Local Ting än Ting

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Local Trinidad and Tobago Power Boats ~ Misc. - 2

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Local Tax

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Local Tobago ~ Island Crashers 2016 - 1

Pigeon Point Heritage Park - July2nd-3rd - Day 2

Too Many Too Post 200+ https://www.facebook.com/Uphotogenic-13 ... 00&qsefr=1

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Local Tobago ~ Island Crashers 2016 - 2

Pigeon Point Heritage Park - July2nd-3rd - Day 1

Too Many Too Posts 200+ https://www.facebook.com/Uphotogenic-13 ... 8853288913

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Local Mushrooms ~ Brasso Seco

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Local History ~ The Evening News - 1935-1989


Newspaper production in Trinidad and Tobago.

Many of the older folks will remember newspapers such as the Trinidad Chronicle, the Port of Spain Gazette and even the Evening News.

The oldest newspaper on record in Trinidad and Tobago is the Trinidad Weekly Courant which existed as far back as 1799.

The oldest tangible newspaper however, is the Trinidad Gazette which later, in 1825, changed its name to the Port of Spain Gazette.

This newspaper ran until 1956.

Had the Port of Spain Gazette survived it would have been the oldest running newspaper having so much heritage and history carried within its pages.

The iconic French page that is referred to in many historical writings, was not isolated to this newspaper alone - other papers such as the Trinidad Spectator also featured a French page that sometimes even featured a few Spanish advertisements as well.

Other noteworthy newspapers are the Catholic News (1892), which is currently the oldest running newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago and the Trinidad Guardian - the oldest running daily newspaper which started in September 1917.

The Evening News - a subsidiary of Trinidad Guardian began rolling off the press in 1935 and ended in 1989.

Photograph below is featured the offset press that manufactured the Evening News.

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Local History ~ Ste Madeleine Sugar Cane Factory

According to James Stark, sugar in Trinidad was "not as in the other colonies, the great staple; nor was it even the first in the field, for cocoa had been cultivated for a century or more before the first sugar-estate was established.

Although sugar-cane was indigenous to this as well as other West Indian islands, three species of which are to be found growing wild in the uncultivated parts of the island, yet the sugar-cane generally cultivated here is, however, an exotic, known as Tahiti cane, and was introduced from Martinique in 1782, by M. St.- H. Begorrat.

The first sugar estate was established by M. Picot de Lapeyrouse in 1787; and from that time up to the date of the capture of the island by the British the cultivation of the sugar-cane increased slowly but steadily."

The photograph below shows the defunct sugar refinery Usine Ste Madeleine.

The word 'usine' is a French word that means a industrial plant that has one or more buildings that maybe interconnected with facilities for manufacturing.

The factory at Ste Madeleine was opened in 1872 - at this time there were other usines operational in Trinidad namely Brechin Castle, Waterloo, Frederick and St. Augustin.

It officially stopped production and closed on 25th May, 2007

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Local Portraits of Cocoa Growing in Trinidad

A Long Read


So near, so far

Chocolate: what even is chocolate? A mood fix; a thing wrapped in plastic or foil; the product of modern-day, less-acknowledged child exploitation; the enemy of dieters; a currency of lovers?

Chocolat! – a French voice exclaims. This means ‘fantastic, beautiful, perfect’. Chocolate is like gold, or heaven. You know it is so good. If you say ‘chocolate’, you are saying: this is really good.

Chocolate: a term not to be used to refer to skin colour. An English friend’s child talks about the ‘chocolate man’ in the gym. My friend frowns at his child. Now it is not good to say ‘chocolate’; really not good.

There are fifteen countries in the world exporting exclusively ‘fine or flavour’ chocolate. This is not the same as ‘bulk’ chocolate; it is produced from a different bean, under rare, wild, mixed and still-studied conditions. Seven of the producing countries are small island states. Trinidad and Tobago, my homeland, is one of these. Yet we import chocolate. The aunt who lives in America brings chocolate ‘candies’. She wants to open the bag and throw them on the floor so that my brother and I will scramble for them. She thinks this will be fun. My father is furious. I am not interested. The foreign chocolate she brings tastes of sugar. There is a special flavour in the chocolate produced by a particular local brand, and though the texture is bad and the wrapping is cheap, that flavour means chocolat to me.

Cocoa tea is something else again. This fortifying drink is made with raw, grated chocolate. It comes out in a soupy texture, flecked with globules of buttery cocoa fat. The art, or comfort, of making cocoa tea: doesn’t that belong to Trinidad’s past; or to the country areas? My mother had grown up in the forested east of the island. Without her stories of her father ‘dancing cocoa’, I, like other children of the capital city, Port of Spain, might have grown up believing that the country areas belonged in the past, too. The roads to them are so bad. Their stories do not make it to the media, or the books. It is easier to hear stories about the ghosts that live in the countryside than to hear from the people who live off that land. Why is the town cut off from the chocolat of the rest of the island?

The cocoa bean is a riddle. One day my father, a boy from the agricultural centre of Trinidad, took us on a long drive through abandoned estates. For years, trees had been patiently, richly, bearing and dropping unharvested fruit: oranges, plantains, bananas were ones I could recognise. He picked an unfamiliar pod. It looked nothing like the Social Studies textbook photos, which were the only imprint that cocoa as a crop had been allowed to make. The orange blimp painted with streaks of other earthy and fiery colours, just a little too big to fit in a pair of long, clasped hands, was cut open. It revealed sour-sweet, sticky white pulp, and hard seeds: nothing that resembled processed ‘chocolate’. What to do with this riddle?

The cocoa tree is absurdly, terribly, delicate as well as resilient. It needs shade, and is often planted under immortelles, high-rise trees famous for brilliant orange flowers. Stressed, they are stressed, they are under extreme stress, I hear an owner say of her cocoa avenues, in this climate-changed extra-dry season. The tree’s flowers are like a weird form of lace lingerie. They emerge directly from the trunk, complicated, small and pale. The stems of the pods, therefore, grow out from the trunk as well. They hang close and heavy. At the Ortinola estate in Maracas St. Joseph, Trinidad, the owner shows me a pitted, deformed fruit, almost like a bloated cashew. This is a cocoa pod which has been bitten by a parrot. The fruit does not recover.

As I travel around Trinidad I hear about Tobago cocoa and the plague of parrots, which have successfully resisted even the attempts to control them with hawks. I go to Tobago and am invited to the harvest. Suddenly, unseasonably, there is a huge fall of rain, and the harvest is postponed. The voice of a venerable Trinidad estate manager, whose wisdom crackles from disillusionment into a kind of impersonal anger, rises in my head: cocoa is a crop; do not listen to people’s arithmetic; you cannot depend on it, it is dependent on weather; always do something else, always have another job. He shows me how the cocoa pod’s fullness needs careful handling. He hands me his ‘cocoa knife’ and teaches me the single, sharp down-stroke which must sever the stem. People who pick and twist leave the trunk traumatised, vulnerable to fungal infections. People who cut into the trunk cause it to scar and, when calloused over, there are no further flowers. He disapproves of employment creation schemes which would see non-specialists involved in the harvest; they should be put to clear weeds in between the young trees. Temporary workers, not knowing what to do, would risk causing harm, even if they could finish their tasks on time. “You don’t learn it in two lessons…You can’t take a course in that,” he says, driving through steep, green paths, pointing out, at every turn and twist, what has been happening with the trees, their different ages and stages. “You have to help the tree if you want it to be tops. You have to help it.”

Destination Chocolate

Fast-forward a generation. Medulla: the middle; the marrow of bone; the soft pith inside a plant stem; the name of a public art gallery occupying part of a private house in Port of Spain. ‘Destination Chocolate T&T’, who describe themselves as ‘a loose affiliation of people, communities and organisations showcasing amazing local chocolates, cocoa products, and chocolate related activities’, i.e. an association of entrepreneurs, advertise a series of events. In February 2016, I walk around the Medulla Gallery downstairs room, where there are about nine stalls, though it is misleading to count – people are sharing space, working together. Items usually unheard-of as ‘locally made’ are on display, existing as if suddenly, though by the miracle of hard work: nicely packaged drinking cocoa; raw nibs, a ‘superfood’; high percentage chocolate bars, all fine flavour; soaps, body polishes, and other products, all competitively priced. It seems idyllic; and very female-centric in terms of the spokespeople, the sellers, the artisans. But these people, so tightly knotted into a ribbon of cooperation and smiles during the exhibition – where do they go home to? What is the flavour of their lives? When I walk out of the Medulla Gallery and into shops, won’t there just be the bulk cocoa beans processed into imported candies sitting in garish plastic on the shelves?

The cultivation of fine flavour cocoa, and the language of it, is as poetic and baffling as the cultivation of grapes for fine wine. The basic terminology is also mythology, and speaks more than one language: French – the concept of terroir, the immediate way the environment affects the food product and imbues it with an identity; Spanish – ‘forastero’ (foreign) beans, interbreeding with ‘criollo’ (native) ones, gave birth to the marvellous ‘Trinitario’. Yet ‘Trinitario’ is not standardised. The University continues to take samples and run tests. Growers and chocolatiers continue to give samples. In the hills of Maracas St. Joseph, the Ortinola chocolate maker hands me a fragment and instructs me to let it move slowly over my tongue and dissolve. The flavour breaks into a spectrum, including the acidic and almost bitter, like rum and bay leaves. Elsewhere in Maracas St. Joseph, passionate activist and prime mover Gillian Goddard offers me slivers of chocolate; hers is made with La Réunion beans, from another part of this small island. The flavour is much darker, like caramelised raisins. It is like the difference between cranberries and black cherries, or merlot and port. Moving into the mountains, Brasso Seco chocolate, lending itself to combination with other flavours – mocha, espresso – is ‘flatter’ and ‘earthier’. Most startling is how assertively the cocoa butter shines through. Far from being a bland medium that helps everything to stick, it is clearly kin to the chocolate. According to how it is processed, it brings a younger or mellower edge.

hichever estate you visit, you will hear of ‘Crystal 5’. This is the chemical structure that gives the shine and snap to chocolate in bar form. The raw chocolate (cocoa beans, cocoa butter, and sugar) has to be ‘conched’, or agitated; then ‘tempered’, as if it were metal being worked. For example, at a small unit, the machines are cute-but-serious. The rotisseries for roasting the beans are small enough to be lifted by one person. A juicer is used for cracking the cocoa beans, which are ground with a hand-mill. Some pieces of equipment are housed in the one air-conditioned room to the side of a village hall complete with a stage, turquoise balloons, and immortelle-flower-coloured satin curtain. They are a cake-mixer-sized conching machine; two light bulbs and a miniature fan to regulate the tempering. At a larger unit, the scale of the machines will be formidable. Heat and friction are the secret of the smooth bars: the conching process for fine chocolate will go on for hours, even days, promoting volatile, mysterious reactions as the cocoa butter is evened out.

Brasso Seco

Mr. H. picks me up in Port of Spain. During the hour and half driving, he hardly speaks. At last, he slows the car. I take this cue to admire the view: trees transpire so thickly that it looks like mist. Their leafy exhalation, without a beginning or end point, was what I, as a child living in a low-lying port area, used to imagine was a set of clouds sitting on the hills. Though the weather is still so dry and hot that wild fires rampage and lay waste to other hilltops of the Northern Range, where helicopters ferry tiny buckets of water back and forth, here the air is cooled by the forest. Mr. H. asks if it is all right to roll down the window. The absence of air conditioning is not obvious. The trees breathe relief.

Brasso Seco is a dip between mountains; considered a valley, though we climb nearly two thousand feet before we descend, just a little. If you can read the forest, you will see trails maintained by locals, making short cuts by foot between places that are hard to access by any kind of car. If you cannot read the forest, it looks like one dark green Keep Out. We pass the road to the Asa Wright Nature Centre. A variety of birdcalls clarifies the air, responsive to every change in movement, humidity and light. Trees yield to one or two flowering shrubs, a few houses: we have reached. About 300 people live here. Older people who received pension cheques were among the first to afford regular electricity, about 20 years ago. Cellphone reception is spotty and landlines not always installed. The health centre opens once a week; the primary school’s teachers commute in from nearby towns; there is one ‘shop-and-bar’, and no known prostitution; one church. Musicians – ‘paranderos’ – bring their instruments if an ‘event’ is going on; and then music happens. What is an event? An anniversary. A senior person’s birthday. Television has promoted isolation, though a lot of the men still go out hunting, whether that is for entertainment or income. There are ‘tapia houses’, raised from the ground, with much under-house human and animal activity. “You know how to make a dirt house? You have to dance the mud like you dance cocoa, with tapia grass. Leepay with cow dung because it holding the thing together – white dirt and fresh cow dung that you pick up that morning.”

The state leases the fifteen acres of land to the Brasso Seco community, who own it cooperatively. There are strong indigenous as well as Spanish elements to the population’s ‘cocoa panyol’ heritage. This shows in the construction of the community centre, with its huge earth oven inside a sheltered-yet-open wooden structure. The people’s ways of cutting and trimming plants, what they interplant, the things they do, make organic sense as they are explained to me. In a tiny community it is easy to know who is doing what on the land. If you see a man passing with a spray can on his back, you know he is using chemicals. Yet where are the outreach programmes to systematise and exchange the generations of knowledge which remains so visibly in living use? Where is the respect for ‘cocoa panyols’?

A mix of local and foreign visitors come here, including regular stops from birders visiting Asa Wright, and couples and families on hikes – even more locals than foreigners, often wanting lunch and naturally enthusiastic about chocolate demonstrations. Agrotourism provides a real escape from Port of Spain, where the fear of perceived crime locks in the possibility of socialising to carefully policed areas.

The colonial-era agricultural estates established here were for the planting of cocoa and coffee, both crops traditionally reared in polycultures. However, the estate owners were less interested in fermenting and drying it properly. Without Trinidad and Tobago’s government incentives to rehabilitate the cocoa industry, cocoa farming would not be a special focus. The Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies is a major global institution. They assiduously send people around the island, offering technical training to farmers, for example in disease detection. Frosty Pod Rot; Witches’ Broom Disease; if you knew these names well and how they can decimate the cocoa, you would be as careful here about what you brought on your shoes as a traveller, about shedding the traces of where else you had been, as you would be in a cattle-rearing country at risk of foot-and-mouth. Workshops are offered in the practicalities of a forest life that does not depend on monoculture: trail maintenance, replanting, ‘minding’ domestic animals, all types of practical interests.

The committee of about 15 people here at the Brasso Seco centre has tended to be 50% male, 50% female, with the executive committee of 8 people also equally gender-balanced, by happenstance rather than policy. However, women tend to avoid named leadership positions, such as ‘President’. They are often found in roles where they can exercise leadership without having a figurehead position or representative title. The chocolate producing facility at Brasso Seco employs about five women at any given time, in catering, maintenance of the area, tour guiding, and demonstrations of cocoa processing. The Brasso Seco chocolate company is owned by two men and two women. In the village, women, being more literate than the men on the whole, can also get work as cleaners and in security. They are showing an interest and getting involved in the processing aspects of the cocoa industry. Men, apparently, are happier doing the fieldwork.

Disagreement

But cocoa is a contentious thing. What to believe? Each place I have visited is, in its way, stressed but fruitful. Who benefits from the cocoa, and how? What is a good way to live? Each person I speak to has strong views that cannot be reconciled with the others. The scientist is convinced that orchard-style cultivation can produce enormous quantities of high-quality cocoa, so that a ten-acre plot would bring in the equivalent of a lower white-collar salary. Trinidad and Tobago is already manufacturing its own gourmet chocolate and, with increased production, could become a global player. Listen to the man who manages a large estate far from the community centre in the hills. He has his eye on cocoa for export, not on ‘bean-to-bar’ or ‘tree-to-bar’ local creations for a niche market. He is equally impatient with the belief in chocolate as activism and the scientific business model of small-scale, intensive production: “Ten or fifteen acres? Whoever tells you you can live on a parcel of land like that is not telling you the truth!” Cocoa is such a labour of love, requiring skilled care and easily ruined. He says that it would be better to have a second income, for example from cultivating vegetables in a controlled greenhouse environment. The community activist who is developing a sustainable way of living that happens to use cocoa, but could be centred on other products, does not see a need to reconcile the competing views. “There are very different realities in one community. There are multiple ways in which cocoa can be utilised…Creating sustainability in a community doesn’t mean you have to have a level of production that leads to a relationship with Valrhona.”

Cocoa remains a contentious thing. A debate stirs in my own head.

“The people here have a connexion to and love for cocoa. They want to see it grow again.”

“It is a challenge, it is a trouble, to employ labourers. And a lot of private owners don’t live here.”

“The history of Trinidad is tied to agriculture…Young people here are starting to realise the benefit.”

“The workers don’t want their children to come here…Trinidadians don’t want to work…They damn lazy.”

“Walk the estate day by day…Don’t be such a scientist.”

Who are they?

In the small mountain village, as she talks, she does things. Her hands are never still. Under the copper tap that sticks out from yellow tiles, she is washing each part of the conching machine. It looks like a giant version of clearing up after making a birthday cake; only the mixture is midnight mud. She came to Trinidad in 1998 as a researcher accompanying an American professor of ethnobotany. She came from suburban California; nothing of what she came ‘from’ is here, but here is where felt like home. “I don’t know if you can ever really know why a place feels like home? Especially when it’s something so different from – it’s not because your Mom and Dad are there or your family is there or you have a history with something. When you go to a place that is really foreign and it feels like home – I can’t describe or explain where that would come from. I just kind of knew it. I mean I felt it. It was very strong. So, I stayed.” She looks fragile and weatherproof at once, and knows every inch of the land.

On the San Juan estate of more than six hundred acres, the old manager who can still complete his daily task with his poignard (cocoa knife) ahead of the young men, drives us casually past avenues of teak and bananas. He has no sympathy for the ‘activists who make chocolate’ – his interest is in large production, in new international recognition for consistent, quality beans from Trinidad; yet he chimes with them when he says, “The farmer should make more money than the trader.”

It is important to him that an estate should be almost self-sufficient. Some women work in the fields here; he says they are especially good gang supervisors. The stretch of buildings that look like a stable block house sixty fermentation boxes, built with fragrant woods from estate trees. As with alcohol casks, the wood deepens the character of the beans’ flavour over time. The troughs of fermenting cocoa beans are covered with banana leaves, which he knows to support beneficial microbes. He leads the way to a gable pitched like a house roof, pushes it back and exposes a wooden deck strewn with beans laid out in four quadrants for drying. It is 60 by 24 feet, and looks as long as a ship.

He explains that a smaller estate there would be two houses, a dancing house and a drying house. Dancing cocoa: he is angry that people talk about this as if it were some kind of ceremony, and act out versions for tourists and young people to admire. “Six men, eight men dancing about twenty box. You can’t straighten your back, you know, if you do that.” Dancing cocoa is not a romantic thing. Only a “ridiculous idiot” would think so, or try to show it by just “mashing it and walking about” in it. “You putting the cocoa between your two feet and you shining it.” It was not like a fête. “It was real hard work.”

And what was his story? He tells me he is an ‘Arab’. His family came to Trinidad from Palestine in the twentieth century. Speaking only Arabic and a little Turkish, they thought they had landed in America. He has poured decades of daily attention into it. This will wither when he dies. For the land belongs to an urbanised owner, who is building a concrete mansion next to the disused, graceful, wooden plantation house; it is left aside although inhabitable, and older than the still-active reservoir built around 1901. Cocoa production is as much ghost story as present and future reality.

http://www.addastories.org/cocoa-t/

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Local Gulf City ~ Customer Service

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Patrick Augustus Mervyn Manning

Gone ~ But Not Forgotten

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Las Cuevas

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Local Aerial Drone ~ Caroni Swamp


SteelPan Music

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Now that is a fantastic pic.

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Las Cuevas

Beautiful

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Local Oil OffShore ~ National Helicopter Services Ltd

Trinidad is home to National Helicopter Services Ltd, or NHSL.

NHSL is one of the longest tenured S-76® helicopter operators, and maintains the largest fleet of S-76D™ aircraft in the world today.

They operate the high-time S-76D aircraft in the fleet which has logged more than 1,700 hours in a little over 16 months of service – a remarkable operational tempo for a brand new model aircraft.

Their fleet of three S-76C++™ and four S-76D helicopters serve mostly offshore oil customers.

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Local Aerial Drone ~ Power Boats Associations ~ Regatta #5

The last Regatta before the SaturdayAugust20th Carib Great Race.

The much anticipated new Mr Solo made an appearance but unluckily hit some debris in the water and had some damage causing them to cut the day short.

Even though there weren't as many boats as we hoped it was still a great event with a lot of action.

Here is a short video highlighting some of the starts of the higher speed classes and a couple of the lower classes circuit.

It was raining during the smaller classes races so unfortunately did not get as much footage of them



Held Sunday3rdJuly2016

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Local Grinding Mill

An old time grinding mill, used to grind dhal, curry, masala ,grind sweets etc..

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1. Local Summer Camp 2016




2. Know Your Country Tours ~ July 2016

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Local Senator ~ Minister of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries

The Honourable Clarence Rambharat

"Best Working Senator in the Gov't"

Bio:

Clarence, known in his community as Kerry, was born and educated in Rio Claro.

Clarence Rambharat is a Senator and Minister of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries. He is also the PNM's Constituency Coordinator for Mayaro.

Senator the Honourable Clarence Rambharat was born in the agricultural community of Rio Claro and attended the Rio Claro Hindu School.

He then attended Presentation College, San Fernando and Princes Town Senior Comprehensive School from which he went to the University of the West Indies as a Law Student and then a Law Lecturer.

Senator Rambharat graduated from the Sir Hugh Wooding Law School in 1995 as the Most Outstanding Student in the Civil Law program.

He also holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship & Innovation and postgraduate training in Occupational Safety and Health.

Senator Rambharat is admitted to practice law in Trinidad and Tobago and Canada. His early work as a lawyer covered land tenure and land administration.

His interest in agriculture developed through his father’s career as a Forest Officer and his family’s long history in farming.

He is a specialist in corporate governance, in particular state corporations, regulated financial institutions including credit unions and banks, code of conduct issues and business ethics.

His work as a lawyer, lecturer and writer on these subjects is well established.

Senator Rambharat has worked for global multinationals in oil and gas and financial services in the areas of corporate governance, regulatory compliance and procurement.

On a personal level, Senator Rambharat is married to Camille Mc Millan-Rambharat.

They have three children, two boys and a girl.

Senator and Mrs. Rambharat are heavily involved in charity work involving children and education.

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Local Bush Medicine's

Tried-and-true bush medicine remedies your granny used to make – and force you to take.

Before there was Buckley’s and Advil, before those fancy Lemsip sachets, and Gravol tablets, there was orange peel tea and ‘zebapeak’.

Here are 10 bush remedies you may or may not have had the pleasure of trying:

1. Orange peel tea/Ginger tea

This doesn’t actually taste that horrible. Almost every Trini will be familiar with long strands of orange peels being hung to dry somewhere in Granny’s kitchen, which, when steeped in hot water, made a mild tea design to cure indigestion and/or gassiness.

Ginger tea, meanwhile, is popularly known as nausea/indigestion remedy.

2. Lemongrass/Fevergrass tea

This tea is supposed to reduce fevers in those suffering from the common cold and flu. It can also be used as an antiseptic.

3. Vervine

The tea is used to stimulate the production of breast milk of nursing mothers; or also for cooling and cleansing the body, the leaf juice is said to be used for rashes and worms.

4. Zepapique

The notorious Zepapique or ‘zebapeak’ tea is known for its horrible taste and reputation for curing your worst cold and flu problems. With a taste like that, it better.

5. Senna leaves

Older folks will be familiar with this dreadful remedy or ‘purge’, used as a de-worming remedy once or twice a year for poor unsuspecting children. Make sure your day is completely free when you decide to drink this tea!

6. Soursop Leaf

The humble soursop tree not only bears a delicious fruit but also has the secret to a good night’s sleep in its leaves, which is steeped to make a tea before bedtime.

7. Aloes

Another bitter concoction, suggesting that anything good for you tends to taste awful. The Aloe Vera plant is also said to have detoxing properties when blended and eaten. To avoid the bitterness, it’s best to blend it up and mix into orange juice. Good luck.

8. Wonder Plant or Wonder of the World

This unassuming, slightly thick leafy plant is supposed to help with inflammation and headaches. Known as Bryophyllum Pinnatum in the plant world, the leaf is usually steeped in hot water than sipped as a tea to deal with a pesky cough.

9. Carailli

While many will know Caraili or bitter melon for its fruit, but some say it can help with an itchy rash by steeping the leaves in water then pouring the water over the afflicted areas.

10. Paw Paw Leaf

The Paw Paw tree is useful for more than just its fruit. Mashing and steeping the leaves of the Paw Paw tree is also said to be good for persons suffering with dengue as it is said to increase the blood platelet count.

http://www.looptt.com/content/10-trini- ... y-horrible

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Local Tobago ~ Green Top Food Truck

If You Call This Food Truck - It Comes To You Wherever You Are In Tobago



321- 0329

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Local Tobago Heritage Festival 2016


Thursday14thJuly - Opening Gala ~ Shaw Park Complex - 8pm

Friday15thJuly - Ms Tobago Heritage Personality Show - Cyd Gray Sporting Complex - 8pm

Saturday16July - Moriah Tobago Ole' Wedding - Moriah Moravian Church - 1pm

Sunday17thJuly - Roxborough Sea Festival and Bay Queen Competition - 4pm

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Local Caribbean Ultimate Fist Fighting

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Local History ~ St. Paul's Pharmacy


St. Paul's Pharmacy on the corner of Queen and Nelson Street.

Stumble on to this by chance today before they began covering the entire sign

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Local Fishing ~ 2nd Bocas



Large King Fish - Weighed in at 51lbs caught

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Local Ochro ~ 22 Health Benefits

What are the health benefits of eating Okra?

Okra has a long list of health benefits:

Rich Fiber Source: Okra’s rich fiber content helps in better digestion, and regularization of bowels. The soluble fiber, Pectin, swells up in the intestine and helps in easier elimination of the wastes from the intestine.

How to use Okra for Diabetes?: The benefits of Okra for Diabetes are plenty. Just like kiwi fruits, okra is found to be very effective in stabilizing the blood sugar levels. It has insulin-like properties that help to reduce blood sugar levels. Eugenol, a type of fiber found in Okra, helps to stabilize blood sugar by curbing the rate at which sugar is absorbed from the intestinal tract.

For Pregnancy and Fetal development: Abundant Folates and Nutritional value in Okra, not only help in conceiving but also in fetus’ brain development, prevention of miscarriages, formation of the fetal neural tube, and preventing any defects in the tube.

For Strong Bones: Vitamin K is a co-factor in the vital blood-clotting process and along with Folates, restores bone density, strengthens bones and prevents osteoporosis.

For Asthma: The antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of Okra, and rich vitamin C content, curtail the development of asthma symptoms and prevent fatal attacks.

Respiratory soother: A decoction of leaves and flowers of Okra are used in treating bronchitis and pneumonia. Its mucilaginous (slimy, gluey) quality makes it an excellent home remedy for treatment of common cold and flu.

Relieves Constipation: The rich fiber and mucilaginous content in Okra pods help increase stool bulk, facilitate proper absorption of water, bind to toxins, lubricate the large intestines, and ensure easy bowel movements, with its natural laxative properties.

Treats Sun strokes: Those suffering from summer heat and sun strokes should include Okra in their diet. Relieves from weakness, exhaustion, and overall depression.

Lowers Colon cancer risk: The insoluble fiber found in Okra cleans out the intestinal tract, decreasing the risk of colon-rectal cancer. The high antioxidants in Okra helps protect the immune system against harmful free radicals and prevent mutation of cells.

Prevents Obesity: Okra provides minimum calories, the fiber helps in keeping you full for longer, and the abundant nutrients nourish you.

Lowers Cholesterol: Okra contains soluble fiber pectin, which helps in lowering the serum (bad) cholesterol and prevents atherosclerosis. It does it by altering the production of bile in the intestines and aiding in elimination of deposited cholesterol and clots.

Skin Detoxifier: Fiber aidstoxic waste cleansing and Vitamin C aids in repairing body tissues, preventing skin pigmentation, reducing acne, psoriasis and other skin conditions.

Lively Hair: The transparent mucilage imparts life and bounce to unruly, curly and lifeless hair. Okra benefits hair in different ways and acts as a great hair conditioner, scalp moisturizer for dry and itchy scalp, fights dandruff and lice, and adds a youthful sheen to your hair.

Detoxification: Okra’s fiber not only aids the stool function but the mucilage binds cholesterol and bile acid, ejecting toxins, dumped into it by the filtering liver.

Immunity Booster: The high antioxidants and vitamin C content make Okra a good immune booster food. Other essential minerals like magnesium, manganese, calcium and iron fight against harmful free radicals and promote healthy immune system.

Clear Vision: Okra contains beta-carotenes (precursor of vitamin A), xanthin and lutein, all antioxidant properties, preventing eye problems like cataract and glaucoma.

Prevents Anemia: Iron, Folate, and Vitamin K aid in hemoglobin formation, blood coagulation, and red blood cells production, providing a supreme defense against anemia.

Cures Ulcers: The alkaline mucilaginous content helps neutralize acids and provides a temporary protective coating for the digestive tract speeding up the healing of peptic ulcers.

Treats Genital Disorders: Okra increases sexual potency and is beneficial in treating genital disorders like syphilis, gonorrhoea, leucorrhoea, dysuria and excessive menstrual bleeding.

Rich Protein Source: The seeds of Okra are an excellent source of first-rate vegetable protein and oils, enriched with amino acids like tryptophan, cystine and other sulfur amino acids.

Feeds Blood Network: Studies show that eating plenty of flavonoid and vitamin C-rich fruits and vegetables, such as Okra helps to support the structure of blood capillaries.

Probiotics Feed: Good bacteria (probiotics), in intestines, thrive on Okra, contributing greatly to the health of the intestinal tract. It helps biosynthesis of Vitamin B complex, similar to how yoghurt serves the small intestine.

http://www.curejoy.com/content/okra-the ... s-of-okra/

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Local Tobago ~ Mason Hall Secondary

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Now that is a fantastic pic.

yeh boss pic

Las Cuevas

Beautiful

rel nice

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Local SEA ~ 2016 Students Interview



The top SEA student, 1st Place Caitlin Brooker visited the studio of #103FM to chat a bit



SEA's 2nd place winner took some time off this morning to chat with Fazeer Rojan #103FM

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Local Band Launch 2017 ~ Harts Carnival 2017 UltraViolet Jungle