Five Events in One GIANT Post!

Holy moly what an eventful last two weeks! It began with a trip to Kingston to meet our friends Josh and Jesse for what appears to be Josh's Birth Month! I had a SPA meeting but Will and the Hunters went to tour the Red Stripe Factory. The tour was free but no samples of good ol Red Stripe. Here are a few pictures of the tour:

It is also important to mention that the Red Stripe Factory recently won an award for being Environmentally friendly- Will said it was extremely clean and that they're trying to find new ways to reuse some of their waste products- WAY TO GO RED STRIPE!
On that trip we were also able to pick up two packages- one from Nick and Joy along with our Christmas Present from Cisco and Kaui (We saw it was postmarked December 31- don't ask me why it took so long to get here!) what a nice surprise! We loved the shirts and pictures! A certain object in Nick and Joy's package brings me to my next story.

As all of our faithful readers know- I now have a flippin sweet school garden at Holland Primary- last week I went back to see how the kids were doing and just to make sure they were taking care of the garden. To my amazement they are not only taking care of the garden but they also planted about 10 rows of black eyed peas! WHOA! I had some spare corn seeds along with some cucumber and cabbage seeds I wanted to put in seed trays so the kids started working on all that- Once we were finished I explained to the kids where I went to college in the states and that each school has a school mascot- I then proceeded to show them Joe Vandal (a gift from Nick and Joy) the kids absolutely loved him- I then told him that I would like to take a picture of them with Joe Vandal- for Joe Travels- of course the kids love having their picture taken. I thought this picture was especially funny, mostly because one little boy is holding his pitchfork while the other one next to Joe has this terrified look on his face (mostly because he's getting shoved out of the picture) and of course you have to love the guy in the back, just throwing his arms up in the air! Thank you Nick and Joy for sending that- everywhere Joe goes it seems like people love it!

I also had another compost training with another woman's group. I won't go into too much detail- there were about 10 women there. It was a lot of fun to do another training with women interested in Agriculture.

We also attended 4-H achievement day for St. Elizabeth. We were supposed to be judges for various events however we managed to get lost on the list. At the last minute they asked me to help judge the Environment Challenge so it wasn't a complete wasted day. I have some pictures of the days events...There was a Ferris wheel (looked old dangerous and had a hand crank), a man with a mullet, a cheer leading performance and a display about water and the environment!

Finally this last weekend I went caving with the Jamaican Caving Organization. I was so excited to go but hurried to pack my stuff because I was running late- well I forgot to charge my camera battery! Grr.... However I had a blast. We went to Smoky Hole- the deepest cave in Jamaica at nearly 200 meters. We descended down about 50 meters (165 ft) since it was my first time caving with them and ascended back up. I went back the next day to do it again- what a rush and thrill- It was amazing, breathtaking, beautiful, and totally AWESOME! Andy Kolb- a PCV was there and took some pretty sweet pictures of me descending down, some of the group, and playing dominoes in a rum bar along with the aftermath of some flippin sweet caving bruises.