, many of Jamaica’s most prominent and respected citizens are Jewish so to all the Henriques, Ashenheims, Matalons, deSouzas, dePasses, Melhados, Delevantes and all the others who helped lay the cornerstones of our country we wish you a very Happy Hanukkah!

The People Who Came

Jewish Jamaica

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You know you are getting old if:

1 You had an exercise book with the Queen and Prince Philip on it and covered your books with brown paper.

2 You wore Bata crepe to school.

3 You know what a gig is.

4 You ate Asham and Busta.

5 You remember what a thruppance looks like.

6 Your school graduation was called “prize-giving.”

7 You got a washout and worm medicine at the end of summer holidays.

8 You used to listen to Rediffussion.

9 You remember when the Lou and Ranny show used to come on the radio.

10 You know what the initials T. A. D. P. stand for.

11 You know who Tony Verity and Dennis Hall were.

12 You remember when television signed on and signed off.

13 You (or your first boyfriend) wore Pirate’s Gold.

14 You know what boxing title Bunny Grant held.

15 You danced to Rock Steady.

16 You know what Fanta and Nu Grape are.

17 You know what a Woolsley and Zephyr are.

18 You remember the police traffic kiosk at King Street and Harbour Street corner.

19 You still call Norman Manley airport “Palisados.”

20 You still have a BOAC bag somewhere in a closet.

21 You still go to the airport just to stand on the waving gallery.

22 You used to go to movies at Premier.

ANSWER KEY:

1-5: You still a yout’.

6-10: You listen to your parents’ stories.

11-15: You’re getting there.

16-19: Viagra and Botox!

20-22: You have Limacol on the night stand and a chimmey under the bed!

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Time passes and by 1931 the bridge was old fashioned and unsafe, after all it was not created for motor vehicles! It was closed to traffic on 23rd October 1931, one hundred and thirty years after it first opened.

In 1998 the World Monuments Fund put this almost forgotten bridge on its Watch List and, in conjunction with the JNHT, the Spanish Town Iron Bridge Foundation was formed. People had lost interest in the relic and additional funds were slow in coming. Then Hurricane Ivan in 2004, with its mega-gallons of storm water, almost finished destroying this structure as sections of the two-century old foundation washed away. An all out effort was made and four years later restoration started in earnest.

Work has been underway since October of last year to restore this beautiful piece of our history. The foundation piers are being meticulously restored with hand cut stones and mortar mixed similarly to that used in Georgian times. There’s one difference though: the bridge, which had originally cost ?4000 to fabricate and install, is now costing J$12,000,000 to repair. It will be wonderful to see the finished project which the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and the Spanish Town Iron Bridge Foundation have worked so hard over the last twenty years to accomplish!

Read more about Jamaica at Jamaica-Allspice.com

So the bottom line is I’ve decided to take advantage of the American “Black Friday” crazy shopping day and have discounted some of the designs in my online shop especially for the Readers of my Website and my Blog. I’ve created two new designs to big up our athletes and I’ve hunted down twenty-four more antique maps to reproduce for my popular Jamaican and West Indian Maps store.

All of these new items are discounted by half of my normal profit margin to say a big Thank You to everyone who has been kind enough to read my random thoughts over the past six years. These designs are accessible only through this link and the one on the Jamaica-Allspice website.

Happy Shopping!

If you’re really into American Thanksgiving here’s a Pumpkin Pie:
Pastry:
1½ cups pastry flour
½ tsp salt
¼ cup shortening
¼ cup butter
Filling:
1 lb peeled and cooked pumpkin or 1×15oz can
½ cup sugar
¼ cup maple syrup or maple-flavoured syrup
1 tsp each ground cinnamon and allspice
½ tsp salt
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup evaporated milk

Preheat oven to 375F.

Sieve together flour and salt. Cut cold butter and shortening into cubes and cut into flour using a pastry blender or knife until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Sprinkle 2 Tbsp cold water over mixture and mix with a fork, add up to 2 more Tbsp water until dough can form a ball. Do not use more than 4 Tbsp water total or your pastry will be tough.

On a floured surface, flatten dough ball with your hands then roll out to a 13 circle. Lift pastry carefully into a 9 inch pie dish and ease in carefully without stretching it, trim edges that hang over sides of dish. Put to one side in a cool place; if using a metal pie plate, put in the fridge while you make the filling.

In a bowl combine pumpkin, sugar, maple syrup, spices and salt. Add eggs and beat with a fork until combined. Gradually add milk, stirring until combined.

Carefully pour filling in pastry shell. Cover edge of pie crust with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil, return to oven and bake for 20 to 30 minutes more or until a knife inserted near centre comes out clean.

Cool on wire rack for about an hour then refrigerate until ready to serve. When ready to serve decorate with whipped cream and chopped pecans.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American Friends!

Read more about Jamaica at Jamaica-Allspice.com

Read about Remembrance Day at Jamaica-Allspice.com

But wait, there’s more to it than that. There are some engines that cannot and should not use ethanol mixed petrol. Most cars made before 1986 as well as many high performance vehicles and more than a few European cars. Nissan cars made before 2004 will not operate properly,  that means me. Please check your car manual if you’re not sure or do some online research. I had posted a .pdf list on my website some months ago. Wheels Jamaica has some information as do many Australian automotive websites.

One and two stroke engines don’t operate properly either. What does that mean: lawnmowers, chainsaws and other gas powered tools as well as most motorcycles. E10 should not be used in marine engines as it attracts water.

E10 does not have a shelf life of more than a few weeks and should not be stored for more than three months under any circumstances as it tends to break down and attract moisture. If you store gas for your generator it doesn’t matter as generators shouldn’t use it either.

However, before we condemn ethanol based gas altogether remember one important thing. E10 contains less contaminants, burns more efficiently and significantly reduces the production of greenhouses gases.

Most cars on our roads can effectively use the ethanol mixture but we cannot decree that henceforth only E10 will be available in our pumps. We must work towards producing other forms of petrol/alternates which will allow us to operate our lawnmowers, generators, fishing boats and old jalopies in a cleaner, more efficient manner.

Read more about Jamaica at Jamaica-Allspice.com

I first visited Hope Zoo the very week it opened. I could not have been more than five or six but even then I think I knew subconsciously that something was not right. I much preferred the flamingos and the deer to the lions. In other words, those that gave the impression of being free and were allowed some small space to move around in, were more appealing.

I lost interest by the time I was about ten but, in my early twenties, I decided I would show some rural schoolchildren the animals they had only seen in picture books. I loaded them all into a bus and brought them down to Hope. The outing was probably a great success from the point of view of the children but for me was one of the most painful events of my life. The animals at the Zoo were by then not just caged, but neglected. Lack of funding and probably lack of interest showed mournful, improperly fed creatures, staring through the wire, begging to be free.

Now, I am not a rabid activist; I believe that properly laid out and properly funded zoos serve a useful purpose by helping to educate our children about places and animals they might otherwise never see. At roughly the same time as the incident with the schoolchildren, I visited the new Miami Metro Zoo. The lions were not in a small concrete pen but instead had an acre or so of landscaped grounds to wander on, they were properly fed and there was a veterinary team on site. This was what a zoo should be!

Am I the only one who sees a difference?

For years now we have been hearing about plans to rehabilitate Hope Zoo. I even applied for a position there thinking I could do my small part. I was turned down; I daresay I did not have the required qualifications. I even found a proposal online from 2001. A small start has been made but still nothing of significance. I suspect that enough people do not have the will; plus our big money corporate sponsors prefer to put their funding into sports which give them greater visibility.

At last I get to the point. The story about Usain and the cheetah cub has made me think. Would it not be a good idea if Zoo officials worked out the annual upkeep of each of the animals in their care and offered them for “adoption?” You or I could cover the annual cost of caring for a flamingo or a spider monkey and those among us with deeper pockets could subsidise the lions, crocodiles, etc. If food and veterinary care of even half the animals were covered then the Zoo could put its limited resources into providing a comfortable habitat for all the animals to live in. If we insist on keeping animals for our enjoyment we are obligated to provide them with a comfortable existence.

"Someone please....Help!.....Is anyone there?"

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There is no Jamaican over the age of forty who did not grow up on Leandro cartoons. Every day for roughly half a century, in Jamaica’s oldest newspaper, two simple characters said in two sentences all we needed to know about politics, economics, world events and life in Jamaica. And he did it in patois! He may well have been the first person to put patois in writing, even before Miss Lou’s poetry.

Born in Trinidad of Guyanese parents, Urban Leandro moved with his parents to Jamaica in the early 1930s. He joined the Gleaner’s staff as a cartoonist in 1937 and there he remained for almost fifty years until 1985. He died in Kingston in 1989. Leandro chronicled an important chunk of Jamaica’s history; the early labour movement and universal suffrage, Independence and events surrounding it, the volatile politics of the 1970s and everyday life in general; but the odd thing is that we can find very little of his own history. I met the man; he lived in Barbican, next door to a boyfriend of my youth. I never got to know him though as he was very quiet and unassuming.

I was very fortunate a few years ago to have been given the opportunity to offer for sale a collection of his works spanning 1961-1986. If you feel for a tongue-in-cheek walk down memory lane and a reminder of some of the high (and low) points in our history, drop me a line and I can arrange a copy for you. The book is US$25 plus shipping and is 11″x8.5″ soft-cover format and is in black and white, as were Leandro’s cartoons. Caveat emptor: If you are not Jamaican you might not understand a single word!

If you wish a copy of Jamaica (in Pen and Ink) please use the Paypal Button below or <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0pt; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

Email me

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I was born in Ireland in 1950 near a small town called Ballymore Eustace in county Kildare on the banks of the river Liffey – purportedly the source of water for Guinness! It was a small town then and is a small town now, and it’s most recent claim to fame was that a lot of the movie ‘Braveheart’ was filmed in the surrounding countryside. Paul Newman also established his ‘Hole in the Wall’ camp there for kids with disabilities. Kildare is the heart of horse racing and breeding in Ireland and it would appear I have come full circle to Del Mar.

I was the youngest of three children, having an older brother and sister, and most of his life my dad was a truck driver. We never owned a home or car, and in my early years we never had electricity or running water; could have written a best seller if Frank McCourt had not gotten there first with ‘Angela’s Ashes’.

My Mom passed away when I was nineteen and my Dad when I was twenty-six, life in Ireland for them was tough. I went to high school and college on scholarships and part time jobs. Everything from making hay and working in a sawmill as a high-schooler, to security guard and builder’s labourer in college.

I did business studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and in my final year I was president of my faculty’s society. We had John Kenneth Galbraith address us at my demotion meeting; he had recently been Ambassador to India for president John F. Kennedy. My law lecturer and mentor was Dr. Kader Asmal, a South African Indian, he later went back home and became Nelson Mandela’s first Minister of Education. He got me interested in human rights, which helps explain my involvement with Pathways to Peace and other organizations.

I loved college and took advantage of the long summers to live and work abroad: Germany as a carpenter, the Channel Islands as a truck driver – I ‘borrowed’ my Dad’s license – and Corfu, Greece teaching water skiing – I spoke no Greek and could not even swim! Seems like all my life no-one can understand my accent…

I was in New York in ’69, working for American Express and Jane Parker’s Bakery…and yes, I went to Woodstock in an old VW Beetle (and I did not inhale!) I was in Times Square watching a full-scale model of the lunar module when man landed on the moon and helped collect signatures to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a National Holiday.

After college I went to work in England, various jobs in the packaging industry, corrugated cases (cardboard boxes to you and me). I was there for eight years, during the IRA Campaign and the hunger strikes, not a very comfortable time to be Irish in the UK.

I was offered a job in Kingston, Jamaica in ’82, making, of all things, toilet tissue, napkins, hand towels and, just like in Greece, lack of prior experience was not a handicap! I ended up staying there for twenty years, moving from one manufacturing company to the next: packaging, office furniture, carpets, building products. In ’98 I started importing and selling pallet racking and shelving, the big heavy duty shelves you see at Costco or Home Depot, and that is still my main business now, exporting from the US. to Jamaica. However it was
not all work and no play, and somewhere in the twenty years I spent there I met and married MaryKay. We have two great kids, Ryan and Tara.

In Jamaica I had helped start and run a non-profit called The St. Patrick’s Foundation and we built five Skills Training Centres in depressed inner city ghettos. I am still involved and on my last visit we donated computers to one of the centres. One of the benefits of being involved with St. Patrick’s was getting invited when VIPs were in town, and over the years I met President Regan, President Carter, Desmond Tutu, Pope John Paul II, Harry Belafonte ….and Mother Theresa! She invited me to come to Calcutta and become a nun, an offer I gently refused on the basis that I might get into the habit!

I joined the Kingston Rotary Club in 1990, the ‘Mother Club‘ for Jamaica and almost immediately I was asked to be Sergeant-at-Arms, a post I held for seven years and was a combination of greeter, comedian, and enforcer. No-one said ‘you lie’ when I held the gavel… One of my favourite memories is being Sgt.-at-Arms for our District Conference and acting as aide-de-camp for President Jonathan Majiiabye, from Nigeria; he was an Rotary International Director then, and still jokes about going to Jamaica and being assigned a white man to carry his bags!

Dr. Dick and the Rev. Al have invited me to join them on the board of M.A.E.G.A., a scholarship program for Mexican-American students. I am on the board of the Elbanna-Peled Foundation, dedicated to peaceful humanitarian missions in Israel and Palestine. Miko and Nader are two incredible people who shipped over 800 wheelchairs to children from both sides. Guess I was hooked back in the 70’s when I saw graffiti in London that said: “Give Palestine back to the Irish!”

This short biography was written by my great friend, Rob Mullally, a most interesting Irishman who stopped this way for twenty years, married a Jamaican wife, had two Jamaican children and then moved on to California. I guess our Island in the Sun was not quite exciting enough for him!

Rob, ever mindful of the Luck o’ the Irish which has blessed his life, supports more causes than the average human being would consider. While in Jamaica he helped create the St.Patrick’s Foundation and even now is probably trying to wrest a hefty sum from one of his movie star friends to send to the starving children of the Sudan or the mistreated women of Afghanistan. Beannacht Dé ort, Rob. God bless you and keep up the good work!

Read more about Jamaica at Jamaica-Allspice.com