Back in Trinidad!

Tauna and Isaac are finally in Trinidad with me!


It's great having them here. It is so wonderful to come home to a home cooked meal and find clean laundry folded neatly on my bed! They officially have one week under their belts and really seem to like it (despite a little culture shock...). We went to the beach yesterday and had a great time. One of the neighbor boys gets along with with Isaac and has adopted him as the "little brother he always wanted." He came along with us to the beach and helped Ike ride the waves.


Isaac starts school tomorrow. We'll see how that goes and post more later...

Hometown Christmas

Being home for Christmas was great, but there was certainly a climate shift from Trinidad! This is a picture of our house on Christmas.


After turning our house over to a friend, Daria Gibbons to house-sit while we are in Trinidad, we drove out to Ohio to visit our daughter Aubrey and her family for a few days. It was great, although little Molly had not seen her Papa for 6 months (half her age...) so it took a little while for her to "warm up."


Ella, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of Papa and Grandmom. She wouldn't let us out of her sight. It was so fun. We got a hotel room close by because their town home really isn't big enough to hold all of us (all of our kids were there). We were getting ready to go and Ella came down in her pajamas, coat, and backpack and told her mom, "I'm going with Papa and Grandmom, you'll be okay mommy."


So we took her to to the hotel with us and she had a ball. She even said, "Papa has a GREAT house!" Although, the first night she was there with us (it was her first night away from home without her mom) we had all settled down with the lights out, just drifting off to sleep and a little voice came out of the dark, "Ok, I'm ready to go home now." It was pretty funny. We turned on the bathroom light, Grandmom put an arm around her, and she went to sleep...

We were also getting Alex ready to be a missionary. We are real proud of him. We took him to the Columbus, OH Temple before we left. He even looks like a missionary already!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas time is real big thing in Trinidad & Tobago. Much like the USA they love to shop and decorate and have parties with LOTS of food. For me, it's kind of hard to get in the Christmas spirit with temperatures 85-90. But, they still like to decorate. I've attached a couple of pictures from my apartment complex. It's kind of fun to see them decorate the coconut trees. But, I guess the manger scene is more appropriate in this setting than sitting in a yard of snow. The second one is my neighbors apartment. He really likes to decorate.



I'll be going home for Christmas and bringing Tauna and Isaac back with me.

Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year.

Dan

Trini Food

One of the unique experiences here in Trinidad & Tobago is the food. I have experienced a lot of new foods since I've been here. I thought I should "share" a few of them with you. All of these are dinners that friends or neighbors have made for me.

The first one is pretty basic, grilled chicken with macaroni pie. The green stuff is callaloo. It's a green vegetable, kind of like spinach. They mix it with pigeon peas and seasonings into this mushy sauce. The red stuff is like a potato salad, except it's made with bread fruit, this large starchy fruit that grows on trees, but they cut it up and use it like a potato. The red color is because they put beets in it.




They eat a ton of chicken down here. In fact, KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) is located at nearly every major intersection. In fact, the KFC that sells the most chicken in the world happens to be right here in Port of Spain.

The next one here is pelau. It could be considered the traditional meal of Trinidad. It's more common than chicken noodle soup in the USA. Pelau is a mixture of chicken (although it is sometimes made with beef or goat, which is real common here), rice, pigeon peas (a small bean) all of which is browned in a caramelized sugar. It's typically served with a side salad.


Because of the large Indian population, curry is real popular. They like to wrap curried meats with potatoes, pumpkin and other stuff in roti, which is an Indian flat bread. There are roti shops in every neighborhood, their version of fast food.



This next one is the favorite at the beaches, Shark and Bake (or sometimes called Bake and Shark). The serve it at stands set up right at the beach. It's shark meat dipped in spicy seasonings, deep fried and put into a bun, which is also deep fried. There is a condiments bar with a ton of toppings to put on it. They are really good...


This one I have yet to try. It was delivered tonight, but I already had dinner, so I am going to save it for tomorrow. This is the ever popular cow heel soup. It's made with cow feet and a variety of vegetables, depending on the cook. This one includes corn on the cob, potatoes, pumpkin, some local things which I don't recall, and for extra flavor, they throw in little green boiled bananas! I'll have to let you know later how this one tastes...

Diwali

One of the big national holidays here is Diwali, or Festival of Lights, which occurred yesterday. It's a Hindu holiday, but because of the large East Indian population in Trinidad, it has been adopted as a holiday here as well, not as big as Christmas, but still significant. The traditions revolve around feasting on Indian food (curried fruits, meats and sweets) and lighting countless clay lamps filled with oil or wax. It's really quite stunning when whole neighborhoods are lit up lining porches, driveways and sidewalks. There are also lots of fireworks. Unfortunately, a drowning rainstorm came up and put out most of the candles in the area that I was in before I was able to get any good pictures. However, I did take a couple of pictures at the Ramdahnie house, friends from Church. They invited me over for their Diwali dinner. I also brought the missionaries, pictured below.



Their little daughter, Rebecca, is quite a handful. She is almost 3 years old, 12 years younger than her next sibling, and 2o years younger than the oldest. Consequently, she is VERY spoiled. I am guilty of it as well, she fills a little of the void of missing my granddaughters. You can see from this picture why she gets whatever she wants, what a doll...




Finally, I wanted to send a couple pictures of the sky. I am always amazed by the beautiful cloud formations down here in the Caribbean. Sometimes when I go out for a run I have to stop and just look. The first picture was taken at sunrise out my bedroom window. The next one was taken from my porch at sunset. These aren't the most spectacular I've seen, but at least I had my camera handy.

Elections

This week marked the National elections for Trinidad&Tobago. The last few weeks leading up to the election were rather "interesting." The campaigning process here is quite different than in the USA. It consists largely of cars driving around with huge speaker/megaphones strapped to the hoods shouting slogans and playing calypso-style music with lyrics for their candidates. Sometimes they get sound systems loaded into the back of flat-bed trucks and people ride around playing the music and shouting into the speakers for their candidates.



Basically, it is very loud and annoying. They crank up the volume so you can hear them from miles away. You can hear the constant beat and shouting of competing candidates. There are up until this year there have been two political parties, the People's National Movement (PNM, and the current party in power) and the United National Congress (UNC). However, this year, a third party threw its hat into the ring, the Congress of the People (COP) who have been disenchanted with both parties.

Last weekend was the big final push before the elections on Monday. Each political party sponsors a huge rally/festival to garner votes. I guess the idea is that who ever can throw the biggest, best party wins! The UNC had their rally in the savanna next to my apartment complex (you can see a picture of the savanna in one of my first posts). The estimate over 75,000 people attended the rally here. It was a mess. The roads were gridlocked in all directions all day. I was pretty much stuck in the apartment complex. I walked out and took a few pictures of the rally, but they are early in the day before all of the bands and entertainment when it got too dark to really take good pictures and too crowded to move around. People were dancing and drinking in the streets for blocks around because it was too crowded to get into the rally. It was unbelievable the amount of alcohol consumed at the rally. In the picture you can see that everyone is dressed in orange. It's the official color of the UNC party.




The elections were on Monday, and the incumbent party, PNM won convincingly. Which was fortunate for me because they are the party sponsoring the police transformation project I am working on, and if one of the other parties had one, we were told it was likely that our contracts would be canceled. It's interesting, whichever party wins the election takes over the next day. There is no transition period like there is in the USA. The Prime Minister and his cabinet would have to move out of their homes and offices the day after the elections. It's quite a bureaucratic mess when political power changes (even more so than exists day to day here, which is saying a lot).

Polls close at 6pm and ballots are counted so that the winners are known by that night. This develops into another rally where the winning political party celebrates. However, this party is not for just the principle party supporters, it is for everyone. My neighbor, who is a good friend and police officer came knocking at my door to wake me up about 11:00pm. He said, "You can't be sleepin' my brudda, we winnin', we need to go to da party!" So I got dressed and went with him and his family to the PNM headquarters in downtown Port of Spain for the big celebratory rally.

Here is a picture of Ransome and his family just before we left. He got his kids out of bed as well. Notice the red index fingers on Ransome and his wife. These are ink markings that they voted. It's one of the controls used to ensure that people on vote once. They are all dressed in red because that is the party color for PNM.


I was amazed at the number of people that came out to celebrate the election's outcome. There were a lot of kids there, but again there was a lot of alcohol being sold by street vendors. There was a lot of food being sold as well. We stayed until about 2am. When we left there were still huge groups of people arriving. It must have gone all night...

Ok, I am trying to post these videos again. The first one is a video of the band that was supposed to play at the Striker's game that I talked about in my previous post. They were pretty entertaining.

This second video is of the young girls that got up to dance once they heard the drummers playing. They learn how to dance young here!